What do people think of democracy around the world? And does it matter?

(Warning: A long and rambling graph-heavy post on public opinion by someone who has never worked with public opinion data before, and who is in addition very skeptical about the importance of public opinion for large-scale institutional outcomes. Part of this occasional series).

I’ve been playing around with the data from the latest wave of the World Values Survey, trying to figure out what people think of “democracy” in these large-scale surveys, and whether it is related to any large-scale institutional features of political systems. And I must say, I find public opinion about democracy quite puzzling.

It’s not that people don’t like democracy. On the contrary, public opinion surveys like the World Values Survey or the various regional “Barometer” polls (Latinobarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, Afrobarometer) tend to consistently find that people really like the idea of democracy; asking about democracy is like asking about motherhood. Consider the figure below, which plots the range of responses in the sixty countries surveyed by the WVS at various times between 2011 and 2014 to a question asking about people’s opinion of “having a democratic political system”:

In most of these countries (including many countries most people would classify as “authoritarian”), more than 75% of the population says that having a democratic system is a “very good” or a “fairly good” idea, while only small minorities claim democracy is a “very bad” or a “fairly bad” idea. In the modal country, in other words, large majorities are “pro-democracy” in some abstract sense. Nevertheless, these same majorities are not always very discriminating about what they consider “good” political systems. In some countries, large numbers of people agree both with the idea that democracy is a good form of government, and that having the army rule, or having a strong leader “that does not bother with parliament and elections” is also a good thing.

The figure below compares answers to the question of whether respondents consider “having a democratic system” a good idea with their answers to questions about other modes of political decisionmaking. It is ordered according to whether the pattern of responses in a country is similar to that found in New Zealand (the first country at the top left). New Zealand is a good reference country because (besides the fact that I live there) the pattern of belief in NZ is consistently “pro-democracy”: democracy is considered to be good by large majorities, while army rule, expert rule, and strong leader rule are not so considered, though expert rule is not altogether discounted.[1] Many countries display a similar pattern of responses (not just “Western” countries; see, e.g., Thailand, where democracy is greatly preferred to army rule or expert rule, even if a substantial minority does evaluate these alternatives positively, reflecting Thailand’s persistent political conflicts), but in others views are more confusing. For example, majorities of people in India, Mexico, and Egypt seem to think all political systems are a great idea; army rule, democracy, expert rule, it’s all good.[2]

Indeed, about 36% of all respondents in India give positive evaluations (answers of “very good” or “fairly good”) to all hypothetical political systems, while less than 1% of respondents are what we might call “principled democrats,” evaluating democracy positively while negatively assessing the remaining options, as we can see in the figure below.[3] By contrast, around 47% of respondents of respondents in Sweden are “principled democrats,” while only around 4% are what we might call “enthusiasts about everything.” (I’m not sure why people in India seem to be so enthusiastic about all the options here; perhaps this is some weird survey artifact. Readers from India might help me out here?).

The WVS also asks a number of questions about whether people consider various things “essential” to democracy, ranging from classic liberal ideas (free elections, equality under the law, civil rights) to economic and social outcomes (income equality, unemployment help, progressive taxation), to “antiliberal” ideas (“religious authorities interpret the laws,” “army takes over if the government is incompetent”). And though many people all over the world tend to agree that elections and other liberal freedoms are essential to democracy, there are clear differences in public opinion about what other things they also consider essential. The figure below is again arranged with New Zealand at the top, followed by those countries whose pattern of responses is most similar to New Zealand:

Public opinion about democracy in the countries at the top of the figure is recognizably “liberal”: free elections, women’s rights, and civil rights are seen as pretty important to democracy by large numbers of people, while economic equality and social security are seen as less important, and “antiliberal” ideas receive little support (though not zero support! One gets the impression that some respondents are just trolling the interviewers, but who knows; survey respondents are under no obligation to be consistent). By comparison, public opinion about democracy in Russia or Kazakhstan (and in most of the post-Communist countries in the sample) tends to emphasize economic equality and social security more (though civil rights and free elections remain important), while in Yemen or Pakistan just about everything in the list is seen as essential to democracy (including antiliberal ideas), and in Bahrain just about everything is seen as unimportant (another puzzling pattern!).

Aggregate public opinion conceals much variation among individual responses, of course. We might think of individual responses as divided into different types, depending on how much they emphasize different ideas – liberal, egalitarian, and antiliberal – relative to some baseline when answering questions about what ideas they think are “essential” to democracy.[4] In particular, we can distinguish between relative liberal democrats (people who consider free elections and individual rights more important than the average respondent in all countries, while de-emphasizing egalitarian and antiliberal ideas), relative social democrats (people who associate both liberal and “economic” ideas with democracy), relative egalitarian democrats (people who associate democracy primarily with “economic” ideas), antiliberals (people who associate democracy primarily with anti-liberal ideas, like “the army takes over when the government is incompetent”), antiegalitarians (people who associate democracy with everything except economic equality), enthusiasts (people who associate democracy with everything), and refusers (people who do not think any of the options on offer in the survey is especially essential). The figure below is ordered according to the percentage of respondents who express relatively liberal and liberal egalitarian views of democracy:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, large numbers of people in “Western” countries – Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, etc. – express views of democracy that are “liberal” or “liberal egalitarian” (relative to the world average), though proportions of “principled” liberals and “egalitarian” liberals vary (Germany contains a very large number of “egalitarian” liberals; New Zealand and the United States do not). Overall, however, pure liberal views are relatively uncommon; indeed, in some countries (Bahrain, South Africa) there are basically no detectable relative liberals (egalitarian or otherwise), while in many countries (e.g, Qatar, Iraq) large numbers of respondents emphasize both economic equality and anti-liberal ideas as essential components of democracy. This is not to say that in these societies nobody cares about free elections or civil rights; but many people there appear to see no contradiction between thinking that free elections and civl rights are important to democracy (even if not the most essential thing), and thinking that democracy also involves (perhaps more essentially) having a role for religious authorities in politics, or for the army when the elected government appears to fail.

Some variation is to be expected given that people in different countries may use different baselines when asked to rank ideas along a 1-10 scale (what a “ten” means in Sweden may not be the same as what it means in Bahrain, on average), but still, the differences are striking, and suggestive of “cultural” clustering among conceptions of democracy. And indeed, using a simple graph representation of the similarities between patterns of responses among countries,[5] and a community discovery algorithm, we find between 3 and 7 clusters (depending on the algorithm used), one of which typically corresponds to the “Western” countries plus Japan and South Korea, and another to the Post-socialist world (Soviet countries plus China plus a few others). For example, the figure below displays five clusters, arranged by color according to the average similarity of the conception of democracy of countries in the cluster to New Zealand; the labels in the legend show a representative country in the cluster.

The countries in the dark blue group (labeled “New Zealand”) show “liberal” patterns of responses, and contain most of the “Western” democracies, plus Japan, South Korea, and Uruguay. The countries in the orange (“Russia”) group contain most of the post-socialist countries, plus a few others (Egypt, Malaysia). Countries in light blue comprise an “Iberoamerican” cluster (Spain plus Argentina and Chile) that is pretty similar to the “Western Europe” cluster; countries in dark red are pretty similar to the post-socialist countries, though they tend to have more “illiberal” conceptions of democracy. One could easily tell a story here about how socialization in formerly communist countries tended to associate democracy with the egalitarian values of the socialist project, which, though denied in practice in some ways, seem to have been accepted by the vast majority of the population. And a contrasting story could be told about the “Western” conception of democracy, which more strictly separates egalitarian “outcomes” from democracy as such. I am less sure about the other, more illiberal clusters; I suppose one could tell a story about the importance of “religious authority” in some of them, but it certainly would not fit all countries. Perhaps the most obvious feature of the “Cyprus” (light yellow) and “Peru” (dark red) clusters is that they seem to gather many the countries of what was formerly called the “third world,” which suggests a better division into “first,” “second,” and “third” world conceptions of democracy. These conceptions, though not wholly distinct, do suggest that people’s views of democracy were shaped in some indirect way by both development patterns and the great ideological conflicts of the 20th century. People expect different (and sometimes contradictory) things of democracy in different parts of the world; and these expectations appear to have been partly shaped by the institutional history of their societies.

Nevertheless, there is little direct correlation between public opinion about democracy (“democratic values,” if you will) and “actual” measures of democracy (as devised by political scientists). Ronald Inglehart (one of the principal investigators for the WVS) has argued that the number of people who “like” democracy or find it important for their country is essentially uncorrelated with standard measures of democracy (he uses Freedom House, but the point holds for other measures, like Polity IV). Talk is cheap, and “liking” democracy has little to do with “having” a standardly democratic political system. Instead, he suggests, democracy is associated with what he and his collaborators call “post-materialist” values.

Inglehart is certainly right about the lack of correlation between “liking” democracy (or even considering it important) and standard measures of democracy (as we can see below); but though the measures of post-materialism included with the WVS do show some correlation with standard measures of democracy, this is not always very high. The percentage of people who give “liberal” answers to questions about the essential characteristics of democracy (relative to the world average) displays a higher correlation with “standard” measures of democracy than almost anything else, including “post-materialist” values:

I do not think this says much about whether a certain combination of views about democracy is needed to produce or sustain democracy; more likely, the process of socialization in countries with “consolidated” liberal democratic institutions, like New Zealand, more clearly differentiates “democracy” from other alternatives, and more clearly associates it with a specific constellation of institutions, than elsewhere, where democracy might be a bit of an empty signifier, ready to be filled with whatever content political entrepreneurs manage to pour into it. In other words, I find it more plausible that liberal democratic institutions tend to produce liberal democrats than the reverse. I also do not find Inglehart et al.’s argument for the importance of post-materialist values to the long-run stability of democracy convincing; though there is certainly a correlation between these post-materialism indexes and some measures of democracy (not all), some careful statistical work suggests the relationship goes away when using other measures of democracy and accounting for reverse causation (from institutions to values). The sorts of aspirational values that get expressed in surveys (which may not be ultimately reflective of deep commitments to defend or promote certain institutions) seem more likely to be shaped by institutions than the other way around; but perhaps that is only my prejudices speaking.

One piece of evidence for this “primacy of institutions” thesis, it seems to me, is the general lack of correlation between responses to questions about the actual degree of democracy in a respondent’s country and standard measures of democracy. “Expert” and “popular” assessments of democracy often diverge radically, suggesting that what people come to consider “democratic” is shaped by prevailing regimes more than the other way around:

Again, these differences are not altogether surprising; different people will answer “rating” questions like these from different baselines, and their responses may anyway be affected by such factors as how well they think the country is doing, what political events are in the news, and perhaps even their mood or the weather at the time of the interview. Someone with more time and training than me could probably figure out how to calibrate these responses better. Yet there are still some interesting patterns worth noticing. For example, there seems to be something of a “sour grapes” effect: in some countries where people rate the level of democracy lower, they also tend to give lower average answers to the question of how important it is that their country be ruled democratically. Moreover answers about more specific aspects of political life, such as the quality of elections, tend to be reasonably well correlated with standard measures of democracy; people in Rwanda, for example, are surprisingly upbeat when they answer the question of how democratically they think their country is ruled (perhaps due to the successes of Rwandan economic development under Kagame), but (on the aggregate at least) they have fewer illusions about their electoral process, which they accurately judge is hardly a perfect model of fairness. (The one obvious outlier is Singapore, where people express great confidence in the freedom and fairness of their elections while being given a low FH/Polity2 score).

The specific answers to questions about elections are interesting in themselves (it’s too bad it was only asked in 40 out of the 60 countries in this wave of the WVS). The figure below is arranged from “freest” to “least free” (by the total Freedom House score), starting with Australia and Chile:

Countries at the very top display high levels of trust in elections: most people think votes are counted fairly, election officials are fair, voters are given a genuine choice at the polls, opposition politicians are not prevented from running, there’s little violence at the polls, and media coverage is reasonably unbiased. (The Netherlands and Germany are model countries here; people there really trust in their electoral process!). As we go down the list, however, we find countries where trust in the voting process is mingled with distrust at the media and the rich (e.g., Taiwan and Brazil), and eventually countries where opinion is highly polarized (e.g., Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Egypt, or Nigeria, where significant numbers think votes are counted fairly and significant numbers think they aren’t). Only in a few countries do we find something like a generalized distrust of the electoral process by majorities of those surveyed; more usually, different groups in the population fiercely disagree about the fairness of the electoral process (as in Venezuela today – unfortunately not included in this WVS wave).This is one more reason to think that elections do not necessarily “legitimate” governments; if half your population strongly doubts their fairness, and the other half strongly supports it, the election is going to be experienced quite differently by each side.

The nine items on elections in the survey measure, as far as I can tell, four dimensions of the electoral process: fairness of the election itself (electoral officials are fair, votes are counted fairly, voters are threatened with violence at the polls); fairness of the media (TV news coverage, journalists); extent of choice (voters are offered a genuine choice, opposition politicians are prevented from running); and perceptions of problematic money in politics (voters are bribed, rich people buy elections). We can thus use an index of perceptions of the fairness of each of these components of the electoral process to construct a measure of polarization. The figure below is thus arranged according to one such measure, from the most polarized society (Zimbabwe, where the fairness of every component of the electoral process appears to be fiercely disputed, with approximately equal numbers of people trusting and distrusting each of them) to the least polarized (Germany, where there seems to be great consensus that every component of the electoral process is fair):

Perhaps the most striking thing we can observe in this graph is how much people distrust the media’s political role in most societies; almost everywhere the media component has the largest number of people expression reservations about its fairness during elections. And people in many societies generally considered to be democratic (e.g, Peru, Argentina, South Africa) express much distrust of almost every component of the electoral process; in Nigeria there almost seems to be a general consensus that everything about the electoral process is unfair. Yet there is a strong correlation between the degree to which perceptions of election day fairness are polarized and the degree to which the country has been democratic, by conventional measures; we might say that the mark of a consolidated democracy (by conventional measures) is simply that people in general agree that election day is “fair,” regardless of other disagreements:

Indeed, the more agreement there is on election day fairness, the higher people rate the degree of democracy in their country:

If I may speculate here, elections only seem to legitimate governments – ensuring some degree of institutional stability – when people already agree that they are fair. They do not have any magic “legitimating” powers if people do not already agree on their fairness; and whether people agree on the fairness of elections is only in part a function of their objective fairness. Deep conflicts in society may “spill over” to the fairness of elections.

All code for the figures in this post is available in this GitHub repository. You will also need the World Values Survey data file (sixth wave, 2011-2014), and the latest data from Freedom House (helpfully converted into an R-friendly CSV file by Jay Ulfelder here).

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1. For the details of how the measure of similarity was calculated, take a look at the code for this post. Essentially, I created a matrix of the proportions of the population giving each answer in each country, and used a Gower distance measure to calculate which countries were similar to which. ↩
2. Egyptians weren’t asked about army rule in 2013. Perhaps the question was regarded as too politically sensitive in the circumstances. ↩
3. The figure excludes Egypt, Morocco, and Qatar, where some of these questions weren’t asked. There’s a fair amount of non-response to these questions in many countries; that’s the reason why the bars in the figure don’t go all the way to the right hand side. ↩
4. This can be done in different ways, but below I simply categorize a response as emphasizing one of these ideas if it scores higher than the world average for the relevant items. More precisely, I combine the scores for the three items measuring each of the main ideas, and categorize a response as emphasizing that idea if it this number is larger than average across all countries. “Liberal” ideas are measured by the questions asking about how essential women’s rights, free elections, and civil rights are to democracy; “egalitarian” ideas are measured by the questions asking about how essential income equality, state provision of unemployment benefits, and taxation of the rich and subsidies to the poor are to democracy; and “antiliberal” ideas are measured by the questions asking about about how essential obedience to the state, the army taking over if the government is incompetent, and a role for religious authorities interpreting the laws are to democracy. All of these are, of course, highly imperfect as measures of these ideas; but this is in the nature of large-scale survey research. ↩
5. A weighted undirected graph where edge strength is the measure of similarity between any two countries in their response patterns to all of the nine questions concerning the essential characteristics of democracy. See the code for this post for more details on its construction. ↩

Political Instability at a Glance

(A graph-heavy post on the post-WWII history of political instability.)

(Update 1/24/2014: Thanks to Profs. Gleditsch, Goemans, and Chiozza for allowing me to use the beta version of Archigos, updated with leader information to the end of 2014)

Despite its ubiquity in everyday discourse, I find the concept of "political instability" exasperatingly vague, encompassing everything from polarized electorates to coups to civil war. Nevertheless, one can still understand most of the phenomena that fall under that rubric as the sorts of events that happen when the norms supposedly regulating political competition fail to be "recognized" as relevant or worth following by sufficiently powerful groups of people. Very wide-ranging normative breakdowns are revolutions and civil wars (Jack Goldstone once noted that the great revolutions were characterized by "fractal" breakdowns of norms regulating conduct at all levels); but coups, other forms of "irregular" leader exit, spikes of protest, and transitional situations can be understood as moments where the norms that are supposed to channel and limit the competition for power break down, either because sufficiently powerful groups disagree about what the relevant norms are, or because they want to change them, or because they can disregard them with impunity.

The identification of political instability events is unavoidably fraught, since what counts as the relevant norm governing political competition, and whether the norm has actually been violated, disregarded, or otherwise violently reinterpreted, will often be disputed. Sometimes it will simply be impossible to tell whether some particular event -- e.g, the recent happenings in Lesotho or the Gambia -- counts as a coup, or whether the fall of some leader is in accordance with "recognized" norms of political competition; indeed, I take it that sometimes there is simply no fact of the matter, though perhaps the very existence of disagreement about the nature of the event is itself significant as an indicator of instability. And of course many events that signal the weakness of norms regulating political competition -- aborted coup attempts, thwarted palace conspiracies -- simply never see the light of day. Nevertheless, it is still possible to get a glimpse of the broad patterns of political instability during the post WWII era.

Here's one way of doing it, which produces lovely "spectral lines" of macropolitical instability. The picture below graphs five forms of instability, per country: the estimated level of democracy and thus regime change, for the period 1946-2012 (from the Unified Democracy Scores by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton); successful and unsuccessful overt coup attempts for the period 1950-2014 (vertical red and blue lines, respectively, from the data gathered by Powell and Thyne, supplemented before 1950 with data for successful and attempted coups from Marshall and Marshall); irregular leader exits (dotted black lines, sometimes coinciding, sometimes not, with the coup data from Powell and Thyne, and including everything from assassinations to revolutionary overthrow that occurs outside whatever prima facie normative framework of political competition holds in the particular country), from the period 1946-2014 (from the beta version of the Archigosdataset by Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza - thanks for prof. Gleditsch for sharing a copy!); shaded colored areas track armed conflict episodes from 1946 to 2013 (from the UCDP/PRIO dataset); and periods of "interruption," "interregnum," or "transition" (light grey shaded areas; basically, foreign occupation, anarchy, political breakdown or explicitly transitional governments) from the polity dataset, in the 1946 to 2013 period. The figure is arranged regionally, by continent: African countries first, then American countries, then Asian, and so on, so that countries in geographical proximity to one another appear close together in the picture:

Coups, wars, irregular leadership transitions, changes in democracy, and periods of "interruption" are distinct phenomena, but they all indicate historical moments where the norms regulating "macropolitical" competition are fluid: where powerful parties don't agree about the definition of the state, the procedures for transferring power, etc. The graph is deliberately crowded -- it is meant to produce an overall glimpse of the "spectrum" of instability in the postwar history of each country, not a detailed history of each country -- yet some events are easily identifiable: major interstate wars (in green: the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, the Yugoslav wars); colonial liberation struggles (in red, such as the struggle for independence in Zimbabwe); the interminable series of conflicts of the Burmese state against its outlying "Zomian" minorities; the endless series of coups and countercoups in Argentina starting with Peron's first presidency in 1946; the coup against Allende in Chile in 1973; the disintegration of the Afghan state since the 80s; the transition to democracy in Spain; and so on. Each country has its own distinctive pattern of macropolitical instability, though in general wherever a country has experienced these sorts of events they have tended to "cluster" in time; macropolitical instability is rarely continuous over long stretches. Similar events also have a tendency to happen in similarly-situated countries, leading to distinct regional patterns:

At this level of aggregation we can see that South American countries have suffered more from coups than from armed conflict, yet coups and irregular leader exits have declined in frequency over the last three decades; that South and South-East Asian states (Myanmar, India, Vietnam, Laos, etc.) have suffered much more from armed conflict of all kinds than from coups; how states in Western Africa and Eastern Asia (basically, the Middle East) have seen a simultaneous decline in coups and an increase in armed conflict of all kinds. (Distinct events with regional implications are also visible - e.g., the central American wars of the 1980s). It is worth noting that these patterns coexist with an increase in measured levels of democracy in most regions of the world since the middle of the 1980s. (The horizontal red line in each picture represents a score of zero in the UDS data, which can be interpreted as the dividing line between democracy and autocracy; by that criterion, in a majority of regions of the world a majority of countries are democratic today, though in some cases barely so).

I suspect that some of these patterns are basically attributable to the timing of consolidation of post-colonial states. For example, if we could extend these pictures back in time we would see many more internal and even some external conflicts in Latin America, as states were consolidated after independence from Spain; much of the internal conflict we see in places like India or Myanmar against groups on their borderlands can be understood as state-consolidation conflict - conflict over who is subject to state power, and to what degree. But as states consolidate, struggles over the definition of the state may give way to struggles over the norms of political competition (coups and irregular leader exits); and these in turn can eventually either lead either to "stability" (relative consensus on the norms of political competition, or at least the victory of one faction or person over the rest, as in long-term personal dictatorships, leading to a decline in in coups and other forms of irregular leader exit) or state disintegration (renewed internal conflict). Consider a picture at an even higher level of aggregation, by continent:

One interpretation of this figure might go like this: the anticolonial struggles of African countries give way by the 70s to a fluid period of coups and countercoups as various powerful groups struggled to define the norms of political competition for control of the new states, often with the intervention of major powers during the Cold War. Yet instead of leading to the eventual victory of some particular norm of political competition, coups and countercoups eventually escalated into renewed conflicts over the very definition of the state -- "internal" wars of various kinds -- since the post-colonial state was a pretty recent and fragile creation to begin with. By contrast, in the Americas, the tendency has been for norms of "democratic" political competition to become entrenched in the context of relatively consolidated states; while the military may still intervene in politics, they find it harder to do so in an overt way. Though there are many reasons for this (including, e.g., changes in the foreign policy of the US) one important factor seems to have been the lessening of radical ideological conflict, which means deviations from norms of democratic competition are more costly and have less point. In fact, the risk of military intervention in politics in Latin America appears to remain highest precisely where ideological conflict over the nature of the state is fiercest, as in Venezuela and Ecuador. The Asian pattern in turn is less about the consolidation of new states than about border adjustment after the colonial period and the bringing of borderlands under central state control, rather than about the consolidation of new states; while the European post-war pattern mostly involves the late transitions to democracy of Southern Europe and separatist conflicts of varying intensity - all legacies of the wars of the first half of the 20th century, which of course are not visualized here.

For completeness, here are the political instability spectral lines of the world:

This is not especially informative (though it does show the trend away from interstate to intrastate conflict, and the long-run transition to norms of democratic political competition around the world), but I find it strangely beautiful.

Instead of aggregating these pictures of political instability, we can disaggregate them and expand them into "geological" pictures of the historical strata of political change. Here's one way of using the enormous amount of information available in these datasets to auto-generate political histories, using the example of Argentina. For the picture immediately below, start at the top, at the end of 2014; as we scroll down (the image is in its natural element online, with its endless scrolling; but one can imagine also a slowly unrolling codex) we move deeper into the country's history. The first thing we encounter is the name of the serving president as of the end of 2014, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner; the name is grayed out - "still in office as of 2014;" leaders who died in office, retired without serving their full term, or were removed by irregular means (e.g., by a coup) are in darker font, to make them stand out (the darker, the more irregular). Each leader's name is placed at the date of his or her exit from power (or 2014 if still in office by the time the Archigos dataset ends), so anything below Kirchner until the next name appears happened during the Kirchner government. If data are available, we see a thick black vertical line representing the Polity score for that year; the further to the right, the more "democratic" its forms of political competition. A "thicker" measure of democracy, represented by the squiggly grey line with the ribbon, is also depicted -- the Unified Democracy score, which aggregates information from various attempts to measure democracy in a consistent way -- and scaled to fit in the same interval. Polity and the UD scores agree on the basic pattern, though the UD scores do not see Argentina's democratic institutions as fully consolidated by the end of 2012 (the last year of the UDS dataset); Argentina does not achieve the highest scores (which would put it bumping against the right side of the graph), and appears to be trending slightly leftwards as of 2012 (less democratic in this graph; no political implication intended). The blue line with dollar numbers represents Argentina's annual per capita GDP, as estimated by Angus Maddison and his successors: Argentina is a solidly middle-income country by 2010.

As we move down further, we encounter the end of the last military government, shortly after the end of the Falklands war, in 1984; the caretaker Bignone presides over the extrication of the military from government after Galtieri, who was mainly responsible for the war, is forced to leave office by his military colleagues. The period before that is one of coups and overall economic stagnation; more generally the pattern of Argentine history over the previous couple of decades is one of continual conflict in the context of boom and bust economic cycles, as we can see by the number of coups, irregular leader exits, and the conflict with the ERP. This is the time of the "dirty war," though it's worth stressing that it was also a period in which divisions within the military were exacerbated by the conditions of Argentine politics; most coups in the period replaced military leaders, not democratically elected leaders. As we move down (back in time), we see the traces of the "impossible game" between Peronistas and the military Guillermo O'Donnell described in his classic analysis of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Periods of repression alternate with classic populism in which the Peronistas are allowed to compete for power, each side of the conflict attempting to consolidate its advantages by transferring resources to its supporters in ways that always proved to be unsustainable given Argentina's dependence on the vagaries of foreign trade (represented by the generally flat trend in GDP, with many ups and downs); but no one ever fully succeeded in fully consolidating power before the terms of trade turned, inflation went haywire, and social conflict instigated either military withdrawal or military intervention. As we move deeper in time, we find that the period of instability really began in the 1930s, with the overthrow of Irigoyen, when Argentina is already a relatively rich country. Before the 1930s we find stability at a lower level of democracy: Irigoyen was preceded by a long sequence of leaders who left office in a regular manner without being overthrown by the military. We might thus speak of a "great cycle" of macropolitical instability from the 30s to the mid 80s, which probably had something to do with the way in which Argentina became integrated into the world economy (according to my meager reading, at least), though the decisions of successive governments as they attempted to consolidate their bases of support -- repression, coups, particular monetary and fiscal policies -- seem to have exacerbated the conflicts of the period.

Because I have a bad memory for people and dates, I like these pictures as aide-memoires, though of course they will only make full sense if one knows a little about the political history of the countries depicted. It's also worth stressing that the datasets involved have gaps and other problems. Though the universe of successful coups since 1945 is pretty well covered, for example, some "unsuccessful" coups never get reported, some coup-like events are not included due to ambiguity, and of course we do not see here spikes of nonviolent protest aimed at changing the norms of political competition (one could use the NAVCO data for this, but I had to stop somewhere, and the graphs are overcrowded enough already). The GDP data is sometimes dubious or interpolated, especially for some of the poorest countries, and of course it does not show the full the range of issues affecting living standards.
And Archigos stops at 2004 (though it's being updated), providing sometimes a false picture of stability for some countries over the last decade. [Updated: now using data to the end of 2014]

Nevertheless, more auto-generated political histories for 173 countries in the Polity dataset are available in the GitHub repository for this post. One can take a look at some really eventful histories, like those of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which are full of irregular leader exits; or at Venezuela, which shows both the period of democratic consolidation following the overthrow of Perez Jimenez, marked by several coup attempts, and the long economic decline preceding the rise of Chavez; or indeed, any number of others. In general, one pattern emerges from these more detailed pictures, namely that there are two basic forms of stability: the kind that comes about when a single person achieves full personal power and successfully "coup-proofs" his rule (e.g., Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Duvalier in Haiti, Gomez in Venezuela) and the kind that comes about when some norm of political competition is expected to be enforceable even at the death of the ruler. The first kind of stability is clear when you see a spike of coups, conflicts, constitutional crises, or irregular leader exits that signal some sort of succession crisis - a sure sign of a previous personal regime. It seems really difficult to transform regimes based on loyalty to a person into regimes where impersonal norms of political competition have "bite"; the instability after the overthrow of Gaddafi is more the rule than the exception, regardless of whether the leader was overthrown or died peacefully in office.

Let's look at coups in more detail, because they are perhaps the most dramatic single event in the data - a single short spike in these spectral lines. The first thing to note is that they are associated with lower measured levels of democracy:

 

In other words, coups have historically occurred most often in already non-democratic regimes; a famous coup against a democratically elected leader like the ouster of Allende in Chile appears to be less common than the many forgotten coups against military regimes all over the world. (Iraqi Prime minister Abu Zuhair Tahir Yahya is reported to have said in 1968, "I came in on a tank, and only a tank will evict me," according to Luttwak's classic handbook on the coup d'etat; most coups in the postwar era seem to have been against people who came in on tanks). Few coups take place against the "consolidated" democratic regimes, which is simply another way of saying that norms of political competition in such countries are recognized as binding by all powerful parties. But we also see few coups against the most autocratic regimes, which are typically regimes where a party or an autocrat has fully coup-proofed their rule.

Coups are thus a symptom of normative fluidity, while both fully autocratic regimes and consolidated democracies are consolidated precisely because their norms of political competition are not fluid, as Finer saw in his classic study of the subject. This is why one of the best predictors of the risk of a coup is another recent coup; "the claim to rule by virtue of superior force invites challenge; indeed it is itself a tacit challenge, to any contender who thinks he is strong enough to chance his arm" which "succinctly explains one of the most usual consequences of a military coup, namely a succession of further coups by which new contenders aim to displace the first-comers. 'Quitate tu, para ponerme yo,' runs the appropriately Spanish proverb." (the quote is from Finer, The Man on Horseback, pp. 17-18; for the statistical evidence, see here).

Most coups nevertheless result in some immediate reduction in the level of democracy as new leaders attempt to consolidate their power (and thus engage in repression), but especially since the end of the cold war, many coups are on average followed a few years later by some degree of democratization (or re-democratization). The classic case was the "revolution of the carnations" in Portugal which overthrew the "Estado Novo", and which led to the modern democratic regime there. Though not every coup today is a liberalizing coup, in general there has been more pressure for countries to hold elections and less tolerance for overt military rule since the 1990s, as Marinov and Goemans argue in detail. Given the dependence on aid of many coup-prone countries, this has typically resulted in quicker democratization after a coup than before the end of the cold war, where dictatorships of various kinds could count more consistently on various forms of superpower patronage. The figure below shows the aggregate pattern quite strikingly:

It's also worth noting that over the post war period coups did not always lead to military rule; on the contrary, they often issued in power struggles that led to personal dictatorships or other forms of authoritarianism. Indeed, "pure" military rule has been quite rare and short-lived in the modern period (characterized by professional militaries rather than military aristocracies); as Finer noted, and later research seems to confirm, some of the very features that give militaries in certain societies the ability to seize power make them particularly unsuited to ruling these same societies without extensive civilian collaboration, and in any case direct military rule tends to exacerbate divisions in the organization.

Using data gathered by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz on regime types, focusing on whether the main institutions of the regime are the military, a single party, a monarchy, or some combination of the three, and on the degree of "personalism" in the regime, we can use it to look at which coups were followed by periods of rule by the military as an institution:

As we can see, the periods of pure military rule (in blue) and mixed military rule (in green; this includes regimes that used a civilian party or where power was also highly concentrated in the leader rather than in a Junta) are surprisingly few; most coups have led to non-military dictatorships, especially personal ones. (Small quibble: the Geddes, Wright and Frantz data shows the difficulties of the enterprise of classification, and the ambiguities of political reality. For example, they classify the Franco regime as a "personal" dictatorship for its entire period; but any student of the Franco regime can tell you that power fluctuated, with the Falange and the military much more powerful early in the regime, though there is clearly a sense that power was highly concentrated in Franco early on as well. I would have classified the Franco regime as a hybrid military-personalist regime).

Coups are more common in poor countries, as one might have expected:

 

But how, exactly, does poverty matter? After all, some surprisingly rich countries have experienced lots of coups, while some very poor countries have had little recorded instability of any kind. Consider this picture, which replicates the first graph of this post, except that the countries are arranged from poorest to richest, and the squiggly line in the middle represents GDP per capita:

Here we see many high-middle income countries that were plagued by coups in the past and sometimes still today (Argentina, Thailand, Syria, Qatar) while some extremely poor countries have never experienced coups (e.g., Malawi). Poverty seems to matter only where authority norms find few organized defenders, or rulers have failed to coup-proof their regimes; and this only because very poor societies seem to have been commonly places where the only organized force of national stature has been the army, and coup-proofing is tricky political work requiring resources that are not always available. (Finer's views are still quite reliable here, though he tends to speak too much of "legitimacy" when he really means organized support; it's not that poor people welcome coups or military rule, but that in poor societies the organized groups that have power are often incapable of resisting the army, and in twentieth century contexts powerful groups have had many different views over which authority norms should prevail).

Interestingly, though poverty is strongly associated with coups (and is typically found to be a significant risk factor in quantitative studies), economic growth is not so strongly associated; it is actually quite hard to find a significant effect of growth on coups in the quantitative literature, despite the fact that it's easy to tell stories about how economic decline might be a trigger of political instability. Though coups have clearly happened in periods of both growth and decline, one could nevertheless squint at the distribution of growth rates in years with coups and conclude that coups have tended to happen in years with slightly lower growth rates than average:

Indeed, it is not even clear that coups result in lowered growth rates in their aftermath (though as far as I can tell the statistical evidence suggests coups typically lead to some decline in growth rate). Consider this picture, showing normalized GDP (100 at the year of the coup) in the years before and after a coup or coup attempt (successful coups are in red, unsuccessful attempts are in blue):

In some cases, we see a U-shaped pattern - economic decline followed by coup, followed by recovery later; in others we see a line sloping down, and in others we see a line sloping up. Coups have happened when income was growing greatly (Libya), and when income has been declining greatly (Iraq, Chile); in periods of recurrent boom and bust cycles (Argentina) and in periods of apparent macroeconomic stability (Thailand, Greece). Sometimes they have been followed by quick recoveries, others by wild fluctuations; ten years after the Pinochet coup Chilean GDP was at the same level as in 1973, though it had oscillated wildly in the intervening period. The key point seems to be that coups are symptoms of underlying political conflict, which may be triggered by factors other than economic instability; even in the Argentine case, where coups where recurrently triggered during economic crises, the problem seems to have been the political conflicts (strikes, riots, etc.) that often came with the economic crisis and that made the military frame the situation in security terms. Thus the relationship between coups and economic growth will depend on the relationship between political conflicts and economic life.

Nevertheless, the macroeconomic aftermath of coups also seems to have varied from before and after the cold war, in line with the Marinov and Goemans thesis mentioned above:

Coups before the cold war on average seem to have happened in periods of growth, and were not necessarily followed by economic recession; coups afterwards seem to have happened on average during periods of severe economic contraction and to have led to further declines. Perhaps this shows that coups have been punished more severely in the post Cold war era, so that only severe economic crisis has led to coups after 1990; or that coups during the cold war happened more often in countries where economic performance is more or less independent of political stability (e.g., oil-dependent countries, like Iraq). But I found the lack of obvious connection between political instability and economic instability striking.

I think overall it is probably fair to say that some forms of macropolitical instability (coups, irregular leader exits, regime transitions involving major normative changes, like transitions from monarchy to democracy) seem to be on the wane. But there is little in this history suggesting that such instability ever definitively ends; on the contrary, though some countries have good long runs of stability, big shocks to the global system (big economic changes, big wars) can trigger periods of instability with very long after-effects. This is probably a bit depressing; it suggests that the events started by the Arab uprisings, for example, will take a long while to work themselves out (mostly in ways that involve "political instability"), until a new normative equilibrium is eventually reached.

Code for all the graphs in this post is available at this Github repository. The vast majority of the code is basically data-munging; you will need to download some of the datasets separately.

(Update, 1/21/2014: minor changes in wording to improve clarity)

(Update, 1/24/2014: using Archigos data for 2014 now)

The Age of Democracy

(Part of an occasional series on the history of political regimes. Contains some work in progress.)

This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases.

Here is a figure I've been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project). The figure shows all countries that have ever had some kind of identifiable constitutional document (broadly defined) that mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (in any context - new constitution, amendment, interim constitution, bill of rights, etc.), arranged from earliest to latest mention. Each symbol represents a “constitutional event” - a new constitution adopted, an amendment passed, a constitution suspended, etc. - and colored symbols indicate that the text associated with the constitutional event in question mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (see data and methods note below for more details):

(Red lines indicate, from left to right, the date of the first mention of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional text, WWI, WWII, and the end of the Cold War [1989]).

The earliest mentions of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional document occurred in Switzerland and France in 1848, as far as I can tell.[1] Participatory Switzerland and revolutionary France look like obvious candidates for being the first countries to embrace the “democratic” self-description; yet the next set of countries to embrace this self-description (until the outbreak of WWI) might seem more surprising: they are all Latin American or Caribbean (Haiti), followed by countries in Eastern Europe (various bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain), Russia, and Cuba. Indeed, most “core” countries in the global system did not mention democracy in their constitutions until much later, if at all, despite many of them having long constitutional histories; even French constitutions after the fall of the Second Republic in 1851 did not mention “democracy” until after WWII. In other words, the idea of democracy as a value to be publicly affirmed seems to have caught on first not in the metropolis but in the periphery. Democracy is the post-imperial and post-revolutionary public value par excellence, asserted after national liberation (as in most of the countries that became independent after WWII) or revolutions against hated monarchs (e.g., Egypt 1956, Iran 1979, both of them the first mentions of democracy in these countries but not their first constitutions).

Today only 16 countries have ever failed to mention their “democratic” character in their constitutional documents (Australia, Brunei, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Monaco, Nauru, Oman, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Vatican City).[2] And no country that has ever mentioned “democracy” in an earlier constitutional document fails to mention it in its current constitutional documents (though some countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries went back and forth - mentioning democracy in one constitution, not mentioning it in the next). Indeed, after WWII the first mention of democracy in constitutions tended to be contemporaneous with the first post-independence constitution of the country; and with time, even countries with old and settled constitutional traditions seem to be more and more likely to mention “democracy” or “democratic” in some form as amendments or bills of rights accumulate (e.g., Belgium in 2013, New Zealand in 1990, Canada in 1982, Finland in 1995). The probability of a new constitution mentioning “democracy” appears to be asymptotically approaching 1. To use the language of biology, the democratic “meme” has nearly achieved “fixation” in the population, despite short-term fluctuations, and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular correlation between a state calling itself democratic and actually being democratic, either today or in the past.[3]

Though the actual measured level of democracy around the world has trended upwards (with some ups and downs) over the last two centuries, I don't think this is the reason why the idea of democracy has achieved near-universal recognition in public documents. Countries do not first become democratic and then call themselves democracies; if anything, most mentions of democracy seem to be rather aspirational, if not entirely cynical. (Though many constitutions that mention democracy were also produced by people who seem to have been genuinely committed to some such ideal, even if the regimes that eventually developed under these constitutions were not particularly democratic). What we see, instead, is a broad process in which earlier normative claims about the basis of authority - monarchical, imperial, etc. - get almost completely replaced, regardless of the country's cultural context, by democratic claims, regardless of the latter's effectiveness as an actual basis for authority or the existence of working mechanisms for participation or vertical accountability. (These democratic claims to authority also sometimes coexist in uneasy tension with other claims to authority based on divine revelation, ideological knowledge, or tradition, invented or otherwise; consider the Chinese constitution's claims about the “people's democratic dictatorship” led by the CCP).

I thus suspect the conquest of ideological space by “democratic” language did not happen just because democratic claims to authority (especially in the absence of actual democracy) have proved more persuasive than other claims to authority. Rather, I think the same processes that resulted in the emergence of modern national communities - e.g. the rituals associated with nationalism, which tended to “sacralize” a particular kind of imagined community - led to the symbolic production of the nation not only as the proper object of government but also as its proper active agent (the people, actively ruling itself), regardless of whether or not “the people” had any ability to rule or even to exercise minimal control over the rulers.[4] There thus seems to have been a kind of co-evolution of symbols of nationality and symbols of democracy, helped along by the practice/ritual of drafting constitutions and approving them through plebiscites or other forms of mass politics, a ritual that already makes democratic assumptions about “social contracts.” The question is whether the symbolic politics of democracy eventually has any sort of impact on actual institutions. But more on this later.

Data and Methods

The underlying texts used to construct this figure have been gathered by the Comparative Constitutions Project. What “counts” as a constitutional document is subject to some debate, especially in countries like the UK or New Zealand that are sometimes said not to have a written constitution. But all of the documents gathered by the CCP are indisputably important, describing basic structures of government and setting out the rights of citizens. Unfortunately, however, most are not publicly available through the CCP repository due to copyright complications. I thank Zachary Elkins, one of the CCP Principal Investigators, for granting me access to them; I also want to note that the work of the CCP in collecting, categorizing, and coding them is invaluable (and hopefully may soon be more widely accessible, with the Constitute website).

Anyway, in order to create the figure above, I downloaded the PDFs of all the documents in their archive and extracted the text of as many as I could using the Python PDFminer library. (Some of the older constitutions have not been OCRd, and a few are password-protected, so there's no text for them; see the “inventory” file for details). I then used this R script to extract each mention of the word “democracy” in each of these texts. Specifically, I identified each line that contained the pattern “democ” or “demok” or “mocra” or “demo-” in every extracted text file (not all of the available texts are in English, but the word “democracy” has similar roots in most European languages at least), as well as the previous and the following line, and put them in a table. I then inspected this table for false positives - instances where the algorithm picks up the word “democracy” in cases where it isn't actually mentioned in the constitutional text, or instances, mostly in poorly-OCRd Cyrillic texts, where the algorithm picks up words that contain the pattern “mocra” but are not “democracy” or “democratic” (or any variant). The exact list of false positives I found is available in the script, as well as all the changes made to the original list of mentions. Finally, I calculated earliest and latest mentions of democracy (as well as a few other variables). The resulting dataset of democracy mentions plus all code (including the code for the figure in this post), is available in this GitHub repository.

Notes

[1] It is possible that there is an earlier mention of democracy in the data; I have not manually checked every earlier constitutional document, and some of them are poorly OCRd and not in a major language. But France and Switzerland seem right.

[2] Some mentions of democracy occur only in passing, as in New Zealand, where a 1990 bill of rights (coded by the CCP as an “amendment” to New Zealand's constitution) has a section on “democratic and civil rights” and indicates that restrictions on rights must be demonstrably justified in a manner appropriate to “a free and democratic society.” One could easily come up with a story linking most of the countries that do not mention democracy: it's basically countries whose constitutional documents are still strongly influenced by a UK or USA constitutional legacy in Asia, due to a relatively stable post-colonial or post-war history (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, Japan) and monarchies whose sovereigns are still relatively unconstrained (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Oman, Tonga).

[3] This is tricky to check with an actual measure of democracy for a variety of reasons (though I'm working on it), but at least today there's no correlation. I do wonder whether a long history of mentions is correlated with democracy today - aspiration becoming reality, as it were - or whether the correlation between mentions of democracy and actual levels of democracy has varied through time (perhaps the language of democracy once meant something but today it does not, for example).

[4] For a fuller academic argument on this point, see my piece on “Models of Political Community” here. I think a similar process once took place in the late Roman Republic, as I argued in a piece on “Cicero's Conception of the Political Community” [ungated here]: Cicero almost came to the idea of a “national” state and “representative” institutions.

Update 9 December - minor edits for clarity; fixed some typos.