POLARITY, POLARIZATION, AND DEMOCRACY: RESULTS FROM THE LINEAR DEMOCRACY DATA

POLARITY, POLARIZATION, AND DEMOCRACY: RESULTS FROM THE LINEAR DEMOCRACY DATA

This paper empirically improves the model and re-tests the theory proposed by Güner 2016 which argues that democratization is impacted by systemic factors such as polarity and polarization. Guner 2016 argues that individual leadership choices on democratization do not exist in a vacuum and they might be shaped by macrolevel, systemic factors. Güner’s theory is an interdisciplinary contribution to the study of democracy which combines macro-level international factors and micro-level individual/leader behavior. In this paper, this hypothesis is re-tested, improving the fixed effects panel regression with linear democracy data and extending the observations to from 5499 to 8596. The results support the argument that polarity and polarization have a significant impact on democratization.

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