Voluntary democratization

Old autocratic elites can have incentives to democratize voluntarily and, indeed, they have frequently done so. We develop a theoretical model that carves out path-dependent politico-institutional traits under which an old autocratic elite both wants and dares to democratize voluntarily. It wants to do so if this improves or preserves the old elite’s wealth position; and it dares to do so only if it expects the future democratic rules to be self-enforcing, since otherwise its members may lose their wealth and possibly their freedom or their life. Due to historical path dependency, some politico-institutional traits carry over to a new democratic constitution. Against this background, we demonstrate that the two conditions for voluntary democratization to hold requires that the gap between the inherited politico-institutional structure and that of a self-enforcing democracy are sufficiently narrow to be bridged via non-violent constitutional reforms.