Measures of Democratization: From Degree to Type to War

Abstract

The global spread of democracy has not resulted in scholarly consensus on how to conceptualize and measure democratization. The recent proliferation of hybrid regimes has encouraged attempts to empirically capture these new categories with the help of existing measures of democracy, raising the question of how one can go from degree to type. This issue has gained in salience because of the claim that incomplete democratic transitions, stopping halfway between dictatorship and democracy, increase the chance of war. This article presents a first overview of the different ways in which democratization has been defined and measured. In addition, it shows how scholars have used Freedom House and Polity scores to build regime typologies. A reexamination of the results of Mansfield and Snyder’s thesis about democratization and war shows the importance of operationalization and casts further doubt on the empirical robustness of their claims.