Abstract
Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult. Most contemporary regimes hold <em>de-jure</em> multiparty elections with universal suffrage. In some countries, elections ensure that political rulers are—at least somewhat—accountable to the electorate whereas in others they are a mere window dressing exercise for authoritarian politics. Hence, regime types need to be distinguished based on the<em> de-facto</em> implementation of democratic institutions and processes. Using V-Dem data, we propose with Regimes of the World (RoW) such an operationalization of four important regime types—closed and electoral autocracies; electoral and liberal democracies—with vast coverage (almost all countries from 1900 to 2016). We also contribute a solution to a fundamental weakness of extant typologies: The unknown extent of misclassification due to uncertainty from measurement error. V-Dem’s measures of uncertainty (Bayesian highest posterior densities) allow us to be the first to provide a regime typology that distinguishes cases classified with a high degree of certainty from those with “upper” and “lower” bounds in each category. Finally, a comparison of disagreements with extant datasets (7%–12% of the country-years), demonstrates that the RoW classification is more conservative, classifying regimes with electoral manipulation and infringements of the political freedoms more frequently as electoral autocracies, suggesting that it better captures the opaqueness of contemporary autocracies.
Highlights
Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult
Many research questions require that scholars use a discrete regime variable, either on the right- or left-hand side
Extant approaches to this task are laudable, but are often either limited in their temporal or geographical coverage, not fully transparent in their coding procedures, or have questionably low thresholds for democracy
Summary
Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult. Most regimes in the world hold de-jure multiparty elections with universal suffrage. Electoral autocracies hold de-facto multiparty elections for the chief executive, but they fall short of democratic standards due to significant irregularities, limitations on party competition or other violations of Dahl’s institutional requisites for democracies. We provide an innovative method to address a key weakness in extant typologies: identifying ambiguous cases close to the thresholds between regime types using V-Dem’s measures of uncertainty. This additional information can be integrated into quantitative analyses, for instance by allowing scholars to conduct robustness checks which exclude more ambiguous cases. Section four compares our regime typology to several of the most frequently used extant measures
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have