Publication

This paper examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. The authors hypothesize that strongly autocratic and strongly democratic regimes will exhibit the greatest stability resulting from self-enforcing equilibria, whereby the maintenance of a polity's institutional structure is in the interest of political elites. Using a log-logistic duration model they find that institutionally consistent polities are significantly more stable than institutionally inconsistent polities and that the least stable political systems are dictatorships with large degrees of political participation.