Democracy and the World System: A case for the use of world systems analysis in democratization research

Abstract: This paper examines the relevance of the world system as a structural condition to be considered in research on regimes and democratization. This is a pilot study in reformulating world systems analysis into the research topic of regimes, their creation and democratization. The methodology is statistical and covers most of the world for the time period 1980-1999. The study starts by formulating implications of the different world system positions (periphery, semiperiphery and core) for the likelihood of a series of political outcomes related to regimes: descriptive inferences of theoretically expected outcomes. The findings are that democratic regimes are far less common in periphery and semiperiphery than in the core, that democracies of the core have far higher levels of electoral democracy than the non-core, and that these have stayed relatively stable within their respective categories. Furthermore, successful coups were far more common in the periphery than anywhere else, and the average durability of regimes was lowest in the periphery, followed by semiperiphery and core, with some additional nuances for democracies and autocracies. The final chapter connects these findings to my theoretical reasoning of how the world system would fit into a more complete theory of regimes and democratization.