The economic, social, and institutional conditions leading toward the sustainability of fragile democracies, the causes of political stability, and the risk of democratic reversals represent classic issues in the contemporary research literature studying processes of regime change. There are numerous examples of states that have taken the first faltering steps away from traditional autocracy, holding multiparty competitive elections, only to revert back in subsequent years. Cases of such reversal include regimes felled by a military coup (such as Thailand), the long-term hemorrhage of human rights (Russia), populist appeals (Venezuela), or an outbreak of election-related violence (Pakistan, Kenya).

Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse's The Fate of Young Democracies analyzes the reasons why younger democracies fail to survive, focusing their explanation primarily on the absence of effective institutional constraints upon executive authority. These constraints, they argue, are particularly important in divided societies. The study also considers two other potential reasons for success or failure, namely, economic development and the role of the international community. To support their core argument about the primacy of institutions, the heart of their empirical research uses large-n econometric techniques, employing the Polity IV measure of democratization and executive constraints. The study compares 123 cases of democratization in 88 nations between 1960 and 2004. Regime transition is measured by a six-point or greater shift in the Polity IV score over a period of three years or fewer. A series of regression models used in the study control for economic factors (including levels of economic growth, inflation, and investment), social conditions (ethnic fractionalization), and presidential executives. The results are clearly presented in an accessible manner, using descriptive graphs as well as models, making them useful for practitioners and policymakers as well as scholars. The book is thus a useful addition to the growing political economy literature on regime change. Nevertheless, several issues about the research create serious shortcomings that undermine the potential utility of this study.

First, in common with much of the political economy literature, the study ignores the extensive comparative political science literature on consociational and consensus democracy. Thus, while studies by political economists such as Douglass North, Adam Przeworski, Philip Keefer, and Dani Rodrik are thoroughly reviewed, by contrast there is no citation, or even passing acknowledgment, of leading scholars of political institutions, exemplified by the work of Arend Lijphart, Juan Linz, Scott Mainwaring, John Carey, Alf Stephan, Brendan O'Leary, Stephen Fish, and Matthew Shugart, among many others. It is striking, and depressing, how far subfields of the discipline seem to inhabit hermetically sealed universes. Thus, the core idea that institutional checks and balances in power-sharing regimes help to promote and sustain democracy in divided societies is presented by Kapstein and Converse as though this is a strikingly original insight, underlined in italics, whereas this study naively reinvents the wheel. The conclusions reinforce the conventional wisdom in the extensive literature on political institutions and consensus democracy that has developed over the last half century.

Moreover, while acknowledging that executive constraints are important, the study fails to delineate the numerous ways that alternative types of institutional arrangements can potentially fulfill this function—whether through the basic types of electoral and party systems, the role and power of the legislature and courts, the dispersal of power through federalism and decentralization, the scrutiny of the independent news media as the fourth estate, or through the constitutional provision of minority vetoes and guarantees for minority representation. For reformers and practitioners, the simple idea that institutional constraints on the power of the executive matter provides few fruitful insights unless it is specified which constraints work most effectively in any constitutional design.

Lastly, even the core empirical finding that executive constraints matter for the sustainability of democracy may be more a product of the Polity IV measure of democracy than any genuine insights. Coders working on the Polity IV project classify democracy and autocracy in each nation-year as a composite score of different characteristics relating to authority structures. Democracy is conceived of conceptually as reflecting three essential elements: the presence of institutions and procedures through which citizens can express preferences about alternative policies and leaders; the existence of institutionalized constraints on the power of the executive; and the guarantee of civil liberties to all citizens (although the latter characteristic is not actually measured). The classification emphasizes the existence or absence of institutional features of the nation-state. For example, competitive executive recruitment is measured by leadership selection through popular elections contested by two or more parties or candidates. The openness of recruitment for the chief executive is measured by the opportunity for all citizens to have the opportunity to attain the position through a regularized process, excluding hereditary succession, forceful seizure of power, or military coups. By contrast, autocracies are seen as regimes that restrict or suppress competitive political participation, in which the chief executive is chosen from within the political elite, and, once in office, leaders face few institutional constraints on their power.

The dataset constructs a ten-point democracy scale by coding the competitiveness of political participation (1–3), the competitiveness of executive recruitment (1–2), the openness of executive recruitment (1), and the constraints on the chief executive (1–4). Autocracy is measured by negative versions of the same indices. The two scales are combined into a single democracy-autocracy score varying from −10 to +10. Given the importance of executive constraints for Polity IV's democracy-autocracy scale, and thus for classifying cases of regime change, it is perhaps not surprising that these factors emerge as significant in the empirical analysis presented by Kapstein and Converse.

The study of the sustainability of democracy is an important issue, for scholars and for policymakers. This book is an interesting contribution to political economy approaches to this topic. But it would have been further strengthened by acknowledging the extensive research literature on the topic, the multiple types of power-sharing arrangements that exist, and the limits in how far the Polity IV measurement of regime change is independent of the measurement of executive constraints.