ABSTRACT
The focus of the theory, developed in the preceding chapters as well as the empirical results are discussed, comprise countries transitioning towards democracy. Therefore, the unit of analysis is the democratizing nation-state. Every nation since 1900 undergoing a democratic transition is included, for a total of 130 cases. In identifying transitions from authoritarianism to democratic rule, we draw on a variety of sources including Huntington's The Third Wav, seminal works by Linz and Share and Mainwaring, the updated Political Regime Change dataset, Polity IV Country Reports and extensive qualitative historical case study analyses from journal articles and other scholarly writings. The chapter utilizes the widely accepted works of transitions as a baseline comparison of regime change to both determine and adopt consistency in coding of countries. However, we are confident that the results are not an artifact of coding decisions and we perform various robustness checks to determine the validity of the results.
