Colonial Democratic Legacies

Abstract: Why have some post-colonial states done so much better in terms of democratic consolidation than others? We argue that we need to supplement existing research strategies - which focus on the role of inter-empire differences in institution-building or on the long term effects of geographic and climatic endowments - with an approach that directly measures the enormous amount of variation in colonial institution-building that took place within empires over time. By using novel data on colonial electoral institutions, we document that the substantial experience that many colonies had with elections prior to independence (even if this was often far short of full democracy) is a good predictor of countries’ post-independence prospects for democratic consolidation.