The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change

Institutions have taken center stage in comparative politics. Scholars studying such varied topics as nationalism, public policy, and economic performance have increasingly cast institutional factors in a leading explanatory role.' This surge of interest in institutional analysis has been especially notable in the comparative study of political regimes. In their efforts to explain the varied dynamics and performance of new democratic regimes resulting from the third wave of democratization, scholars have focused extensively on political institutions, such as electoral laws, constitutional rules, and party systems.2 Although institutional factors command great interest among those studying the performance of new democracies, they have curiously played a far less significant role in explaining these regimes' origins.3 The study of transitions to democracy during the last decade has been dominated by voluntarist analyses that focus on contingent leadership choice. Such analyses view transitions as open-ended processes of strategic interaction and tend to overlook how political institutions shape these processes.4 A similar deemphasis of institutions characterized earlier work on the origins of authoritarian regimes. Those analyses focused mainly on socioeconomic structural variables, either ignoring institutions altogether or treating them as epiphenomenal manifestations of macrostructural forces.5 Institutions have thus been a missing variable in theories of regime change. This omission is puzzling because regime change fundamentally involves institutional transformation. Regimes are the formal and informal institutions that structure political interaction, and a change of regime occurs when actors reconfigure these institutions. We should expect regime institutions to have an important impact on the capacities and behavior of incumbents who seek to defend them. Similarly, we should expect