Does integration into international markets and political co-operation help to build democracy? This question is motivated by an interesting empirical observation: between 1950 and 2000 the magnitude of international trade and co-operation increased rapidly while the majority of the observed regime transitions did not establish democratic rule but various types of authoritarianism. The study employs a game theoretic model that explicitly accounts for democratization and developments towards authoritarianism. Additionally it suggests utilizing an unconventional measure of regime change that considers positive and negative meaningful institutional changes as well as minor alterations. By applying various regression models it can be shown that strongly integrated authoritarian regimes are less likely to develop towards democracy. While less integrated regimes rather democratize, increasing levels of integration into global markets are likely to stabilize authoritarianism. Moreover, if integrated regimes alter, they are more likely to shift towards stricter authoritarianism.
The findings motivate to rethink the common academic and political perception that international co-operation and integration foster democratization. The results of this examination strongly question the efficiency of policies that rely on this perception.

Vorwort
How globalization hinders the prospects for democratization

Autorentext
Ersin Özsahin is researcher at the department of political science, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Zusammenfassung

1. 1 Thefocusofthisbook Much has been written about the evolution, development, decline, and the p- sistence of democratic institutions. The query for the keywords democracy or democratizationintheSocialScienceCitationIndexyieldedabout3,000articles 1 and books published in the last 50 years. Regarding the fact that the database just covers the leading journals and publishers of the social sciences, one may reasonablyarguethatthetotalnumberofpublicationsdealingwiththeevolution ortheexistenceofdemocracyismuchhigher. Giventhis, pushinganotherbook intothemarketneedssomeplausiblereasoning. In1999, BarbaraGeddesasked What Do we know about democratization. . . and came up with the answer thatthe?ndingsareambiguousandthatthesupposedcausalmechanismsatwork behindtheobservedrelationshipsarenotcon?rmed. Geddes(1999)conclusion relies on her identi?cation of an interesting and yet unsolved puzzle concerning thedirectionsoftransitions. Shecounts85breakdownsofauthoritarianregimes between1974and1998andidenti?esonly30transitionsthatresultedinsurviving andstabledemocracies. Accordingtohercodingschemeshecounts9democ- cies that were only to last a short period of time before experiencing a reverse transition; 8 transitions that led to regime types characterized as partial regimes rather than pure democracies; 4 polities that descended into warlordism; and 34 regimechangesthatyieldednewformsofauthoritarianism. Insum,themajority of observed transitions between 1974 and 1998 resulted in the creation or re- rangement of authoritarian rule rather than in the establishment of democracy. Althoughavastnumberoftransitionstudiesexist,thispuzzleremainsunsolved. 1 ThedatabasequerywasconductedinAugust2009 14 1 Introduction Itisarguedherethatthisisprimarilyfortworeasons: ?rst,thelargemajorityof therelatedliteraturefocusesontransitionstodemocracyanddisregardsdevel- mentstowardsauthoritarianism. Itfollowsthatthetheoreticaldebateisdominated byapproachesthataimtoexplaindemocratizationbutpaynoattentiontocontrary developments. Second, the majority of quantitative studies utilize dichotomous measures to operationalize democratization, i. e. democratization is measured in terms of transitions and is de?ned as some politys crossing of threshold levels of a given measure of democracy. This measure thus ignores institutional shifts that do not yield regime changes. As this institutional alterations are included inthemeasuresparametervalueofstability, suchdichotomousmeasuresfailto re?ect the full variance of the observed institutional alterations. This raises the questionwhetherthe?ndingsofthetransitionliteraturearebiasedduetotheuse ofasomewhatarbitrarydistinctionbetweenregimechangeandregimestability.

Inhalt
The economic constraints on regime changes notes towards a coherent formalization.- Modeling transition.- Research design.- Results.- Conclusion.