Determinants of Democracy in a State: An Ordered Logit Regression

To find which factors determine the level of democratization in a country, a myriad of different variables have been tapped and shown to be relevant to democratization literature. Diskin, Diskin, and Hazan do a nice job in showing the variety of approaches in their 2005 study, and conduct a seeing what sticks regression to see what eventually pans out. For these scholars, the question that they answer is slightly different (What factors determine the stability of a democratic regime?) that the one posed, but this is due more to the dominant paradigm in political science than through any real different in what they are trying to answer.

Scholars en masse in political science use the terminology of Diskin, Diskin, and Hazan because democratization is the organizational culture for political science. Owing much to the modernization scholars of the 1950s, there is still a large push in political science that sees democratization as the ultimate for a nation - what the individuals in the nation want and what will benefit the nation the most. Thus, pieces like M. Steven Fish's "Islam and Authoritarianism" are worthwhile in a critical sense for showing the tension in this democratization-as-best model.

So what determines the government a nation will take? The aforementioned Fish shows in his "Islam and Authoritarianism" that there is a strong correlation between dictatorships and Islam, while Beblawi in his research on rentier states shows a greater tendency toward autocracies with an increasing dependence on monoexports (oil, minerals). Other scholars have differing opinions on which factors make a state more democratic; Kopstein and Reilly claim that the dominant regime type of the region determines the regime that a nation will take, while

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