Defending democratic norms: Regional intergovernmental organizations, domestic opposition and democratization

Many regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have adopted commitments to democracy and take action to defend these commitments when they are violated. But do they succeed? This study explores whether, and how, regional IGOs help bolster and deepen democracy when it is threatened. Examining Latin America and the post-communist region in the post-cold war era, I show that regional IGOs can help produce democratic change in the wake of government-led violations of democratic norms, though for different reasons than previous studies have focused on. They do so largely through their effect on the domestic political opposition. When incumbents attempt to steal elections or consolidate their power, regional IGO involvement encourages the opposition to mobilize against the regime and helps translate this mobilization into political change.;Existing theories of the domestic effects of international institutions focus on how membership in certain IGOs allows states to make a credible commitment to democracy. This argument rests on the premise that IGOs enforce democratic conditionality, making norm violation costly. At odds with this theory, I demonstrate that enforcement by regional IGOs is selective, meaning that leaders can anticipate whether they will be punished, and IGO membership itself does not serve to deter governments from violating norms. But I show that, through their active involvement in certain countries, regional IGOs can help produce democratization in the wake of norm violations.;I develop a game-theoretic model of democratic norm violation that captures the strategic interactions between an incumbent, opposition and regional IGO. I test the model's predictions using an original dataset that records when incumbents manipulate elections, executives make power grabs, opposition parties engage in mass mobilization, and regional IGOs promote democracy. The dataset covers all Latin American and post-communist countries, from 1990--2005. I complement the quantitative analyses with country case studies of the Dominican Republic, Armenia, Peru and Serbia that trace how, and under what conditions, IGO involvement helps produce democratic change.;My analyses bear out the central prediction of my theory: regional IGOs help mobilize and empower the domestic opposition. In turn, opposition mobilization and IGO involvement increase the chances that a country will experience democratization in the wake of government-led violations of democratic norms. But this effect tends to be delayed: in most cases, IGO involvement has no effect on domestic political outcomes at the time it is implemented, but rather produces democratization in the next electoral cycle. This delayed effect helps explain why scholars have tended to dismiss the role of international actors in democratization.