In my dissertation “Perceptions and conceptions of regime stability” I shed new light on one of the oldest questions of political science: the causes of the survival and decline of political systems. In the last decades, scientific knowledge on the issue of regime stability has advanced tremendously. At the same time, academic uncertainty has barely shrunk. Today’s research still lacks a broad consensus on the definition of regime types and is in want of generally accepted measures to precisely delineate between states of stability from periods of instability. Moreover, researchers disagree considerably in the prioritization and the sequencing of cultural and economic, domestic and international, or structural and institutional factors. These research challenges stem from the erroneous belief in the fundamental unity between language, thought, and reality. Previous studies have failed to appropriately recognize the intricacies and potential trade-offs of what I term the trinity of terminologies, concepts, and categories. Differences in meaning, in naming, and in observing gain immediate political relevance as they are the “pre-factual” foundations of the recent post-factual crisis of politics. Substantial parts of the book are dedicated to contextualizing my study as I seek to make a methodological virtue of epistemological necessity. I suggest a process to transparently quantify the value-laden qualitative starting point of research and use this information to develop measurement devices that can bridge the rifts between comparative regime analysis, democratization research, and contemporary democratic theory. Using conceptual techniques that advance the methodology of comparative politics I show that research itself operates between facts and norms (Habermas 1992), thereby clarifying the mutual relevance of normative qualities and empirical quantities.

After the first introductory chapter, I delve into the challenges and remedies associated with the innate subjectivity of at first glance objective definitions of regime types. The third chapter turns to the issues associated with conceptualization and measurement. I present a conceptual inventory of sixteen regime types that allows for cross-sectional, longitudinal, and crosssequential analysis. To elucidate the ramifications of conceptual issues on empirical findings I present evidence ranging as far back 1800 and covering more than 160 countries around the world. Concentrating on the period after the fall of Berlin Wall, the fourth and fifth chapter give a descriptive account of regime transitions and transformations, and, increasing the precision of my measurement devices, latent and acute regime crises respectively. Chapter 6 turns to the international, structural, and institutional causes of survival and breakdown of political regimes in various time frames. Chapter 7 reiterates the process of concept formation and expands the investigation to the micro-level of citizen’s attitudes and subjective perceptions towards political regimes. Based on this, chapter 8 cross-sectionally investigates the forces of inertia, i.e. the impact of political regimes on legitimacy beliefs in more than fifty societies worldwide. The final chapter summarizes the findings about regime stability and sketches the features of what I coin rational idealism as the trademark of the most fruitful avenues of future research.

Substantively, my results support the institutional camp. Controlling for other international and structural, and a broader set of institutional factors, I show that the consistency of institutions regulating the access to political power are the most important single factor to explain regime stability. In the case of full-fledged democracies, free, fair, and inclusive access to power initiates a virtuous cycle: political elites have no incentives to seek severe constitutional changes from the status quo. Furthermore, political elites’ self-restraint aids in maintaining and further developing a homogeneous public morality thereby serving the purpose of fostering conformist legitimacy beliefs in the populace – a task political actors did not primarily intend to pursue.