Democratic Political Stability Some Traditional Hypotheses Reexamined

This paper is a.companion piece to “Democratic Political Stability: A Methodological Note” which recently appeared in these pages.’ The present article is concerned with a discussion of the stability performance of twenty selected democratic polities, and is an attempt t o answer a basic question: how, if at all, can one account for the very real and observable differences in stability levels of democracies? This objective is accomplished by examining several of the major and most influential traditional hypotheses found in the literature dealing with an “explanation” of stability and by examining the relationship of these variables to the proposed measure of democratic stability. The reviewed hypotheses include economic development and processes, Roman Catholicism, party systems, cultural homogeneity, and democratic attainment.