Democratic Resilience in the Twenty-First Century. Search for an Analytical Framework and Explorative Analysis

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive conceptualization of democratic resilience as regime performance and regime capacity. It introduced the Resilience Capacity (ResCap)-Index and combines different approaches of measuring autocratization to capture varieties of resilience performance in democratic regimes. The usefulness of the concept of democratic resilience and its measurement for empirical research is demonstrated through an explorative study of up to 117 countries across the world since 2000. The preliminary evidence from our explorative analysis suggests that resilience capacity has a significant and substantial effect on a country’s predicted probability to prevent a substantial loss of democratic qualities or the breakdown of its democratic regime, but not the ability of the political system to recover from such democratic erosion or breakdown. This supports the view that it is necessary to differentiate between different forms of democratic resilience which, though temporarily connected, depend on different forms or combinations of resilience capacities.