IRCPPS in the Links: Democratic Consolidation and Time

At Dart-Throwing Chimp, Jay Ulfelder re-considers the relationship between a democracy's age and the likelihood of if breaking down.  In two separate posts, he argues that:

 traditional thinking about the relationship between the passage of time and democratic consolidation is biased by a selection effect. Yes, the risk of a reversion to authoritarian rule is lower in older democracies than it is in younger ones, but that’s really because the democracies most susceptible to breakdown have already been weeded out. For fragile democracies, the risk of breakdown actually increases over time, unless and until they manage to transform themselves into lower-risk cases by producing an alternation in power or deepening protections for civil liberties. After that, there is essentially no association between the passage of time and the prospects for regime survival...