Random walks into democracy and back: The case against causal explanations of democratization

Due to the complexity of historical processes that have led into sustainable democracy, determining generally applicable theories of democratization without violating standards of modern methodology is difficult if not impossible. Hence, we follow an alternative avenue by distinguishing singular democratization events from the politico-institutional soil on which they fall. We represent the latter by the type of loyalty on which government officials coordinate in cases of loyalty conflicts: either to other government officials; or to the rules of the underlying power-sharing arrangement. We embed our results in a dynamic framework and then run a number of simulations that reconstruct possible historical paths into and out of (sustainable) democracy. We demonstrate that the evolution of sustainable democracy, but also its demise, may evolve out of a purely random walk, i.e. a sequence of serially — although not necessarily spatially — uncorrelated historical events, rather than out of any identifiable and generalizable causal driver. • We posit the impossibility of catch-all explanations for democratization. • We provide a framework for explaining various paths into sustainable democracy. • We distinguish democratization events from their institutional background. • We run simulations that allow for a broad range of paths into sustainable democracy.