<P> Civil wars cause a number of problems for democratization . Laura Armey and Robert McNab found that the longer a civil war lasts, and the more casualties it produces, the more hostile the warring factions become to each other; this hostility in turn makes stabilization along terms of peaceful competition, required in a democratic regime, more difficult . Problematically for democracy promotion, the same study found that quick, decisive victories for one faction--even an ostensibly pro-democratic rebellion--similarly discourage peaceful, electoral competition for control of a government after the conflict is over . Leonard Wantchekon has suggested that one of the most reliable forces of democratization is a stalemated civil war, in which the original motivation for the conflict becomes irrelevant as the costs mount; this impels the factions to turn to a combination of internal and external arbitrators to forge a power - sharing agreement: elections and outside, neutral institutions to guarantee that every faction participates in the new democracy fairly . </P> <P> External interventions see different levels of democratization success depending on the type of intervener, type of intervention, and level of elite cooperation prior to the intervention . The level of neutrality and geopolitical disinterest the intervener possesses is important, as is the severity of the intervention's infringement on sovereignty . The differences can be highlighted with three examples: a neutral, mostly unobtrusive monitor missions like UN election observers in Nicaragua in 1989; the multilateral NATO IFOR mission in Yugoslavia to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1031 in 1995; and the unilateral, destabilizing intervention represented by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 . All three missions aimed on some level to promote democracy, with varying degrees of success . Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis have found that the peacekeeping missions most successful at producing fledgling democracies have strong mandates backing them up, but tend not to revolve around military enforcement . Successful democratizing interventions consist of monitoring factions' adherence to their negotiated settlement, while the most successful ones include extensive state - building (such as improving government efficiency and professionalism, or classical infrastructure assistance). </P> <P> Interventions that fail to expend resources on state - building can sometimes be counter-productive to democracy promotion because, as McBride, Milante, and Skaperdas have proposed, a negotiated settlement to a civil war is based on individual factions' faith in the state's unbiased distribution of the benefits of stability; an external intervention shakes that faith by implying that such faith was misplaced to begin with . An additional problem raised by Marina Ottaway is that interventions too often rush to implement formal democratic institutions, such as elections, without allowing time for competing elites to separate responsibly; because of the short timeframe, they either unite into a new authoritarian arrangement or rely on overly divisive party platforms, such as identity, which precludes "permanent fragmentation" of the elite within a cooperative regime framework . A final concern raised with external interventions, particularly unilateral or narrowly multilateral ones, is the perception or actualization of imperialism or neo-imperialism in the name of human rights or democracy by an interested party, which, she theorizes, spawns counter-productive nationalist backlash; however, even neutral monitors must be careful that their reports do not invite a unilateral intervention, as the Council of Freely - Elected Heads of Government's 1989 report on Panamanian election fraud did for the United States . </P> <P> Another school of thought on how democratization most successfully occurs involves an authoritarian regime transitioning to a democratic one as a result of gradual reforms over time . The basic mechanism for this is a four - player game theoretical set - up in which moderate regime and opposition figures form a pro-democratic reform coalition to sideline their respective hardliners, whom they fear threaten the state's stability . However, Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz raise a caveat to that picture: it requires both a highly institutionalized regime and public sphere . The regime must not be sultanistic (based entirely around one central ruler's desires) in order that different members retain some degree of autonomy and have different interests; meanwhile, in the public sphere, there must be a strong civil society that can both maintain pressure on the authoritarian regime while also providing support for the reform pact and the moderates who formulated it . As Ray Salvatore Jennings explains, over the past half century, the success of democratic transitions has depended substantially on the ability of civil society organizations (CSOs) to disseminate dissident information to counter authoritarian regimes' narratives, as well as their mobilizing high voter turnout and monitoring the first elections to prevent interference by hardliner members of the regime . Further, many scholars partial to the gradual reformism perspective on democratization agree with Francis Fukuyama, who asserts that the role of CSOs in directing the part of individuals' lives not under the liberal democratic state's control makes CSOs critical to sustaining the social capital and self - advocacy important for liberal democracy . </P>

2 ways in which democratic participation could be promoted