More Rawlsian Thought Experiments: An Inverse Income Voting System

(For some unknown reason, re-reading Rawls stimulates my weird idea generator. Another politically impossible proposal here, presented as a thought experiment)

[Update 25 August 2012: see the more detailed discussion of this proposal here]

Thinking about the difference principle today, it occurred to me that most of the discussion on the topic tends to be overly focused on the economic institutions that would ensure that the least advantaged group in society would fare best. Yet the difference principle is not restricted in its application to economic inequalities; in fact, the principle specifies that inequalities of authority and political power must also be justified to the worst off group in society: “[t]he second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of institutions that make use of differences in authority and responsibility” (§11, p. 53, emphasis mine). Is a standard democratic system – with its panoply of elections, constitutional protections, and so on –justified in those terms? Rawls seems to assume so, even though standard democratic institutions entail clear inequalities in authority and responsibility which are not obviously to the maximum benefit of the worst off.

Moreover, to the extent that Rawls discusses the connection between political and economic inequalities, he tends to think of the direction of causation as going from economics to politics. Unjustifiable political inequalities in authority and responsibility (as, for example, when the rich have undue influence in the political process) would be remedied, in his view, once objectionable economic inequalities are taken care of, which seems reasonable enough; after all, he notes, such inequalities are correlated with one another (§16, p. 83). With low levels of economic inequality, widely dispersed ownership of the means of production, and a healthy dose of public campaign finance, Rawls argues, whatever differences in authority and responsibility political institutions would still produce would be justifiable to the least advantaged (cf. §13, p. 71, §36, p. 198).

But why wait until such inequalities are fully remedied? Imagine that instead of the standard, one person, one vote system, we had a voting system where the poorest person with any income got 1 vote, the person with twice the income of the poorest person got ½ a vote, and a person with 20,000 times the income of the poorest person got 1/20,000^th of a vote. “Income” here includes any government transfers; people with no income would have 1 vote, just as the poorest people with any income. The specific value of the vote would be linked to the income records on file with the national tax agency, and no one could vote who was not linked in some way to the tax system. We might use broad categories instead of specific incomes – say, people making less than $10,000 a year get one vote, people making up to $20,000 half a vote, and so on; and of course we might decide that a different weighting of votes is required. [Update: it occurs to me that using the median income would be easier to set up. For example, voters below the median income each get one vote, voters between the median and twice the median get half, and so on.] Whatever the case, poorer people would have more formal influence than richer people.

In a fully income-equal society, everyone would have 1 vote; in an extremely unequal society, the very poorest would have the most political influence. High-flying hedge fund managers with extremely high incomes likely would have an infinitesimal vote, though they would of course still have many means of exercising influence. After all, elections cost money, and the rich are more able to run for election and lobby legislators. But the idea is that the least advantaged groups would have compensating advantages, as politicians would have to cater to the greatest mass of votes; yet these advantages would diminish as transfer payments increased, or society became more equal. Note also that the specific value of a person’s vote would fluctuate throughout their lifetime, being very high when the person is very young or very old, and very low during their peak earning years. (The system might work kind of like an automatic means test for politically distributed benefits, baked right into the political structure).

Would there be anything wrong with this system, from a Rawlsian point of view? Everyone can still vote and run for office, so the first principle of Rawls’ theory - the principle guaranteeing the equal basic liberties - is not overtly violated; and it seems to me that the inequalities of authority and responsibility produced by this system are more clearly justifiable to the worst off group in society than the inequalities produced by a standard democratic system. For one thing, it provides the least advantaged in society with the fair value of their political liberties in a direct, unmediated way that complicated systems of campaign finance cannot match. Moreover, a political system along these lines bypasses the theoretical discussion about which economic system would best produce outcomes in conformity with the difference principle; different proposals can be tried, and if they worsened the lot of the least advantaged, the poor would gradually acquire sufficient political clout to overturn them. (In theory, this is compatible with pure libertarian laissez faire, so long as such laissez faire actually does improve the condition of the least advantaged group).

Like any oddball proposal, this is very likely a bad idea. (I can imagine all kinds of bad incentives to underreport income, for example, and I’m not sure it would fit with the well-entrenched idea that having an equal voice is a mark of respect of equal citizenship.) But I’m curious: are there specifically Rawlsian grounds to reject this sort of system? (I'm sure there are other grounds). And what are the obvious problems I’ve missed in here? Does this lead to a sustainable politico-economic equilibrium, or simply to an intensification of class conflict?

[Update 2, 20 August 2012: fixed some minor typos. Also thought of some further refinements. Suppose we divide the income distribution into N equal quantiles. The voters in the lowest class have one vote, and the voters in the highest class have (1/(N^x)) fractional vote, where x is a parameter determining how extreme the disenfranchisement of the rich is. When x=0 everyone has one vote, as today; when x=1, the disenfranchisement is strictly proportional to class position, so the each person in the nth quantile has 1/n votes; but we could set x between 0 and 1, leading to a range of different weightings of formal influence for the poorest depending both on the number of "classes" and on the extent of disenfranchisement with income. With few classes and low x, the system is close to our own; with many classes and large x, there is a very steep disenfranchisement curve. What values of these parameters would be chosen behind the veil of ignorance?]

Democracy and development since 1950 in one chart

My previous post, in one chart:

(Click here for larger size).

Bubbles to the right are more democratic countries, measured using the Unified Democracy Scores; bubbles to the left are more autocratic countries. Note how the left side of the graph has much more volatility, even within single countries, as expected; the bubbles move up and down like crazy. By contrast, on the right side of the graph everything oscillates more sedately. (Try following Lebanon, for example; you can also zoom in to particular regions of the graph). For another interesting view, change the color to "regime type" and set the Y axis to plot GDP per capita (rather than GDP per capita growth). (Change the scale to "log," too, for a clearer view).

(Data on economic growth from the Penn World Table.)

A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.75: Democracy and Development

(Statistician General’s warning: no significance tests or confidence intervals were harmed in the writing of this post. Appropriate model assumptions not guaranteed. Do not use without consulting a trained and licensed statistician.)

I haven’t done one of these posts on the history of political regimes in a while, but I am preparing something for a class on the topic of the relationship between political regimes and economic development, and figured it’s a nice addition to the series. Besides, it is always a good time to put up pretty graphs on this blog.

What is the relationship between political regimes and economic development? The basics of this relationship in the post-WWII era seem pretty well understood: basically, the richer the country, the more likely it is to be “democratic” (in the sense I’ve discussed here and here, where democracy is conceived as a system of normatively regulated competition for control of states including the usual paraphernalia of elections, freedoms of speech and assembly, etc.), though the reasons for why this is the case remain disputed, and there are obvious and significant exceptions to this pattern. Conversely, the academic literature suggests that democratic regimes have a slight and indirect long-term development advantage, though the evidence for this claim is much more controversial, and there is no consensus on how this particular advantage operates, if it exists at all (for a meta-analysis of studies on this topic, see here).

Here I want to look at how the relationship between development and democracy has changed over the past 60 years. For our purposes in this post I am going to use the Unified Democracy Scores developed by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton. These scores basically aggregate the information contained in nine other democracy scores – Polity IV, DD, Freedom House, and six other lesser known indexes – in such a way as to indicate the “uncertainty” associated with particular country ratings. The score for a given country ranges between around -2 and around 2, with higher numbers being “more democratic.” A score of “zero” can be interpreted as a cut-off between more or less “open” regimes and more or less “closed” regimes, though we could also use three breaks, with regimes at one end of the distribution being clearly “dictatorships,” regimes at the other end being clearly “democratic,” and regimes in the middle being “hybrid” regimes of various kinds – competitive authoritarian, tutelary democracies, democratizing monarchies, etc.  As an example, here are the scores for the year 2008, split into three quantiles to indicate 

these broad regime categories:

Unified Democracy Scores, 2008

(The length of each horizontal line is the 95% confidence interval for the score; in general, small democracies at the top of the scale have more uncertain ratings, while dictatorships at the bottom of the scale have narrower confidence intervals, indicating less disagreement about the classification of dictatorships than about the determination of the level of democracy beyond a certain point). A three way split works quite well: the countries in red are the more obvious dictatorships, while the countries in blue are more clearly democratic, and the countries in green have the sorts of problematic hybrid regimes that are difficult to classify with certainty as either wholly democratic or wholly undemocratic.

Using those breaks, here is what the distribution of regimes looks like since the 1950s:

Distribution of regime types since 1950

Fully closed regimes had their peak in the late 70s and early 80s, but the end of the Cold War pushed many of these to at least hold elections, as we saw in this post. But how has this distribution evolved in terms of income per capita? Consider this plot:

Income per capita per year and regime type

(GDP data from the Penn World Table). Each circle shows the median income of the particular regime type for a given year, where the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes that fall into that category. The lines show a lowess fit for the overall trend growth of income for each particular regime type. I interpret the story the graph tells as follows.

The median income of democratic regimes has been higher than the median income of both hybrid and fully authoritarian regimes since at least the 1950s, and the gap has in general widened, not narrowed, even as the number of democratic countries has increased. (From this graph we cannot tell, however, whether the gap has widened because democratic countries have grown faster, or because non-democratic countries that grew fast turned into democracies; from the graphs below, we may infer that it was a mixture of both). The gap was highest during “peak authoritarianism” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when most poor and newly independent countries were either hybrid regimes or dictatorships, but it stopped growing after the end of the cold war, when a number of relatively poor countries became democratic.

Interestingly, whereas before the end of the cold war the median hybrid regime was also richer than the median dictatorship, this pattern is reversed after the end of the cold war. Full authoritarianism proved almost impossible to sustain in poor countries without the patronage of the major powers or natural resource wealth; for the most part only relatively rich dictatorships, or dictatorships that retained a special relationship with a major non-democratic country, survived, whereas most poor countries today have some sort of hybrid regime. Thus in 2008, the list of full dictatorships included Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Qatar, Libya, Swaziland, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Laos, China, Eritrea, Cuba, UAE, Oman, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Iran, and Syria. (Not all of these had GDP data in the Penn World Table – North Korea, for example. Note also that some of these regimes have large levels of uncertainty associated with them – the list could very well have included Brunei, for example, instead of Iran; but the basic point does not appear to change if we switch some of these around. I haven’t really checked, since this is only a blog post and checking requires some actual programming, but one could check by drawing new samples of democracy scores from within the distribution Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton generate. That’s the fun thing about the UD scores. It is also worth noting that some of these regimes appear to have survived the end of the cold war only because they had unifying enemies – Eritrea, Cuba, and Iran come to mind; fear can be just as stabilizing as wealth.)

What about growth? Is any particular regime type consistently associated with economic growth? Here’s what it looks like when we plot the relative growth performance of different regimes in every year since 1950:

Economic growth by regime type per year

(Click for a larger version). Each circle represents the median growth rate for the regime type indicated by the color; the size of the circle is proportional to the number of regimes in that category for that year. The lines show a lowess fit of the trend growth rate of each regime type; the shaded areas represent automatically generated 95% confidence intervals. (Many caveats apply. See warning above). Any year where the blue circle is higher than the red or green circles is a year where the median democracy did better than the median hybrid regime or the median dictatorship.  

As indicated by the width of the confidence intervals around the red and green lines, dictatorships and hybrid regimes have had more variability in economic performance than democracies since at least the 1950s: more growth “miracles” and “disasters,” often in the very same country. (See this paper by William Easterly for the actual scholarly version of the argument). To the extent that we can ignore these confidence intervals and focus only on the trend performance, democracies have not always done better than these other regimes. In the early post-war era it seems that dictatorships did better (though most did about as well as democracies), but then decolonization came along and the growth performance of dictatorships basically cratered. Indeed, the 80s, when the so-called “third wave” of democratization began, was also (not coincidentally perhaps?) the time when the “growth gap” between democracies and hybrid and dictatorial regimes was at its widest. Ominously, the last decade has seen a reversal of this pattern, which explains much of the (not very well thought out) commentary about the rise of the “Chinese model.” (Democracies, in particular, seem to have been much more strongly affected by the financial crisis that started in 2008 than either dictatorships or hybrid regimes, though all regimes appear to have been affected to some extent). Yet we should not make too much of this; even in the last decade, democracies did basically the same as the other regimes, judging by the overlap in confidence intervals – their responses seem not to have been too obviously wrong relative to the responses of authoritarian  countries (many of which benefitted from high oil prices). And we should remember that the median per capita GDP of democracies is already much higher than that of dictatorships or hybrid regimes; if we ought to be worried about anything, it is about the effects of bad economic performance on hybrid regimes, which could potentially lead to a reversion to more authoritarian forms of government:

Economic growth by regime type per year

I have purposely refrained from making any big claims about a general relationship between regime type and economic performance. From the evidence above, it seems that there has not been a great deal of difference between different regimes, except in the 80s. But instead of throwing away information by breaking the democracy scores into categories, we could try to look at what the relationship between the raw scores and growth rates looks like in general. Here’s my idea (please tell me if this doesn’t work; there are probably a million problems with it I haven't thought about). For every year, we estimate a simple linear model of the form growth = a*democracy_score + b*log(gdp_per_capita) + c + error. We then plot the coefficient a for each year; when this coefficient is positive, the more democratic the country, the better its performance for that year, adjusting for its existing level of economic development, and when the coefficient is negative, the opposite is true, i.e., the less democratic the country the better its growth performance for that year (many caveats apply). When we do this, we find that more democratic countries had a clear growth advantage only between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, and that advantage seems to have been lost in the 1990s, even reversed:

Growth advantage of democracy per year

(An even simpler model, not controlling for the existing level of economic development, gives a broader democracy advantage, extending back to the 1960s, but not a radically different picture.) It is worth noting that these relationships are different in different regions: the “democracy advantage” calculated using this method has been negative in East Asia, South Asia, and Western Europe for the period 1950-2008, and zero or positive just about everywhere else:

Growth advantage of democracy per region

Interestingly, Polynesia, East Africa, and Central Asia have had some of the largest “democracy advantages”: the more democratic the regimes have been there, the better their growth performance. Looking at entire continents, the broadest democracy advantage by far is in Africa (and it is positive in all).(Many caveats apply: for example, there isn’t a lot of variability in the democracy score in some of these regions, like in Australia and New Zealand, and the calculated coefficients aren't always significant).

Anyway, more could be said, but it’s late and I need to move on. Any thoughts on how to further this sort of analysis? All code needed to replicate these plots is available here; you will need to download the Unified Democracy Scores and the Penn World Table separately. You also need this file of country and region codes.

[Update, 18 May: fixed a small mistake in the last two plots. Results don't change, though the Polynesian "democracy advantage" is now more pronounced]

[Update 2, shortly after: I take it back. It was fine the first time, though it doesn't make much difference.]

The Kantian Logic of Democratization: A Footnote on Levitsky and Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War

(A review of Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Most political regimes in the world today allow for some form of electoral competition. As we saw in this post, towards the end of the cold war most stereotypical “dictatorships” (where competition by non-official parties was de jure forbidden and political control over the public sphere was nearly complete) began to give way to regimes in which control over the state depended in some way on winning real electoral contests. International pressure from Western powers, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and popular protest all contributed to this outcome.

Yet elections, as anyone will tell you, do not equal democracy. Most of these “electoral” regimes – places like Zimbabwe, Russia, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, and many other countries - featured genuine political competition, with fiercely contested elections (unlike the meaningless “elections” held in many communist countries before the end of the cold war), organized oppositions which often held substantive legislative or subnational offices and could occasionally even win presidential or parliamentary elections (unlike in de jure one party states), and at least some islands of media independence (unlike the situation in many genuine dictatorships); but such competition was neither free nor fair by any reasonable standard. Incumbents persecuted or harassed their political opponents by legal or illegal means, intimidated or bought the media, packed supposedly “independent” judicial institutions with their supporters, used state resources without restraint for campaign purposes, and even occasionally fraudulently stole elections through good old-fashioned ballot stuffing and vote falsification in efforts to secure their position.

Consider a few examples. In Ukraine in the 1990s, “businesses that financed the opposition were routinely targeted by tax authorities” and in Ghana similarly “entrepreneurs who financed opposition parties “were blacklisted, denied government contracts, and [had] their businesses openly sabotaged”.” In Taiwan, the KMT used to outspend its opponents 50-1 in elections, and in Russia the Yeltsin campaign spent “between 30 and 150 times the amount permitted the opposition in 1996.” In the Peru of Fujimori, private television stations “signed “contracts” with the state intelligence service in which they received up to $1.5 million a month in exchange for limiting coverage of opposition parties.” (All quotes from Levitsky and Way, pp. 10-11). Everybody knows about the selective prosecution of potentially threatening “oligarchs” in Russia (like Mikhail Khodorkovsky) for tax reasons, not always without some justification (after all, they probably did not get rich by following the rules), but the tactic is common, though with local variations according to context (see, e.g., the Anwar Ibrahim case in Malaysia). Libel and defamation suits, especially, are the tool of choice for shutting down critical forms of media: according to Levitsky and Way, in the nineties newspapers in Croatia were sued for libel more than 230 times; in Cameroon at around the same time the use of defamation suits forced the closure of several newspapers. (We pass over in silence the use of libel or defamation suits in Cambodia, Belarus, Russia, and many other places as a way to intimidate opponents and silence critical voices). Sometimes media restrictions even get a decent veneer of justification, as when the Chavez government in Venezuela refused to renew the “over the air” license of RCTV, an opposition-leaning TV station, in 2007 for having supported the coup against his government in 2002. All of these actions are of course made easier if the government takes care to pack supposedly “impartial” or “independent” institutions (constitutional courts, electoral commissions, and so on) with government supporters (see, e.g., Venezuela and Malaysia). Finally, there are the more obvious tactics to suppress political competition, to be used when all else fails: beatings and imprisonment of opposition members by security forces (ask Morgan Tsvangirai and many other Zanu-PF opponents in Zimbabwe), old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, and vote falsification (in Serbia under Milosevic, Ukraine under Kuchma, and many other places).

Rather than thinking of these regimes as somehow imperfect or transitional democracies, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that we should see them as authoritarian regimes in their own right. Levitsky and Way call them “competitive authoritarian” regimes (a term they coined in a widely cited 2002 article), and tell the story of their emergence and the reasons why some of them managed to more fully democratize but others did not in a recent book (Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, 2010). The book is a pretty impressive research achievement; the bibliography alone is 110 pages long, and it can serve as a good introduction to the post cold war politics of the 35 different countries they study.[1]

Now, I’d prefer to speak not so much of authoritarianism, democracy, and democratization (at this point at least) but of transformations in the prevalent varieties of political competition in the world. Modern “democracy,” on this view, is merely a system of normatively regulated oligopolistic political competition for state power, which does not sound particularly inspiring, except when we consider how hard it seems to be to achieve even that. In the post cold-war era full political monopolies have tended to decay into systems of unregulated political competition (“competitive authoritarian” or “party hegemonic” regimes) where rulers can often get away with the murder of their political opponents (literally and figuratively); only some of these systems of unregulated political competition turn into modern “democracies,” where rulers cannot so easily get away with murder of their political opponents. So the key question is: how do normatively unregulated systems of political competition turn into normatively regulated ones? How do we move from political systems where rulers “play dirty” by exploiting their control of the state (and oppositions do the same, if they win) to systems where they can’t get away with that, or at least not that easily? (The converse question is also important, though not the focus of Levitsky and Way’s book: why do systems of normatively regulated political competition sometimes break down, leading to regimes where rulers can get away with murder?). The problem is not so much about political turnover (ruling parties do occasionally yield power in competitive authoritarian regimes, even though this typically requires mass protest and other forms of extralegal action as well as winning elections) but about what can shift the kind of political competition that is enabled by a regime.

Levitsky and Way’s answer to that question is relentlessly structural – protest and opposition action plays little role. It is also reminiscent of an old argument in Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” (hence the title of this post; more on that later). In brief, they argue that neither Western pressure nor domestic opposition action by itself is capable of inducing democratization (at best, such international and domestic pressure can produce “electoralization,” not democratization: electoral turnover within normatively unregulated forms of political competition); it is only when domestic and international pressures for democracy are consistently amplified by social and economic links with Western democracies that elites in these regimes will consistently invest in credible ways of enforcing the norms of political competition (e.g., genuinely independent electoral commissions and judicial systems, a press that is not constantly pressured by the government du jour, etc.).

Let’s start with the obvious international pressures for democracy (or political competition, really). Since the end of the cold war most Western powers (at least the powers Levitsky and Way are interested in, the USA and the EU) have adopted an explicit “democratization” agenda, in which they have used various incentives to promote electoral regimes of varying credibility. The effectiveness of these pressures, however, varies with what Levitsky and Way call “leverage,” i.e., the influence Western governments are able to bring to bear on other regimes to make their politics more competitive. Western leverage is greatest for small, aid-dependent countries (like many African countries), and smaller for larger economies (like Mexico or Malaysia). It is larger when democratization is the primary issue on the foreign policy agenda of Western powers (as in many Latin American and Eastern European countries in the 1990s and early 2000s), and smaller when competing issues (like terrorism or other security concerns, especially since 2001) trump democratization (e.g., in the middle East, but also in places like Serbia and Croatia during the Balkan wars), or when other powers are able to provide support to authoritarian rulers (e.g., Russian support for Belarus in the early 1990s, and Chinese support for Burma or North Korea today). It is larger when governments can offer carrots as well as sticks, and smaller when only sticks are available (so the European Union had high democratizing leverage over those countries that were thought to be credible candidates for membership in the EU, but had less leverage over those countries which were unlikely to become members).

Levitsky and Way emphasize that Western pressure for democratization is very often quite superficial; Western powers are easily satisfied if the target government conducts more or less “clean” elections, and sometimes not even that. And they are not always especially consistent; only salient events, like elections, tend to engage them, whereas more ambiguous actions like politically motivated prosecutions or the abuse of state resources for election purposes can pass off uncriticized. (Incidentally, as this neat new paper by Simpser and Donno argues [gated], high quality election monitoring can have unintended bad consequences, pushing competitive authoritarian rulers to use practices that are generally bad for normatively regulating competition, like muzzling the media or packing the courts as a way of getting approval for “clean” elections on election day; too much focus on the quality of elections can thus worsen the quality of the surrounding institutions via strategic adaptation on the part of incumbent rulers).

Leverage is really helpful for democratization only when it is reinforced by what Levitsky and Way call linkage. By this Levitsky and Way mean the whole range of social and economic ties between Western democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes. These may include trade and migration links, the circulation of elites through American and European universities, various forms of communication across borders, and so on.  A high density of these ties helps produce consistent pressure for democratization (or rather, for enforcing norms of fair political competition) by amplifying the effect that even minor violations of the norms of political competition have on foreign and domestic publics, creating transnational constituencies for democracy, and providing incentives for elites in competitive authoritarian states to invest in the credibility of the institutions for monitoring violations of these norms. It is only when linkage is high that foreign pressure really becomes expensive for domestic elites in competitive authoritarian regimes, and not only in purely financial terms; when every suit your government brings against its political opponents produces an endless stream of NY Times articles, cancellations of visits from dignitaries, visa troubles, and in general international opprobrium from their peers and colleagues in Europe or the USA, adherence to the norms of political competition starts looking like a good deal.

Linkage gets you not only an official EU protest over the treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko, it gets you a headline like “Europe Protests Ukraine’s Treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko” in the NY Times, the promise of an investigation by the Ukrainian government, and Joachim Gauck cancelling his travel plans to Kiev. I’m sure similar treatment of a Malawian opposition politician would not have rated anything close to the same reaction. (And Ukraine, in Levitsky and Way’s scheme, only rates medium, not high, levels of linkage). Linkage creates lobbies that constantly bring violations of the norms of political competition to the attention of Western foreign ministries and legislatures, and it creates elite constituencies interested in preventing such violations in the first place; it makes Western pressure consistent and predictable. This is why it was so hard, for example, for Vladimir Meçiar to get away with relatively small violations of the norms of political competition when he briefly ruled Slovakia in the 1990s, and why it seems unlikely that Viktor Orban will be able to consolidate a truly competitive authoritarian regime in Hungary today. By contrast, when there are few regular ties between a competitive authoritarian regime and Western democracies, foreign pressure is erratic and constituencies for enforcing norms of political competition are weak, regardless of the level of leverage. High leverage and low linkage produces at best electoral turnover (i.e., it pushes incumbents out when they lose an election) without genuine transformations in the norms and institutions of political institutions (the opposition is likely to be just as bad as the government in its treatment of the press or its abuse of state resources), which is precisely what Levitsky and Way think happened in many African countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.

A parallel argument works for domestic sources of pressure, though I think here Levitsky and Way muddle the presentation of the issues a bit. They want to argue that domestic pressure is usually not that significant for either democratization or even electoral turnover (in contrast to some recent scholarship, which emphasizes the importance of protest and opposition strength). So they emphasize that what really matters is the strength of states and incumbent party organizations: when these are “strong,” protest doesn’t get you very far. Milosevic survived enormous levels of mobilization as long as his security forces held together, whereas in Madagascar or Haiti the state could barely control the territory, let alone prevent relatively small opposition forces from overthrowing the government (in Haiti, an “army” of about 200 rebels). But, as Levitsky and Way sometimes seem to acknowledge, the interesting question is not so much about turnover but about the fairness of the norms of competition; and here all the work is done by linkage, not state or party strength or opposition pressure. Only high levels of linkage, in their view, induce either victorious oppositions or incumbent governments to invest in credibly enforcing norms of political competition; in its absence victorious oppositions do not behave much better when in power than the governments they displace.

I also think that to speak of “state” vs. “opposition” strength is to reify the fluid character of these things. One can agree that oppositions win power in competitive authoritarian regimes where states and incumbent party organizations splinter (as in the so-called “color revolutions” in the early 2000s), i.e., transfer their loyalty to the opposition or remain neutral, but this hardly means that opposition efforts don’t matter much: successful opposition efforts are typically geared towards inducing such transfers of loyalty. The more interesting point Levitsky and Way make has to do with why some states and parties are so resilient in the face of opposition challenges – think of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, holding together in the face of generalized economic collapse and a well-organized opposition movement. Why? Levitsky and Way point to the role of non-material incentives: whereas parties and states that are held together only through patronage (the ability to distribute jobs and benefits) tend to break down in the face of opposition pressure or economic crisis, security forces and parties that were forged in war or insurgency (in Armenia or Zimbabwe, for example), or are otherwise held together by some salient identity in addition to patronage (communism, ethnicity, etc.), tend to require far more pressure, indeed generational change, to break down. (This also works for regimes that are not competitive authoritarian but simply monopolize political competition: Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc.).

There is something “Kantian” about the story Levitsky and Way tell in this book. In Perpetual Peace Kant argues that a “federation” of Republican peoples can spread “if a powerful and enlightened people” that makes itself into a Republic serves as “a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.” This process does not involve a change in human nature; as Kant says elsewhere, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” All it requires is the growing interdependence of peoples, which eventually come to acquire interests in the preservation of republican norms and the maintenance of peace, and which thus make these republican “cores” grow outwards, slowly. Similarly here: norms of fair political competition only spread and become powerful through a process that involves a growing level of interconnectedness across borders. The idea is simultaneously optimistic – electoralization plus growing connections to the core (“globalization”?) make the zone of normatively regulated political competition grow ever outwards – and pessimistic – regimes that are “far” from this core will have fragile and generally unregulated forms of political competition regardless (this suggests pessimism about, for example, Mali). (Though they do not make much of this, their story also suggests that policies that prevent the growth of linkage – like the “embargo” on Cuba – are about the worst possible policy to encourage democratization). Of course, this story also assumes that political competition in the core does not decay, perhaps through processes that rob it of its importance – think of the growth of the national security state in the USA, or the ways in which the great recession has affected most European democracies. But Levitsky and Way tell it pretty convincingly, with masses of qualitative evidence; I learned a lot from this book.

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[1] Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Benin, Botswana, Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All of these countries are classified as “Competitive Authoritarian” in 1990-1995; by 2008, two of them had become “fully authoritarian” (Belarus and Russia), and 14 had become “full democracies” by Levitsky and Way’s accounting. (One additional country, Nicaragua, first democratized and then became a competitive authoritarian regime again by 2008). Their cases do not include countries that became competitive authoritarian after 1995, or which were “party hegemonic” regimes in 1995 (too little competition; e.g., Singapore, in their view, though I suspect this case would be problematic for their theory) but might have become more open since then. They also do not include countries in which unelected offices are the most important ones, even if there is a significant electoral component (e.g., Morocco, Iran) or under foreign occupation. 

Crowdsourcing a Democracy Index – 2012 edition

It’s that time of the year again – time to crowdsource a democracy index.

First, a bit of context. Last year, I had the idea of using the Allourideas pairwise comparison software to crowdsource a ranking of countries by their degree of “democracy” in 2010. I asked students in my Dictatorships and Revolutions class to set the ball rolling, and then posted the link to the widget here, allowing anybody to vote. Surprisingly, in just a couple of months of voting the results were interestingly close to standard indexes of freedom or democracy: the crowdsourced ranking had a correlation of 0.84 with Freedom House’s widely-used ratings of political and civil liberties for 2010, and the basic crowdsourced ranking was generally plausible (see this post for further analysis of these results) . In fact, by now the correlation has increased to 0.86 (8556 votes total), which is about as good the correlation between Freedom House and Polity IV (0.87).

I am interested in seeing if this kind of crowdsourced measure can be used as a sort of quick and dirty index of democracy. To be sure, crowdsourcing the construction of an index of democracy in this way is usually not a good way of generating reliable social science data. For one thing, the exercise does not impose any restrictions on how the concept of “democracy” should be understood, which means that it implicitly aggregates all kinds of different ideas about democracy, weighting them by the degree to which larger numbers of people consider them important. (It takes a “democratic” approach to concept formation, you might say). But it does have the virtue of being cheap (total cost: about $0, compared to over US$500,000 annually for the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” report, and $120,000 annually for the Polity IV project), aggregating the dispersed information of large numbers of people from all over the world, and making it possible to generate various measures of “uncertainty” around the crowdsourced estimates. So I want to repeat the exercise, and produce a democracy ranking for 2011:

(Click here if you can’t see the widget above. Vote as many times as you'd like, and don't worry if you have to use the "I can't decide" button).

In theory, the more votes, and the more diverse the voting population – the more people from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world – the more informative the results should be. So please vote early and often, and share!

I am also interested in which dimensions of the complex concept of democracy people tend to weigh more when making these sorts of comparisons. Do people put more weight on the presence or absence of elections, for example, than on economic equality? You can help me to figure this out by using the widget below to rank various dimensions or components of democracy in terms of their importance to you (or adding your own):

(Click here if you can’t see the widget above. Vote as many times as you'd like, and don't worry if you have to use the "I can't decide" button).

The “seed” dimensions of democracy for these comparisons are taken from a recent piece by Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, et al. (“Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy”, Perspectives on Politics 9(2): pp. 42-62; ungated here) that is very much worth reading if you are interested in the issue of how to measure democracy. But I make no claim that these are the only dimensions of democracy that matter; if people have other ideas, you can add them in (I will need to approve any suggestions, though).  You are also welcome to discuss in comments the kinds of considerations that you used to make distinctions between countries, or any other considerations that might improve the usefulness of this sort of exercise.

Enjoy, and please share!

Varieties of Political Competition

(Part 1.5 of a series on the history ofpolitical regimes. This gets a bit technical in the second half, which contains a sort of blurry sketch of a theory of political regimes)

Our political vocabulary has a very long history. Terms like democracy, dictatorship, autocracy, tyranny, and even words of more recent vintage like authoritarianism or totalitarianism carry a great deal of descriptive and evaluative baggage, acquired in the course of political debate over a long time. They are rich, many-layered concepts, useful for simultaneously referring to and evaluating complex and vaguely-defined combinations of institutional, cultural, and other aspects of social systems. But by the same token, all that baggage makes it very difficult to use these terms to track the history of political institutions in anything but the roughest fashion. Or at least the history of the forms of political competition for power in states.

Consider an apparently simple question like how long the USA has been democratic. Since independence in the late 18^th century? Since the 1820s? Since reconstruction? Since the introduction of women’s suffrage? Since the 1960s? Never? Since the 1960s but only until recently? Until the 1930s? Historically, the idea of democracy has provided support for all of these answers, and all of them have had advocates. And though the current usage of the word "democracy" makes some answers more plausible than others, the controversy is pretty much ineradicable. We may at best be able to agree that the USA today is likely to be more democratic in some ways than in the late 19^th century (a more inclusive suffrage, more tolerance of certain forms of dissent), but perhaps less democratic in other ways than in the 1930s (a more entrenched and pervasive national security bureaucracy that is impervious to political control, greater structural barriers to entry into political competition, etc.). Moreover, even if we agreed that the USA has been democratic for some particular period, this would not necessarily tell us much about how competition for control of the state changed during that time: how norms of leadership selection evolved, how barriers to entry into political competition changed, how the ability to constrain the actions of the winners of the competition for power waxed or waned, etc.

Now consider instead the question of how long the USA has selected its top political leadership via competitive elections where candidates must enlist the support of a substantial fraction of a relatively large group (much greater than Dunbar’s number) to gain power, and where entry into political competition is normatively regulated (there are relatively well-enforced rules about who can be a candidate for power) but where such regulation does not impose large formal barriers to entry (the rules imply the existence of large pool of potential candidates representing a wide variety of interests and with a wide variety of life experiences and skills, even if structural barriers like access to money or racism considerably reduce this pool in fact). This question is in principle answerable (a: since the early 20^th century, at least), but it is not identical to the question of whether the USA is or ever was a democracy, whether in the USA “the people” or “the rich” or “the well connected” rule or have ever ruled, or indeed the question of whether its political system is any good at all.

It seems plausible to say that this method of leadership selection (competitive election) must be a component of democracy in large states (i.e., that no state without some such method of leadership selection can be called a democracy), yet this implies a whole theory of democracy relating competitive elections to ideals of inclusion and autonomy that is itself contestable. Ancient Greeks, for example, thought elections were characteristic of “oligarchic” regimes (rule by the rich), for understandable reasons having to do with the typical barriers to entry into political competition they presuppose (when offices are open to election, only the rich are able to compete for them effectively, as the American primary season certainly suggests); in their view, sortition [selection by lottery], not election, was more appropriate to the ideals of citizen equality implicit in the notion of demokratia (the power of the demos) and isonomia (citizen equality before the law) as they understood it. (They were certainly right for their political context; and perhaps their ideas are worth taking seriously today as well). Even the idea that elections are an institution of accountability (and hence something that helps “the people” to rule) rather than a mechanism of selection (useful only as an efficient way to discover the most talented rulers for an already established hierarchy) is a relatively recent development. At any rate, even if we agreed that competitive leadership selection through vote-gathering in large electorates is part of any definition of democracy in modern states, this does not imply that we would agree on the relative importance for democracy of such elections relative to, say, the inclusiveness of the electorate, the existence of a culture of tolerance, the responsiveness of elected officials to public opinion, or the protection of various rights.

From the point of view of trying to write a history of political regimes, it may thus be best to proceed in a disaggregated way: to speak not of democracy but of regimes where leadership selection is conducted on the basis of competitive elections with large electorates and few formal barriers to entry, for example, as I tried to do in my previous post. Instead of saying “democracy” we say CE/LG/LBE regimes (competitive elections/large group support/low barriers to entry). We thus substitute collections of small and relatively unimportant ideas like political competition through elections for large but important ideas like democracy, and then check whether these individually small and unimportant institutions come together in particular ensembles that make a difference to the things we care about. (E.g., like whether some particular combination of large-group elections, low barriers to entry into political competition, etc. actually tends to evolve over time, and whether these combinations tend to make a difference to the realization of particular ideals of autonomy or freedom). This avoids the historical tangledness of existing regime concepts, though at the cost of bracketing, at least for a time, evaluations of actual institutions. But at least then the important questions become either empirical (which institutions lead to the realization of particular ideals?) or purely philosophical (how should we weigh the relative importance of political values like equality, participation, etc.?).

I am primarily interested here in the institutions that shape political competition for the control of states (so non-state spaces are out of consideration for the moment), as well as the institutions that constrain the winners of such competition: the “varieties of political competition” for short. What we want to know are the “parameters” that describe such competition. What distinctions are useful for thinking about these varieties? A sketch of a theory of political competition might look at the following questions, only some of which overlap with the traditional concerns of democratic theory:

1.  As in the previous post, we might want to know whether the selection of those who control the state is regulated by more or less “self-enforcing” norms or not; periods where people attain power primarily by force (coups, revolutions, etc) seem to be substantially different than periods where people attain power in a normatively regulated way. Whether norms are self-enforcing depends on the commitments and resources of the actors subject to them, not on the norms themselves, since no third parties outside the regime exist to enforce them by definition (in other words, constitutions are mere pieces of parchment unless everyone can credibly commit not to defect). It would then be useful to know whether we can say anything general about the conditions that make some selection norms (hereditary, competitive, etc.) self-enforcing, not just competitive electoral selection norms.
2. We might also want to know which form the norm of leadership selection takes: whether the norm is to select people who fit a certain definite description (as in monarchies, where the next ruler is the heir of the current ruler), or to select people whose names are produced by some random process (lottery), or who meet a certain explicit standard (“meritocracy”), or, more commonly, who can show sufficient evidence of support within a group of “selectors” (election, acclamation, negotiation within the Politburo, etc.). (Mixtures of all of these selection norms are possible, especially when the state contains more than one center of power; in which case we might want to know something about the relative “powers” of these centers of power). Which selection norm is in force seems to have some effect on how long a leader is in power; selection norms that require a leader to show “evidence of support” appear to make it harder for leaders to keep control of states than selection norms that do not. It might also have an impact on the quality of political leaders (ungated), or on their social background. 
3. We might wish to know the size of the group whose support must be mustered when selection is regulated by “evidence of support” or "random" norms, as well as the kinds of barriers to entry into this group. This is in part because when contenders for power must show support from large groups (say, 4-5 times Dunbar’s number, or around 600 people, the size of the typical Central Committee of a communist party), elective institutions almost invariably develop; usually the only way to show that you have the support of 100,000 people is to count them. Moreover, small selector groups almost always indicate highly hierarchical social structures, require different sorts of “payment” by contenders hoping to secure support, and are easier to “cartelize” (preventing contenders from expanding the boundaries of the group by escalating political competition outwards).
4. We might wish to know the sort of “industrial organization” prevalent in the political arena (by analogy with this). For example, in many countries where control of the state is allocated to those who can show support from large numbers of adult citizens via elections, the political arena is typically organized around a few large multipurpose “firms” (parties) who are the main competitors for control, along with a large number of small special purpose groups (think-tanks, civil society groups, PACs, etc). Though the formal barriers to entry into this arena are low, the structural barriers are large (creating a party capable of appealing to large numbers of people takes real economic and symbolic resources), so that political competition operates in practice in an “oligopolic” manner. In other countries, political competition is fully monopolized by a single multipurpose “firm;” in yet others there is a dominant political firm but many special-purpose groups that cannot directly compete for power. Moreover, competition between the main “firms” in the political arena can be more or less regulated by norms that limit the permissible methods of competition. I know there is a well-developed theory of party systems for democracies, but it is not integrated with a theory of politico-industrial organization in other political systems; and we might want to put all of this in a single framework if we are interested in the history of the varieties of political competition.

Simplifying a bit, you might end up with a typology of varieties of political competition like this:

The table could be extended further; but it might get a bit too technical, and I’m not sure how illuminating it would be (more in part 2 with actual graphs and less theory, assuming part 2 ever arrives). The interesting questions would then be about which forms of politico-industrial organization can stably coexist with particular selection norms, and which of them actually produce good consequences, if any; but it might take me a while to get there, if ever.

A Very Short Quantitative History of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Other Political Regimes, Part I

(Part I of probably two).

Readers will have to forgive me, but I find dataset blogging addictive. One can use historical datasets to tell stories, not just to test models, yet outside economic history one hardly finds much quantitative history, much less quantitative political history, out there. Nevertheless, the Polity IV dataset I described in the previous post, with its long-run coverage and wealth of information about patterns of political authority at a global level, lends itself to the sort of quantitative history of political regimes I have in mind.  Though this sort of history is not always advisable, it provides a powerful antidote to the most common failings of what passes now for the history of democracy and other political regimes: excessive Eurocentrism, and annoying tendencies towards either Whig triumphalism or Hegelian determinism. (An exception here is Adam Przeworski’s excellent book Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government, whose self-consciously global perspective and use of long-run quantitative data makes it one of the most eye-opening books I’ve read on democracy and its history). My hope is that a little bit of quantitative history can mitigate some of the nonsense people seem to believe about democracy; and since I’ll soon start teaching my “Dictatorships and Revolutions” course again (more on this in a different post), I thought I’d try to use the Polity data to graphically chart the evolution of different patterns of political authority over the last couple of centuries for the benefit of students and perhaps others.

A couple of methodological points before starting. First, though the Polity IV data is pretty substantial, going back to 1800 in some cases, it does not track every single polity within that period. The focus is on nation-states, and indeed nation-states that have survived up to the present; lots of states that did not survive to the present time (because they were annexed by other states or disappeared through other processes) are not included, though some historical polities are (Prussia, Bavaria, Wuerttemburg, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Sardinia, the Papal States, Modena, Parma, Tuscany, a few others). Colonial dependencies of these independent states are not coded; the dataset codes only the regime at the imperial center (though we can correct for this bias to some extent, as we shall see). Moreover, some of the polities that are included in the dataset from 1800 onwards (Austria and Turkey, for example) have experienced so much change (from Austro-Hungarian empire to Austria, and from Ottoman empire to modern Turkey) that one doubts the wisdom of having a single time series for them (rather than, for example, a time-series for the Austro-Hungarian empire and another for Austria). And Polity does not collect information about “micronations” (less than 500,000 inhabitants), which means that its coverage of Oceania (Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia) is spotty at best. Finally, it is also worth noting that in the long span of time covered by the dataset many areas of the world, some of them incorporating substantial populations, were effectively stateless: James C. Scott’s “Zomia” in Southeast Asia is one of these regions, but every continent has had (and sometimes continues to have) large non-state spaces. Statelessness does not mean that people live without political authority, but authority is far more fluid (and often has different implications) when exit is relatively easy, as it has historically been in stateless areas, than when exit is more difficult, as it has often been in state zones.

Second, as I was saying in the previous post, the dataset does not track every feature of political regimes that might be of interest. It purports to measure only three general concepts: the mechanisms of executive recruitment in states (how leaders come to hold power over a central state apparatus), the forms of political competition (how groups contend for control over a central state apparatus), and the degree of executive restraint (how much the power of the political leaders at the centre is limited: political discipline). Though all three measures are very highly correlated (above .99), I strongly suspect that while executive recruitment and political competition do measure fundamental if related aspects of the political regime, executive restraint is best understood as a function of the other two, plus temporary changes in the configuration of political forces that are not part of the political regime properly speaking. In other words, to the extent that “executive restraint” is not simply picking up paper constraints (whether the constitution says this or that about a political leader), it must be picking up the ways in which the groups that play a role in political competition and selection are able to sanction the main government leaders in the state. So in what follows I will mostly ignore the measure of executive restraint and focus on executive recruitment (this post) and political competition (in part II).

Let’s start with the mechanisms of executive recruitment. In the Polity classificatory scheme, leaders can come to power in two basic ways: through unregulated political activity (your classic coup d’etat, for example) or through some norm-regulated process (like hereditary succession, competitive election, etc.). Norm-regulated processes can in turn be divided into those where political leadership is allocated, at least in principle, on the basis of “ascriptive” characteristics (like what family you were born into), and those where political leadership is allocated by explicit selection within a particular group. (No modern polity allocates political leadership by lottery, unlike many ancient ones; this may be a modern mistake). Finally, selection can occur through relatively open competition within a relatively large group (election, though not necessarily universal suffrage election), or through informal processes within small groups ("designation;" e.g., like the process of selecting the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). These three dimensions of political competition lead to a seven-fold set of categories: pure ascriptive (absolute hereditary monarchies without powerful prime ministers); ascriptive plus small-elite selection (absolute monarchies with powerful prime ministers, for example); ascriptive plus large-elite selection (powerful monarchs confronting powerful elected prime ministers, for example); pure small-elite selection (single party regimes, for example); pure large-group selection (competitive electoral regimes); small group plus large-group selection (what polity calls “transitional” or “restricted” election regimes, though they are often not very transitional at all but merely regimes where small elites cannot select the leadership without some form of large-scale electoral competition, even if unfair); and self-selection regimes (unregulated selection). Polity also has a confusing “executive-guided transition” category that I don’t much like, but basically indicates a period of transition from a self-selection regime to a norm-regulated selection regime. (In fact, for most purposes it can be replaced by the self-selection category, since it does not actually indicate a change in executive selection mechanisms and relies on uncertain analyses of leadership intentions). So what do we see when we look at the evolution of political authority through this lens?

Fig. 1

Vertical lines and shaded areas indicate, from left to right, the First World War, the beginning of the great depression, the Second World War, the beginning of African decolonization, and the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet empire. Black/grey areas at the bottom of the graph indicate the number of countries falling into Polity’s three “transitional” categories: regime transition, anarchy, and foreign occupation. You must also imagine much of the white space in the graph – representing lots of colonial possessions – to be colored dark red and green, since rule over colonial possessions was exercised through limited elite and ascriptive selection regimes, even if regimes at the imperial center were different.

A few things are worth noting. First, there is a slow but steady trend towards more large-group selection regimes – relatively competitive elections of all types, even if mixed with small-elite selection (as in competitive autocracies). These elections are not always fair [update: and suffrage is not always universal or even close to universal], but by my count nearly 70% of all regimes in 2010 involved some form of meaningful competition for executive power within large electorates, while only 30% or so did in 1900:

Fig. 2

Large-group competitive selection is now the norm, not the exception, a change that happened over the course of a century but begins in the 19^th century. But though the overall trend is clear, the proportion of large-group competitive selection regimes fluctuates quite a bit, apparently in response to major political events: the two world wars (one can identify them just by looking at the spikes in regime collapses), the beginning of decolonization, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the great depression barely rates a blip – it hardly affects the trends in executive recruitment patterns. And the current trend towards more large-group selection regimes starts in the mid 1970s (the oil shocks? The exhaustion of the appeal of single-party regimes?), though it appears to accelerate by 1989. Oddly, the 70s are also the great age of coups (“self-selection” regimes – lots of these emerged with decolonization) as well as the apogee of limited-elite selection regimes (single-party regimes, especially). The data thus seem to point to a future where most regimes recruit their leaders through electoral competition (not necessarily fair!) appealing to large groups, but there is still a substantial minority of ascriptive recruitment regimes (monarchies, basically) and limited-elite selection regimes; it’s as if the only long-term stable equilibria are either competitive elections or full-blown monarchies.

Moreover, the phenomenon is pretty much global: competitive regimes with elections that appeal to large electorates are now found in every continent:

Fig. 3

(Includes both competitive electoral regimes and competitive autocracies [mixed large group/small group selection]; the picture is not substantially different with only full competitive electoral regimes included). But it was never just a European phenomenon: competitive regimes (even if not always very stable and electorally fair) are first of all an American phenomenon (and I don’t mean North American). Most large-group electoral selection regimes in the 19^th century were in the Americas (the USA, Canada, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala), though we even find some in Africa (Liberia for a time, which of course was in part an American import). Genuine electoral competition for power with an appeal to large electorates is a New World invention, but not a specifically North American one, even if the North American version of the experiment proved relatively more stable than many of the South and Central American versions. To be sure, the fact that a regime is competitive insofar as executive recruitment requires an appeal to a large electorate does not mean that it is a democracy in the full sense of the term (however you want to define it); many of these competitive regimes included important restrictions on suffrage (slaves and women needed not apply), and elections were not always fair or fully free. But all of the regimes in figure 3 are fundamentally different in kind, at least with respect to the mechanism of executive selection, from regimes where leaders are selected either by ascription or by informal competition within a small elite.

Here’s a more fine-grained picture of the distribution of such regimes since 1950:

Fig. 4. Competitive regimes per region.

(As I mentioned earlier, coverage of Oceania is pretty sparse in the dataset, so you might as well ignore the Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia cells). As we can see, these regimes are now common basically everywhere; the only laggards are Central and Western Asia, where large-group selection competitive regimes (let's not speak of democracies, however) are still less than 50% of the total.

Non-electoral regimes – monarchies, single-party regimes, etc. are now almost exclusively found in Asia and Africa, though they used to be pretty evenly distributed throughout the world:

Fig. 5

Interestingly, the only real shocks to the distribution of these regimes seem to have been decolonization in the 1960s and the end of the Cold War in 1989. It is as if new countries generally end up with limited selection or unregulated recruitment regimes, and it takes a while for them to move either toward large-group selection or full monarchy. 

We can also look at this history in combination with the history of economic development. Using data from the Penn World Tables (caveat: some countries have no income data, and what data exists only goes back to 1950 for most countries), we can see that the rise in competitive selection regimes is visible in every income quantile except the highest:

Fig. 6

The proportion of competitive regimes in the richest quantile seems to be declining over time (and stabilizing in the third quantile) at about 80% of all regimes, as stable oil monarchies and other limited-elite selection groups rise to the top of the income distribution. As Przeworski has argued, there seem to be diminishing returns to conflict over executive selection mechanisms in rich countries, so all regimes should be relatively stable at high levels of income per capita. To be sure, full electorally competitive regimes (with “free and fair” elections) are less common in poorer countries, but even if we restrict ourselves to these regimes, we get basically the same picture:

Fig. 7

We can actually investigate this further by looking at the “transition matrix” of regimes over this period of time per income quantile. We basically look at what the regime is like at time t, and then what it is like at time t+1, and make a matrix, where each cell represents the percentage (number) of cases over the period in question where a mechanism of political selection in the rows changed to one in the columns (so the diagonal represents stability):

(Click here for a full spreadsheet version). Here we see that mechanisms of executive recruitment in countries in the poorest quantile remained stable about 90% of the years in question (i.e., on average they switched to another selection mechanism about once every ten years); by contrast, at the richest quantile, only self-selection regimes were stable less than 95% of the time. Competitive electoral regimes in the richest quantile were stable basically 100% of the time; but all other regime categories were also stable, and hereditary monarchy was basically just as stable as democracy at this level of income (more than 99% of the time). Even state breakdown appears stable in the richest quantile; those puzzling 13 years of stable state breakdown in the second table represent Lebanon, which appears to have maintained a relatively large income per capita during the years of civil war (though note economic data is likely to have been spotty and unreliable during that time, so take that factoid with a large scoop of salt).

Moreover, rich countries were likely to transition to competitive regimes if they transitioned at all; and the regimes most likely to transition where the self-selection regimes, whereas in the poorest quantile we find transitions to a wider variety of other regimes.

So where does that leave us? More in part II (looking at the forms of political competition over this period), but basically I think what we see is the political manifestation of the long process of global economic change since 1800 (the industrial era). We start with ascriptive selection and limited elite selection regimes everywhere in the world (or at least in zones of state power), but economic change slowly alters the basis of political power in them (more so in certain kinds of economies than others). These changes render norms of political selection unstable, and more particularly they make it possible for elites (new and old) to “defect” from previous norms of selection by appealing to larger groups in the selection process (this, generally, means elections). And global political shocks (the world wars, the breakdown of empires) can push the process in particular directions at least for a time – e.g., towards single party regimes in the wake of WWII and decolonization, or towards electorally competitive regimes after 1989. But after countries reach a certain level of income, political competition over executive recruitment is less useful; so all regimes eventually stabilize. 

Code necessary for replicating the graphs in this post, plus further graphs and ideas for analysis, in my repository here. (Still pretty rough, though). You will need to download the Polity IV and Penn World Table datasets directly.

[Update 21/2/2010: added a few small clarificatory remarks about how comeptitive elctoral regimes are not necessarily democratic in the full sense of the term]