Recent scholarship on democratization has produced several dominant hypotheses concerning the role of institutional design in promoting stable democracy. This article tests these hypotheses by examining the outcomes of 56 transitions to democracy in the Third World between 1930 and 1995. The authors' analysis contradicts recent scholarship on institutional design by finding that the choice of constitutional type (presidential or parliamentary) is not significantly related to the likelihood of democratic survival in less developed countries. It is also found that in the context of the Third World, the combination of multipartism and presidential democracy does not appear to lessen significantly the likelihood of democratic consolidation, nor does parliamentarism evince any obvious superiority in sustaining competitive multiparty regimes. The findings are sufficiently strong to warrant a rethinking of some of the dominant hypotheses on the institutional design of democracy.
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