While I generally agree with most of your post(s), those two phrases always trigger the hairs in the back of my neck. "Rule of Law" is just another way of saying that you are following locally interpreted procedural legitimacy - it is always a matter of interpretation. Stoning a woman for being raped is following the "rule of law" in some parts of the world. “Good governance” is almost meaningless since the standard of what is “good” has to be interpreted by those being governed. It is really only relevant if you are trying to correct “bad” governance and then it is only important if it is really bad (like your examples of Yanukovych. I guess I would caution against using terms that may not have a universally agreed upon definition.
That said, I agree, the proof will be in the pudding. Economics matter first and foremost, since a country had a better chance to remain a democracy if it is wealthy.
Recent studies of democratization, most importantly Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub,
Limongi, 2000 (PACL), question the modernization hypothesis that richer countries are
more likely to be democratic. PACL claim instead that transitions to democracy are
unpredictable, but once there, countries can remain democratic with higher levels of GDP
per capita. We retest this hypothesis using an expanded data set and a three-way, rather
than two-way, categorization of regimes: autocracies, partial democracies, and full
democracies. We find that the modernization theory does hold up well, contrary to
PACL’s findings: greater levels of prosperity do predict when countries are likely to
leave autocracy and stay fully democratic. Partial democracies, on the other hand, emerge
as the most volatile and least predictable category of regimes.
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