Via lm: Lessons in Forced Democracy. Vedantam argues that the Philippines is a better analogy for Iraq and consequently offers more insight. The numbers inthe article for the probability of success for forced democracy are low with only 41 cases of democracy being implemented by force successfully over the last two hundred years. The recidivism rates are high too; a third of democracies imposed by force fail within ten years. Of the weak democracies which survive the first ten years, seventy-five percent fail within twenty to thirty years. While ninety percent fail within sixty years.
From the article:
Those two success stories had all four of the ingredients that Enterline and Greig found make for successful impositions of democracy: large occupation forces early on to stamp out nascent insurgencies; a clear message that occupation forces were willing to spend years to make democracy work; an ethnically homogenous population, where politics was less likely to splinter along sectarian lines; and finally, the good fortune to have neighbors that also were democratically minded, or at least neighbors who could be kept from interfering.The counter argument to ethnic splits making democracy impossible is India; however India used to include Pakistan and Bangladesh. The article ends with the warning:
"We have to get it right now, or it would be much more difficult to do in the future," Greig said. When an imposed democracy fails, "citizens learn that democratic institutions are not effective in dealing with the problems in their societies, so the society becomes less likely to push for democracy in the future."
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