Michael Bernhard and Jeffrey Kopstein
Revolutionary violence has two distinct impacts that need to be theorized on different time horizons. Failure to properly conceptualize it and operationalize its impacts leads to a bias in analysis against rapid change. This older critique can be brought up to date and saved from this pitfall by thinking through the distinction between short versus long term impacts. Revolutionary change predicated on violence is by its nature is highly anti-democratic. It paves the way for dictatorial regimes whose behavioral and institutional legacies pose an impediment to future attempts at democratization. At the same time, however, it also creates forms of socio-structural and cultural change that work in the long-term and whose impact on future democratization attempts can be positive or negative. Conceptualizing, disentangling, and illustrating these mixed legacies is the main contribution of this paper. We will explicitly connect the two dimensions and tease out the conditions under which the second can have a positive impact of democractic outcomes. The history of liberalism is inextricably caught up in violent transformation; where this violence is absent, revolutionary breakthroughs at the social level rarely occur. At the same time, violence on its own is no guarantor of long run democratic consolidation. The paper extends the empirical analysis from the West to that of the communist and post-communist world in order to illustrate how political development and violence shape long-term regime outcomes.
