Exogenous Breakdown: The Institutional, Socioeconomic and Political Causes of Democratic Termination

This chapter draws the reader’s attention to the conventional position typically put forward by democratic advocates when confronted with the claim that democracy is inherently predisposed to self-destruct. It argues that for those whose work centres around the issue of weak, failing or failed democracies, the focus has generally been directed toward extrinsic – or exogenous – factors that impact upon democracy from the outside. Not only that, but it claims that the large majority of these works tend only to examine democratic failure as part of the early stages of the transition towards democracy. Few studies, to this end, examine the collapse of mature or strong democracies – in part because of the widely held assumption that mature or strong democracies are almost near impenetrable to attack. In this sense, the general tendency has been to approach democratic breakdowns as an anomaly whose true source stem from such factors as economic instability and inequality, inappropriate or ineffective institutional frameworks or the existence of intractable ethnic divisions.