The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival

Michael H. Bernhard · Christopher M. Reenock · Timothy Nordstrom

237 citations0/0 files storedInternational Studies Quarterly

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Political Conflict and Governance Political Theory and Democracy Culture, Economy, and Development Studies

Abstract

Using an original dataset that covers the period from 1951 to 1995, we consider the enduring effects of Western overseas colonialism on the democratic survival of postcolonial democracies. We treat colonialism as a holistic phenomenon and differentiate the relative effects of its legacies with regard to the level of economic development, social fragmentation, and the relationship between the state and civil society. We find that Western overseas colonialism, a factor often overlooked in recent large-n studies, continues to have an effect on the survival of democratic regimes. We further find that the legacy of specific colonial powers has an important effect on survival as well. Unlike previous studies, we find that former Spanish colonies outperform British colonies when colonialism is conceptualized holistically. However, when we break colonial legacy into separate components (development, social fragmentation, and the relationship between the state and civil society), we find that the advantages former British colonies enjoy are attributable to the legacy of the state/civil society relationship. Moreover, we show that at least in the case of former British colonies, time spent under colonial rule is positively associated with democratic survival.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 237 citations exist upstream.

References

1992The third wave: democratization in the late twentieth century 1979“Effective” Number of Parties 1984On the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy 1997Modernization: Theories and Facts 1992The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century 2013Capitalist Development and Democracy 2001States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control 1995Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data

Cited by

2015Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict 2010Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability 2017Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy 2019The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem) 1 2016The Long Shadows of Spanish and French Colonial Education 2023Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.