10.25394/PGS.9109409.v1
Elis Vllasi
Elis
Vllasi
Sabotage: When Motherlands Ruin Foreign Democratization Efforts
Purdue University Graduate School
2019
Democratization
Transnational Ethnic Conflict
Spoilers
Democracy Promotion
Military Intervention
State-Building
Decentralization
Time-Series Analysis
2019-10-16 17:55:19
Thesis
https://hammer.purdue.edu/articles/thesis/Sabotage_When_Motherlands_Ruin_Foreign_Democratization_Efforts/9109409
Why do some
international efforts to promote democracy abroad fail? A few conventional
answers: the target country lacks the necessary institutions; leadership is incapable
of making the changes required; and third-parties have insufficient influence
needed to motivate a new system. My research, however, suggests
something else entirely: democratization efforts fail
when nearby ethno-nationalist homelands, or <i>motherlands, </i>interfere
in the democratization processes of their neighbors as they seek to contest the
political borders of the states with whom they share transnational ethnic kin.
Democratization is seen as a barrier to promoting the convergence between
ethnic and political boundaries. Building on the theory of peace spoilers, I
contend that a motherland can opt for a variety
of strategies to challenge the democratization of a target
state. Strategies can range from helpful to harmful to democratization of
a target state. Their level of effectiveness at spoiling democratization
efforts is a function of the intensity and frequency of events (conflict
or cooperative) that a motherland initiates against a target state. Relying
on new datasets from Varieties of Democracy, Ethnic Power Relations and Phoenix
Events Data, and different statistical models, my research shows through a
large-N study and a case study that the level of democracy of a target country
is lower when a motherland displays high levels of intensity and frequency of
conflictual. Also, democratization emerges as an ethno-national homeland
exhibits low levels of motivation and opportunity to contest the borders. My findings show that motherlands can act
as spoilers when they are a non-democratic regime that has recently
lost territories populated by ethnic kin to a nearby state; and enablers of
democratization when they are a democracy and were separated from kin long ago.