The Ebb and Flow of

Dictatorship and
Democracy

. . . . an autocrat, whether a
nationalist strongman,
revolutionary hero, or
Communist apparatchik, . . .
Dobson, p. 2

By 2005, the number of

democracies in the world had
more than tripled since
[1974] . . .
Dobson, p. 4

Regime Type Defined

A

political regime is a set of formal and informal

rules determining:
!

Who

can have access to political power;

What

are the acceptable means of getting to power; and

What

rulers can and cannot do while in office

How do you know a (fill in the blank)

when you see one?
Defining

a political regime involves two tasks:

Conceptualization

What regimes can (logically) exist? > one should provide a

theoretically exhaustive list of feasible regimes
What are the characteristics that a regime should have to
qualify as type k?
Operationalization
On the basis of what observable characteristics can we say that
some observation qualifies as a regime of type k?
(i.e., how do I decide if Peru in 1995 was a democracy or a
dictatorship?)

Previous Efforts
Large-n

studies often employ one of these three

measures of regime type:
Democracy

and Dictatorship (1946-2008)

(Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi 2000; updated by
Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland 2010)
https://sites.google.com/site/joseantoniocheibub/datasets/
democracy-and-dictatorship-revisited
Polity IV (1800-2013)
(Marshall et al 2014):
http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscrdata.html
Freedom Houses Freedom in the World Index (1972-2014)
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedomworld#.U_oNCLywK_Y

. . . and they are perfectly correlated?

These

measures differ in term of both

conceptualization and operationalization
!

We

will review each of them,

underscore

their strengths and weaknesses

review some additional measures/corrections proposed by other
authors

Democracy and Dictatorship (DD)

Conceptualization

Dychotomous typology: a political regime is either a democracy

or a dictatorship
Difference between categories is institutional: democracies are
regimes where incumbents lose elections, implying:
There are regular elections; and
Elections are competitive
All non-democracies are dictatorships

Democracy and Dictatorship

Operationalization

The hard part is deciding when elections are sufficiently

competitive. The authors deal with this issue by coding all cases
where the incumbent never relinquished power as dictatorships
Specifically, a country is a democracy if
The chief executive is elected (directly or indirectly)
There is an elected legislature
There are multiple parties, some of which are opposition
parties
There was at least one instance of alternation in power in
the past (i.e., the incumbent recognized an electoral defeat)

Democracy and Dictatorship: Evolution over time

Democracy and Dictatorship: Pros

Easy to operationalize
Operationalization based on institutional characteristics >
knowing a country is a democracy provides information about
the institutions that exist in that country
(i.e., there is only one way of being democratic)
Recognizes that difference between Belgium and North Korea is
not merely of degree
These countries are distinctive political animals, not different
points along the same continuum

Democracy and Dictatorship: Cons

!

Alternation rule is awkward: retrospective coding, sometimes for

decades
Japan coded as democracy since 1946 only because LDP
relinquished power for the first time in 1993
Institutional differentiation ends with democracies > all
dictatorships treated as equal
the Iranian Revolution (1979) replaced the monarchic rule
of the Shah with a republican regime with elections, albeit
not entirely open and competitive ones. Yet according to the
DD dataset, the political regime remained the same

Polity IV
Conceptualization

Political regimes should be classified on the basis of their

authority patterns
Such patterns vary across three dimensions:
Competitiveness and openness of executive recruitment
Constraints faced by the chief executive; and
Competitiveness and regulation of political participation

Polity IV
Operationalization

Observations receive a Democratic score and an Autocratic

score between 0 and 10 each
Scores based on the presence or absence of certain rules,
institutions, and practices
Scores assigned by coders, usually country experts
In practice, researchers combine both scores to create the Polity
score:
Ranges between -10 (North Korea, Saudi Arabia) and 10
(Western democracies)
Only way to receive a -10 score: get a 10 in the Authoritarian
scale, 0 in the democratic scale; vice versa for a score of 10

Evolution of the Polity score

Polity IV: Pros

Ample coverage: 1800-2013
(Implicitly) recognizes that informal patterns of
participation and competition matter

Elections in some democracies are really competitive, in others

less so

Better than DD at distinguishing differences

between authoritarian regimes > Iran is a good
example:
year
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982

1996

Polity IV
-10
0
-2
-4
-6

-6

Polity IV: Cons

!

21-point scale gives an illusory sense of precision:

Strictly speaking, scale is ordinal: moving from 6 to 7 not
equivalent to moving from 0 to 1
In practice, indicators are highly correlated > we can
distinguish between -10 and 10, but not between 9 and 10
Many authors recognize this, and group several scores together:
!

-5
5
-10
10
Dictatorships Anocracies Democracies

!
!

But

Aggregating many indicators means that there are many ways to end up with the
same score > especially problematic for middle values
If one is to classify observations in a few categories, shouldnt it be better to classify
cases on the bases of explicitly observable, institutional characteristics? (e.g., whether
there are elections, legislatures, etc?)

Freedom House (FH)

!

Conceptualization

The idea is to measure respect for political and personal freedoms, rather
than political regimes themselves

Operationalization

Country experts code observations along two dimensions, each on a 7point scale:
Political rights measure whether citizens can participate in elections,
pluralism is tolerated, etc.
Civil liberties measure whether there is freedom of expression, people can
enjoy individual rights, the government is contained by the rule of law, etc
Scores are averaged, and countries are then classified as Free, Partly
Free, or Not Free

Evolution of FH scores

Freedom House: Pros & Cons

Civil liberties score explicitly tries to measure the what

rulers can do once in power component of the political
regime:

Like Polity: Ordinal rather than cardinal measure,

Several ways of getting the same score,

Is freedom of the press respected?

Are government officials subject to the rule of law?
To what extent are minority rights respected?

Scores try to capture many features at once, and the criteria employed is
unclear / might vary between coders

and so researchers end up employing discrete classifications

(Free, Partly Free, Not Free) that are based on aggregate
scores rather than observable, clearly specified institutions

Three different indicators? Correlations over time

Three different indicators?

We

want positive correlations, but are they too high?

Polity IV and FH are less fine-grained in practice than they look

on paper
In practice, many cases are easy
It shouldnt be surprising that everybody classifies North
Korea as extremely undemocratic and Sweden as fully
democratic
The problem lies in the middle, where we often
have little data to make systematic classifications
> coder biases matter more

Furthermore,

neither of these indexes distinguishes

between different kinds of dictatorships

Modern authoritarians have

successfully honed new
techniques, methods, and
formulas for preserving power,
refashioning dictatorship for
the modern age.
Dobson, pp. 4-5

Discriminating among Dictatorships

!

Geddess

2003 typology of authoritarian regimes

Competitive

Authoritarian Regimes (CARs)

(Levitsky and Way 2010)

Svoliks

2012 four dimensions of dictatorship

http://publish.illinois.edu/msvolik/the-politics-ofauthoritarian-rule/

Geddes 2003
Three

basic types of dictatorship:

Military
Personalist
Single-party

But

Categories not grounded theoretically

Too many intermediate categories (military-personalist,
personalist-single party, etc)
Ignores other relevant information (e.g., competitive elections)

From a distance, many of

the worlds leading
authoritarians look almost
democratic.
Dobson, p. 6

Competitive Authoritarian Regimes (CARs)

Many

dictatorships allow for multiparty elections (and sometimes

the incumbent loses), especially after the end of the Cold War
Most authors classify these regimes on the basis of Polity or FH
scores, without regard to actual institutions

(e.g., anocracies are regimes with a Polity score between -5 and 5, but there are
many ways to get a score in this range)

Levitsky

and Way 2010 define and code CARs explicitly:

The regime is civilian

Formal democratic institutions are the only legitimate way to gain access to power;
but
Incumbents control of state resources gives them a significant electoral advantage
> elections are free but unfair

Limited

scope: Levitsky and Way only identify and code the 35

CARs that existed between 1990 and 1995 > coding the
unfairness of the electoral process in a systematic way is difficult

Four dimensions of dictatorship (Svolik 2012)

Regimes

originally classified as dictatorship or democracy

Based on DD, minus the alternation rule

Dictatorships

vary across 4 dimensions:

Military involvement in politics

Restrictions on political parties
Legislative selection (no legislature, appointed, elected w/limited
participation, etc)
Executive selection

Svolik

provides no typology of dictatorships, but

classifies regimes according to these dimensions
depending on the research question of interest (e.g., what
explains military involvement in politics?)

For what might you use these datasets?

For what might you use these datasets?

Papers
Cross-sectional

context
Time serial context
Context might be more nuanced than average score.
!

Presentations
Cross-sectional

context
Time serial context
Context might be more nuanced than average score.

What is missing from all these datasets?

What is missing from all these datasets?

Selectorate

Theory: the relative sizes of the . . . .

Interchangeables
Influentials
Essentials
!
!

How

might we move from these datasets to a

dataset based on selectorate theory?