Explaining regime change: A directed acyclic graph

Type Thesis

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Summary

The ongoing Arab Spring, like the demise of colonial rule in Africa and the civil wars in Latin America before it, has shifted attention yet again to the question of why some regimes fail and others do not. This paper seeks to discover the conditions under which regime change occurs. Following Pearl (2000), I build a Bayesian network (using a directed acyclic graph) based on theory from which I then derive testable hypotheses. I use discrete-time analysis to test two models using data for the dependent variable from the Democracy & Dictatorship Revisited Dataset (Cheibub, Gandhi, & Vreeland 2009). The models suggest that deflationary crises and an increased magnitude of internal violence increase the probability of regime change. In addition, they indicate that decreased state fiscal capacity and lower professionalism and autonomy of the bureaucracy also increase this probability. The theoretical and empirical results of this study provide significant insights for explaining regime change and will continue to have substantive implications for the post-Arab Spring research agenda.