Linkage,Leverage,and the Post-Communist Divide

Countries such as Azerbaijan and Russia fall somewhere between the extremely autocratic countries described above and this set of more democratic countries.

Joan M. Nelson and Stephanie J. Eglinton , Encouraging Democracy: What Role for Conditioned Aid? (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1992), 20-47.

Ibid., 20.

Gordon Crawford , Foreign Aid and Political Reform: A Comparative Analysis of Democracy Assistance and Political Conditionality (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 211-227.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer , Jeffrey J. Schott , and Kimberly Ann Elliott , Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990), 12-12.

Russian support for Serbia in the late 1990s is a partial exception.

Nelson and Eglinton , Encouraging Democracy, 20-20; Crawford, Foreign Aid and Political Reform, 210-27; and Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Steven E. Clinkenbeard, “Donors versus Dictators—The Impact of Multilateral Aid Conditionality on Democratization: Kenya and Malawi in Comparative Context, 1990-2004” (PhD diss., Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 2004); and Jon C. Pevehouse, Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Terry Lynn Karl , “Imposing Consent: Electoralism versus Democratization in El Salvador,” In Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva , eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (La Jolla, CA: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, 1986); and Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 55-56.

Thomas Carothers , “The Observers Observed,” Journal of Democracy 8:3(1997): 17-31.

Nelson and Eglinton , Encouraging Democracy, 35-35; and Olav Stokke, “Aid and Political Conditionality: Core Issues and the State of the Art,” In Olav Stokke, ed., Aid and Political Conditionality (London: Frank Cass/EADI), 63-67.

See Nelson and Eglinton , Encouraging Democracy; Stokke, “Aid and Political Conditionality”; Gordon Crawford, “Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality: Issues of Effectiveness and Consistency,” Democratization 4:3(1997): 69-108; and Crawford, Foreign Aid and Political Reform.

Crawford , Foreign Aid and Political Reform, 187-187.

This discussion draws on Laurence Whitehead , ed, The International Dimension of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Pridham, “International Influences and Democratic Transition: Problems of Theory and Practice in Linkage Politics,” In Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1991); and Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 53 (October 2000), 1-37. It is worth reiterating that this argument applies only to the post–cold war era. We do not expect ties to the United States to have a democratizing impact during the Cold War period.

Kopstein and Reilly , “Geographic Diffusion”; and Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, “Patterns of Diffusion in the Third Wave of Democracy” (Paper presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 30 August–2 September 2001). See also Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

Gleditsch , All International Politics Is Local, 4-5.

Ibid., 13.

This discussion draws heavily on Pridham, “International Influences and Democratic Transition”; Kopstein and Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion”; and Whitehead, The International Dimension of Democratization.

Vachudova , Europe Undivided; and Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Important exceptions include the work of Pridham , “International Influences and Democratic Transition”; Kopstein and Reilly, “Geographic Diffusion”; and Whitehead, The International Dimension of Democratization.

Data from the World Bank World Development Indicators.

Jackie Smith and Dawn Wiest , “The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: National and Global Influences on Transnational Association,” Social Forces 84:2(2005) 621-652. Of course, this measure should be interpreted with some caution since it is in part endogenous to democratization.

Victoria Clement , “Yellow Revolution? Recent Referendums and Elections in Central Asia” (Presented at the conference “Shades of Revolution: Democratization in the Former Soviet Union”, University of Illinois, Urbana, 12 September 2005). See also “A Show Trial,” The Economist, 1 October 2005.

Karen Smith , The Making of EU Foreign Policy: The Case of Eastern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 109-109.

In 1992-1993, Belarus, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine had combined Freedom House scores of 7, 8, 7, and 6, respectively. At the same time, Russia is obviously a separate case that was probably excluded for other reasons including its size.

Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon , Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo(Washington, D.C.: Brookings International, 2002), 194-194. On a per capita basis, refugees in the Balkans received ten times more aid than refugees in Africa. See Christine M. Chinkin, “Kosovo: a ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ War?” American Journal of International Law 93:4(1999): 847.

Geoffrey Pridham , ed., Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1991), 220-220.

As calculated using IMF Direction of Trade Statistics. Calculated as an average of the annual total of imports and exports over GDP 1992 to 2000.

Andrei Sannikov , “Russia's Varied Roles in Belarus,” In Margarita Balmaceda et al. eds., Independent Belarus: Domestic Determinants, Regional Dynamics, and Its Implications for the West (Cambridge, UK: HURI Press, 2002), 222-231.

Lucan Way, “Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Political Competition in the Former Soviet Union” (Manuscript, University of Toronto, Canada, 2006).

Between the mid-1990s and the beginning of 2004, Belarusian industry paid just $30 per thousand cubic meters of Russian natural gas—about one-half and one-third of the price paid by Ukrainian and Western companies (Ukrainska Pravda, 16 October 2000; and Vitali Silitski, “What Are the Consequences of the Russian ‘Gas Attack’?” RFE/RL Belarus Ukraine Report, 23 September 2003).

Anders Aslund , “Is the Belarusian Economic Model Viable?” In A. Lewis , ed., The EU and Belarus: Between Moscow and Brussels (London: Federal Trust London, 2002), 173-184.

Thus, in the late 1990s, Belarus had an external debt that was just 6 to 7 percent of GDP.

Jan Maksymiuk , “EU Warns against Unfair Presidential Referendum—But to What Avail?” RFE/RL Belarus Ukraine Report, 15 September 2004.

Todor Tanev , “Emerging from the Post-Communist Chaos: The Case of Bulgaria,” International Journal of Public Administration 24:2(2001): 236-248; and Venelin Ganev, “Ballots, Bribes and State Building in Bulgaria,” Journal of Democracy 17:1(2006): 78-79.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “Competitive Authoritarianism: The Origins and Evolution of Hybrid Regime Change after the Cold War” (Manuscript, 2006).

Thus, according to UNESCO figures, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania had 318, 426, 123, and 147 students (respectively) studying in the United States and Western Europe as compared to just 31 from the entire USSR in 1970.

In the 1990s, population flows to Western Europe and the United States were more than three times lower from the former Soviet Union than from Central and Southeastern Europe (based on available data 1990 to 2000 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and New Cronos [Europe]); at the same time, international tourism as a share of country population was about seven times lower in the former Soviet Union than in Central and Southeastern Europe on average (based on calculations from UNESCO data).

Thus, especially in the context of weak linkage, it is important to distinguish between autocratic breakdown and full democratization. Autocratic breakdown occurs when autocrats lose power; democratization only occurs when the government respects civil liberties and conducts free and fair elections. The recent fall of autocrats in Georgia and Ukraine has created important openings for greater democracy. It is, however, still too early to know whether these autocratic breakdowns in fact represent truly successful efforts at democratization.

For recent debates on the impact of economic development on regime outcomes, see Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes , “Endogenous Democratization,” World Politics 55:4(2003): 517-549; and Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Because linkage and economic development are so highly correlated, they cannot be put in the same regression equation. Thus, to compare their impact, we compared the adjusted R-squared that results when each is put separately in the same regression equation (with variables measuring oil production, Muslim population, presidential power, and the level of democracy at the start of the transition). Linkage yields an adjusted R2 of .830 while economic development yields an adjusted R2 of .716. Linkage is measured by four components: (1) extent of trade with the United States and fifteen EU member countries (exports/imports over GDP); (2) population movements as measured by the log of the yearly average travel (for all purposes, business, education, tourism) by country residents to the United States and European Union 1990 to 2000; (3) communications ties as measured by per capita Internet and cable access 1990 to 2000; and (4) membership in the Organization of American States (OAS) or potential membership in the European Union. Each of these components has been put into a 5-point scale relative to data for all non-Western countries in the world. Democracy was measured using the 2005 Freedom House scores. Economic Development was measured using log GDP per capita (2004). Other control variables were oil production (from World Development Indicators), presidential power (as measured by the World Bank), Muslim population, as well as the level of democracy at the start of the transition in 1990 (as measured by Freedom House).