Abstract
The outcomes of political transitions during the late 1980s and early 1990s varied considerably across sub-Saharan African countries. In their well-received book, Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997a) concluded that the differences in sub-Saharan Africa's incumbent neo-patrimonial regimes shaped contingent factors such as political protests and military interventions that were important to transition outcomes, but did not themselves directly influence the success of transitions. Shortcomings in their statistical analysis, however, cast doubt on this conclusion. This article presents an ordered logit analysis of Bratton and van de Walle’s rich data set that corrects these flaws. It concludes that institutions did more than merely shape contingent events; they had powerful and independent direct effects on the outcomes of political transitions in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
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Additional information
Frederick Solt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With the support of a Fulbright-García Robles grant, he is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork on subnational democratization in Mexico.
I would like to thank Guang Guo and Evelyne Huber, as well as theSCID editors and anonymous external reviewers, for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this work.
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Solt, F. Institutional effects on democratic transitions: Neo-Patrimonial regimes in Africa, 1989–1994. St Comp Int Dev 36, 82–91 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686210
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02686210