Noisy Regimes, Causal Processes, and Democratic Consolidation: The Case of Costa Rica

Explanations for Costa Rican democratic exceptionalism often hinge on the assumption that democracy was consolidated soon after the 1948 civil war. Hence, the decade of the 1950s are rarely studied. This article employs archival research and elite interviews and results in several key findings. Our most important contribution that democracy was not consolidated soon after 1948, but was consolidated only after the 1958 elections. During the 19531958 period, all opposition forces in Costa Rica were willing to use force to overthrow a democratically elected president. An elite pact did not bring about democracy in Costa Rica. Electoral and other institutions die not channel preferences from bullets to ballots. Rather, the absence of a military caste altered power relations and the calculus of elites and led to the endurance of the electoral regime. Finally, we demonstrate how our causal explanations are often dependent on the period of time that we study and that incomplete qualitative datasets bias our findings.