The Great Norm Shift and the Triumph of Universal Suffrage: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.825

(Continuing an occasional series on the history of political regimes. Lots of charts and graphs, and one slideshow, using the Political Institutions and Political Events dataset by Adam Przeworski et al., which is a fantastic resource for people interested in this topic. And I like pictures!).

People sometimes do not realize how total has been the normative triumph of some of the ideas typically associated with democracy, even if one thinks that democracy itself has not succeeded quite as spectacularly. Take, for instance, the norm that rulers of states should be selected through some process that involves voting by all adults in society (I'm being deliberately vague here) rather than, say, inheriting their position by succeeding their fathers. In 1788 there were only a couple of countries in the world that could even claim to publicly recognize something remotely like this norm. Most people could not vote, and voting was not generally recognized as something that needed to happen before rulers could rule; rulers could and did claim to have authority to rule on other grounds. Norms of hereditary selection structured the symbolic universe in which political competition took place, and defined its ultimate boundaries for most people (at least those who lived in state spaces). Yet by 2008 there were only four or five countries in the world that did not publicly acknowledge universal voting rights:


(You can watch the slideshow in full screen or view the individual maps separately here.)

Each map in the slideshow displays three pieces of information, all taken from the PIPE dataset (see the data and methods note at the bottom of this post for more information about the dataset and the process used to generate the maps, including some R code): the type of class and gender franchise restrictions in place in a particular country for a particular year (the number inside each bubble, and the color of each bubble); whether other franchise restrictions are recorded (such as restrictions on voting by priests or the military; this is the border color of each bubble); and whether the franchise expanded or contracted on any particular year (the shape of the symbol). The first digit of each number inside the bubbles always indicates the type of class restrictions in place at the time, ranging from 0 (no suffrage), 1 (estate representation) to 7 (no class restrictions at all); the second digit indicates the type of gender restrictions in place, ranging from 0 (no female suffrage at all) to 2 (equal suffrage rights for men and women). Thus "7" means "manhood" suffrage (all adult males can vote, without property qualifications, so long as they are not disqualified by "other restrictions"), and "72" means universal suffrage (all adults can vote, without property qualification). The code "SN/O" means either that the franchise is determined at a subnational level and hence no single set of class and gender restrictions applies throughout the territory (as in the USA for the 19th century), or that there is an at least partly elected assembly but no franchise information is recorded (this is mostly the case for colonial legislative assemblies before independence in African countries).

The maps start out very sparse; only a few countries in the world recognized an electoral norm in any form at the beginning of the 19th century, though I'd wager that a few of the early adopters, even in class restricted form, are not very well known: Haiti in 1804 (before most of Europe), most central American countries by the 1820s, all Latin America by 1830. The first country in the dataset to adopt full "manhood" suffrage is Greece in 1844 (before France in 1848); the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire apparently had some form of class restricted female suffrage by 1861, though New Zealand of course was the first to achieve true "universal" suffrage. (Which is cool). Japan had a form of class-restricted suffrage by 1889, and Iran had full "manhood" suffrage by 1914, along with most of the Balkan countries, followed shortly by Iraq and Turkey, the latter of which achieves universal suffrage by 1930, before Uruguay, the first Latin American country to get there (in 1932).

The most striking thing the animation shows, to me, is how complete is the shift between the world of the 18th century, where politics was structured around norms of hereditary selection, and today's world, where politics everywhere is structured around electoral norms. We can see this at a glance by just looking at the relative frequency of franchise restrictions:

Figure 1: Franchise types worldwide, 1788-2008

The magnitude of the shift is staggering. The number of countries that do not recognize a norm of  universal suffrage is tiny: less than 6% of all countries. And about half of these have universal male suffrage anyway; the half that makes no concessions to the suffrage norm at all - or for which no information is available in the dataset, but is safe to assume have no suffrage at all - consists of the few remaining absolute monarchies. No big country, save for Saudi Arabia (which is not that big), rejects the principle that rulers should be selected via elections (even North Korea enshrines the principle in its constitution!). Universal suffrage is about as close to a cultural universal today as these things get. (And, incidentally, it was not a particularly European practice even early in the 19th century, as we see in the slideshow above).

To be sure, the fact that a norm is publicly recognized - is enshrined in constitutions and given lip service in other ways - does not mean that it is actually very meaningful. The "legitimacy" of the norm, to use a word I dislike very much, does not mean that the norm will be followed, or that it will affect power structures to any significant extent. (Incidentally, the same was true of norms of ascriptive selection in the European middle ages, a subject I would like to return to later; for all its symbolic influence, general belief in heredity as a principle of selection did not mean the norm was generally respected). Universal suffrage does not mean democracy.

It is true enough that the meaning of the norm of universal suffrage varies with the context; the fact that all adults could vote in the Soviet Union or Libya had different political implications than the fact that all adults can vote in New Zealand or Venezuela. But it is still striking that there is now so little political conflict over the principle of universal suffrage, which was once new and terrifyingly radical. That there was at one point a real conflict over the norm - over whether it was the right norm, and who should be allowed to vote - is shown in the frequency of suffrage contractions in the 19th century. Here we can see the traces of large-scale class conflict being played out precisely over the meaning of the norm of voting. Of the 39 franchise contractions unambiguously recorded in the dataset, the vast majority (71%) happened in the 19th century, most in Latin America, a testimony to the fierceness of conflict over the norm at the time:

Figure 2: Expansions and contractions of the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

(Franchise contractions are the pinkish bars at the bottom).

Figure 3: Franchise changes by region, 1788-2008, all countries

Franchise contractions were often quickly counterbalanced by franchise expansions, as we can see in the slideshow above; the rich never held the normative advantage for long (even if they, of course, held the power). Interestingly, it looks that as overt class restrictions on the franchise disappeared, certain other kinds of restrictions became more important, though the dataset seems patchier here, and it does not include every other restriction we can think of (like felon disenfranchisement). Overt class conflict over the meaning of the norm of voting in the 19th century yields to other forms of conflict: anticlerical conflicts, military-civilian conflicts, ethnic conflicts, territorial conflicts, all of which leave their traces in the constitutional changes recorded in the dataset. (Female enfranchisement comes in two waves, one early in the 20th century and another in the 1950s; the second wave at least seems to have involved no significant male-female conflict, but instead resulted from party competition, as Przeworski documents more fully in this excellent paper). There are even a couple of cases - Kenya in the 1950s and the Soviet Union for a couple of decades after 1918 - where the voting system explicitly disenfranchised the propertied (a real-life antecedent of the voting system I described theoretically here); the advantage in the conflict over the meaning of the norm had swung so radically to the poor that this was even thinkable, though these experiments didn't seem to have had much of an impact for the later development of the norm.  Nevertheless, most of the more noxious "other" restrictions on the franchise have also disappeared today, even if restrictions on military personnel voting still remain in a a couple of places:

Figure 4: Other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Latin America again stands out as an outlier in the extent to which its political conflicts were waged in the normative terrain of the franchise: who is excluded, and who is included, has been a much more contested issue there than elsewhere. And most Latin American "other restrictions" have been about the place of the military, reflecting a longer history of tensions between civilian and military powers there (code 6 indicates restrictions on voting by military personnel).

Figure 5: Regional distribution of other restrictions on the franchise, 1788-2008, all countries

Still, one might think that countries may recognize universal suffrage constitutionally, but fail to hold elections, or fail to hold elections for meaningful offices, or elections that allow for opposition. Yet as the number of countries with suffrage has increased, so have the numbers of at least partly elected legislatures with real powers (the figure refers to lower chambers with genuine legislative competences; mere advisory councils, elected or appointed, as in Saudi Arabia, don't count):

Figure 6: Composition of legislatures around the world, 1788-2008

In fact, only a few countries around the world fail to have today any kind of at least partly elected legislature; and even those "partly appointed" legislatures seem to be mostly elected anyway (I use data for 2000, which is more complete for some reason- but the numbers are not likely to have budged much since then):

Figure 7: Composition of legislatures around the world, 2000

(North Korea has the dubious distinction of holding elections but having no meaningful legislature). And along with elected legislatures, we see a corresponding increase in the frequency of elections worldwide:

Figure 8: Number of elections in the world per year, 1788-2008, all countries

In fact, we may be reaching "peak election": there are about 0.35 elections per year per state (counting only national legislative and presidential elections), which is what one would expect from typical electoral cycles of about 3-4 years if every country in the world held elections:

Figure 9: Number of elections per year as a proportion of the number of states in the world

Interestingly, the maximum number of elections relative to the number of states in the state system was in 1920! And as we might have guessed from the information in this post, "peak authoritarianism" in the 1970s was also the nadir of elections relative to the number of countries in the state system. But even then, there were lots of elections. Elections where opposition was NOT allowed were in fact almost as common then as elections that opposition was able to contest:

Figure 10: Number of elections per year with and without political opposition

Both types of election, those with and without opposition, are old; "single party" elections are not the invention of the communist regimes of the 20th century. Yet the open banning of opposition parties - the attempt to stamp out opposition completely - seems to have been more common wherever norms enshrined in constitutions were openly disregarded: 

Figure 11: Presence or absence of opposition according to whether or not a constitution is "in force"

Though note, again, how during peak authoritarianism in the 1970s we see the highest number of cases where constitutions explicitly banned political pluralism of any kind. Incidentally, these were mostly in Africa and Asia, as well as in the communist states of Europe; in many Latin American dictatorships (e.g., Brazil) opposition was  not completely banned, at least not all of the time.

Figure 12: Regional distribution of states with and without political opposition

So the switch towards a norm of universal suffrage has been accompanied (disregarding peak authoritarianism in the 1970s) by a switch towards a norm of political competition; in fact the number of states without opposition seems to have averaged about a quarter of the total, regardless of franchise type, and is quickly decreasing.

Figure 13: Proportion of states with and without political opposition by franchise type

I am not saying, of course, that states that allow some political opposition are "democratic" in any strong sense. (I am coming to dislike the word). Political competition is restricted in many ways around the world, some of them quite subtle, and some of them less so. But it is striking that the normative shift over the last two centuries does seem to have increased the competitiveness of political life, if nothing else, in ways that have not been reversed over the span of two centuries. One can look, for example, at the number of elections where the incumbent party remains in power after the election, regardless of whether or not they "won" the election (I'm telling you, this dataset is fantastic); and here the trend is inexorably towards greater competition, even if elections are still mostly won by incumbent parties around the world. But whereas elections in the 19th century produced incumbent victories between 80 and 90% of the time (or rather, resulted in opposition parties actually taking power only between 10-20% of the time), elections today result in incumbents leaving office nearly 40% of the time:

Figure 14: Electoral outcomes per year, 1788-2008, all countries

So the normative shift is real and reflected in a number of different aspects of political competition. In general (with some exceptions), the longer a history of elections, the lower the degree of incumbent advantage. In this graph, the length of the bar represents the number of elections recorded in the dataset, and the color represents the type of outcome; red indicates an opposition party was able to take power after winning the election (an "alternation" in power, in the language of Przeworski):

Figure 15: Electoral outcomes per country

(The black lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela, the three countries that have been "home" to me, all of them countries with long histories of elections, and from where most of the readers of this blog come). Another way of viewing this information is by plotting the percentage of times the incumbent has won an election per country:

Figure 16: Proportion of elections where incumbent party remained in power per country

The USA stands out as a country where incumbent advantages have historically been low - more so than many other places with long histories of democracy; only the Netherlands and the UK, among countries with comparably long histories of elections, have had lower degrees of incumbent advantage. And the regional patterns are perhaps as one would expect. Think of the "green" in the following map as places where it has historically been safe to be an incumbent in an election:

Figure 17: Political competitiveness in elections worldwide, 1788-2008

Incumbent advantage has historically been lowest in the richest parts of the world, though there are some obvious outliers, and the correlation does not indicate any form of causation, even if theory does lead us to expect that the degree of incumbent advantage would be negatively correlated with long-run growth (a test I have not performed, but may later).

Finally, it is worth noting that most people seem to have become more, rather than less, enthusiastic about participating in elections since the 19th century. As the number of people capable of participating and actually participating in elections has increased with changes in the franchise...

Figure 18: Ratio of the number voters in legislative elections to total population

(Each dot represents the ratio of voters to the total population in a particular election in a given country; some very low ratios are due to boycotts).

Figure 19: Ratio of participating voters to total population, by franchise types

The proportion of eligible voters participating has increased, not decreased:
 

Figure 20: Voter turnout per year, 1788-2008, all countries, in elections with and without opposition

(Each dot represents an election in a given country; turnout is calculated as the ratio of participating voters to the proportion of actually eligible voters). 

Figure 21: Voter turnout in legislative elections, 1788-2008, with and without opposition

Turnout nevertheless has varied quite a bit by country:

Figure 22: Voter turnout in legislative elections per country, all years

(Turnouts greater than 100% represent either problems with reported numbers of participating voters, or the fact that more people voted in some elections than were actually eligible according to franchise rules. Interestingly, the USA has always had lower turnout rates than a lot of other countries; and high turnouts do not appear to have ensured good governance. It is also worth noting that the highest turnouts have all been in elections without opposition, where voting is a form of signalling, and is encouraged by coercive mobilization, even if it makes no difference to the outcome).

In sum, we seem to live in a golden age of participation, even as elections are often thought to be disappointing, and voting irrational. Elections are the great ritual of the age, though they certainly don't make as much difference as most people seem to think. The aggregate effect of all this electoral activity seems to be mostly, if marginally, positive; yet elections have not reduced injustice or inequality as much as early proponents of universal suffrage had hoped.

It is nevertheless striking that conflicts that were once fought on the terrain of the norms concerning suffrage and elections have shifted to other terrains; the norm is no longer the object of live struggle. And if elections and universal suffrage did not make as much material difference as its proponents had  historically hoped, they nevertheless seem to have ultimately accomplished a great "redistribution of status." It is no longer possible to  signal unequal status by depriving people of the vote. We seem to have all become democrats at least in the sense that most people everywhere all publicly recognize the norm that all adults are equal citizens who all should have one vote, even if that norm is routinely violated or made meaningless still in many parts of the world.

Data and methods note
First, a thank you to Adam Przeworski for making available the PIPE dataset here. Like most very large-scale historical datasets of political data, the PIPE dataset misses some things, given the patchiness of the historical record (the dataset only aims at full completeness from 1917 onwards, though it does try to go back to the inception of representative institutions in every country still existing today), and some starting dates are a bit arbitrary (for example, the United Kingdom only enters the dataset in 1800, and has franchise information starting only in 1832, with the first Reform Act). Judgments about institutions are sometimes difficult to make. But in general, this is great data.

I nevertheless had to clean it up a bit to create the maps and graphs in this post. I first cleaned up the country names and fixed a few other minor things using Google Refine, added capital cities and their latitude and longitude (mostly using the cshapes R package by Nils Weidmann), added franchise data for Russia (which was missing), and then calculated a number of variables. The record of all this data wrangling is available in this repository, in the file Processing PIPE.R (and the Google Refine JSON extract). The code for the graphs is available in the file Final graphs.R. The code might change as I clean it up; right now it is essentially one big hack.

[Update, 12 September: Fixed some typos and minor stylistic problems]

[Update, 16 September: Code for processing PIPE now greatly simplified - see repository]

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]

The Half-life of Leaders and the Half-life of Regimes

Thinking back on the last couple of posts, a couple of questions arise naturally. First, there is the question of the survival of regimes in general, not just democracy: if most democracies die within 15 years or so, what is the median duration (the “half-life,” if you will: the time it takes for half of them to be gone) of other regimes? And second, there is the question of the relationship between the half-life of regimes and the half-life of leaders: do regimes whose leaders tend to have longer half-lives also have longer half-lives? My interest in these questions stems from my current research on the question of legitimacy: my sense is that legitimacy matters much less than people usually think to the survival of large-scale patterns of political power and authority, so I’m interested in trying to figure out if there are systematic differences in survival between more and less “legitimate” regimes and other political structures. So this is another exploratory post, with lots of graphs.

How do we measure the duration of non-democratic regimes relative to democratic regimes? Though democratic regimes are not always straightforward to identify, non-democratic regimes come in a much wider variety of forms – from hereditary, absolute monarchies to single party regimes and multiparty hybrids, and some of these forms shade gradually into one another over the course of many years. (For a sense of this variety, consider the differences between Mexico before the 1990s under the PRI, whose presidents succeeded each other with clockwork regularity every six years and a lively opposition existed but could never win the presidency, North Korea today, where opposition is non-existent and succession is controlled by a tiny clique, and Mubarak’s Egypt.) To get a handle on this question, I’m going to use the Polity IV dataset, which codes “authority characteristics” in all independent countries (with population greater than 500,000 people) from 1800 to 2010. (I’ve been convinced by Jay Ulfelder’s work that the DD dataset I used in my earlier post is not appropriate to study comparative regime survival due to the way it codes certain democracies where alternation in power has not occurred as dictatorships, which systematically biases the survival estimates of democracies upwards).

The Polity dataset is fairly rich. Most researchers seem to use only the composite indexes of democracy and dictatorship it offers, but these indexes, while useful, do not have a strong theoretical motivation, as Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland argue here. For my purposes, it is best to use the dataset to extract those authority characteristics of political regimes it purports to measure: the mechanisms of executive recruitment, the type of political competition, and the degree of executive constraint. Mechanisms of executive recruitment include hereditary selection, hybrid forms combining hereditary and electoral mechanisms, selection by small elites, rigged elections, irregular forms of seizing power, and competitive elections; types of political competition range from the repressed (all opposition banned, as in North Korea) to the open (typical of thriving democracies); and executive constraints range from unlimited to “parity” with the legislature. (See the Polity IV codebook for a full discussion). In theory, the dataset distinguishes eight kinds of executive recruitment mechanisms, ten types of political competition, and seven degrees of executive constraint, plus three different kinds of “interruption” (including breakdowns of state authority, loss of independence, and foreign invasion and occupation), leading to a possible 563 possible patterns of political authority, but these dimensions are all highly correlated (over .99); indeed, only 212 combinations of executive recruitment, political competition, and executive constraint actually appear in the date, most of them only once and for short periods of time, and it is obvious that some combinations do not even make sense. (And those that do make sense do not always capture all the information we would normally want about a political regime: Polity has no good measure for the extent of suffrage in competitive regimes, for example). But the dataset helpfully indicates how long each of these patterns last, so we can attempt a first cut at the question of the half life of regimes using a Kaplan-Meier graph:

The half-life of an “authority pattern” – a combination of an executive recruitment mechanism, a type of political competition, and a specific form of executive constraint – is 6.6 years, though the tail of the distribution is very long: some of them have lasted for upwards of a century. Switzerland, for example, has had the same authority pattern for 162 years, and Afghanistan retained the same authority pattern from 1800 to 1935 (a hereditary monarchy). As it happens, social and political life comes to be mostly structured in most places by the long-lasting patterns, but most patterns of authority do not last that long. Incidentally, at this level of abstraction there are no great regional differences in the half-lives of authority patterns, though it does seem as if authority patterns last slightly longer in Europe and the Americas than in Africa and Asia:

Yet an “authority pattern” is too amorphous a unit of analysis. We might get a better handle on the question of comparative regime survival by looking specifically at the mechanism of executive selection, since the manner in which the chief power in the state is selected is normally thought to be quite important and to have far-reaching consequences: whether supreme power is achievable by hereditary succession only or through designation within a closed elite or via competitive elections or some other means seems to have important consequences.

Of all the mechanisms of executive selection identified in the Polity IV dataset, only one, “Competitive Elections,” is unambiguously democratic by most people’s lights. Though within the dataset the fact that a regime has competitive elections is no guarantee that it will also have universal suffrage, for the most part “competitive elections” identifies most countries that most people think are democratic. We can thus calculate the duration of all periods of “competitive elections” and compare them to the duration of all “non-democratic” periods – those periods where executive selection happened through some other means. The details are somewhat tricky (see the code), but here are the results:

Some notes. As we might have expected from the discussion in the previous post, full hereditary monarchies (Russia under the Tsars, Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, Portugal and Romania in the 19^th century, Nepal in the 19^th century, among others; there are 65 episodes in 40 countries in the dataset) have the longest half-lives (nearly 32 years; this increases if we collapse the two hereditary monarchy categories. Note these are not “constitutional” monarchies like the British one). But competitive electoral regimes are no slouches, with a half-life of about 17 years (in keeping with Jay’s numbers in this post, though he uses a different dataset), and as time goes on their survival rates seem to converge with those of monarchies. Similarly, “limited elite selection regimes” (e.g., single party-communist regimes, where a narrow clique selects the leader without open competition) have a half-life comparable to that of democracies, but as time goes on they tend to break down more; their survival rates seem to diverge from those of competitive electoral and monarchical regimes. Low survival rates are found especially among political forms that appear to have internal tensions, such as competitive authoritarian regimes, where elections exist and are contested by an opposition, but it is very hard for the opposition to attain real power (e.g., Zimbabwe today). I confess I don’t really understand Polity’s “Executive-guided transition” category, but it’s obviously a regime that is turning into something else (the Pinochet regime in Chile after the 1980 referendum but before the return of competitive elections counts, for example), and “ascription plus election” includes regimes where the monarch retains some real power but the legislature and other executive offices are no longer under its thumb  (only a few are recorded in the data, including Belgium in the late 19^th century and Nepal in the 1980s and 90s); it makes sense that such regimes, halfway between “real” monarchies and purely constitutional monarchies like the British, should have short half-lives as the conflict plays out and either turn into competitive electoral regimes or into more absolute monarchies.

It is also interesting to compare the relative survival rates of competitive electoral patterns of authority vis a vis periods where selection happens by non-competitive electoral means (regardless of whether the selection means stay the same):

Though the difference seems to narrow as time passes, the half-life of non-democracy since the 19^th century has been a bit longer than the half-life of competitive electoral regimes (23 vs. 17 years). In sum, political regimes do not last much more than a generation.

(For those still following, the regional breakdown indicates that competitive electoral periods have had the longest half-lives in Europe and the Americas, whereas non-democracy has had the longest half-lives in Africa and Asia; no special surprises there, though I am not sure about the reason).  

How does this relate to the half-life of leaders? For that, we turn to the ARCHIGOS dataset by Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza, which contains information about the entry and exit date of almost all political leaders of independent countries in the period 1840-2010. It’s a fantastic resource – more than 3000 leader episodes, and information on their manner of exit and entry. And the conclusion one must draw from examining it is that power is extremely hard to hold on to; a ruler’s hold on power seems to decay in an exponential manner (note I haven’t checked that the decay really is exponential in the technical sense, though I'm thinking of doing that). Over this vast span of time, covering all kinds of political regimes, the half-life of leaders is only about 2 years, or a third of the median authority pattern, as we might have expected from the previous post (though the half-life of leaders is even smaller here):

Yet of course it is the people who beat the odds – those who last much longer than the average leader – the ones who shape social and political life. (There’s an endless parade of mediocrities in the dataset, two-bit prime ministers gone after a few months of ineffectual dabbling and the like).

(But don’t some leaders come back to power after losing it? In fact, the vast majority of leaders only attain power once, and never return to power, though about 100 did manage the feat three or more times. In fact, practice does not help; survival in power only appears to decrease the more previous times the leader had been in power, though note that the uncertainty of the estimates also increases, and one might expect that age would take its toll too).

We are now in a position to extend the analysis in the post below by merging the Archigos and the Polity dataset to calculate the survival curves for leaders conditional on the pattern of executive recruitment. Though I would take these curves with a grain of salt, here are the results:

As expected from the previous post, it’s good to be king – the half-life of absolute kings is about 12 years (and it’s almost always king: there are only 41 female leaders in a 3000 case dataset). Interestingly, a similar result for the half-lives of Chinese emperors is reported here (10 years: Khmaladze,  Brownrigg, and Haywood 2010, ungated) as well as for the half-lives of Roman emperors (11 years: Khmaladze,  Brownrigg, and Haywood 2007, ungated). There is something about the deep structure of monarchies in many different periods and societies, it seems, that points to a half-life in power of about 10-13 years for monarchs. 

More generally, authoritarianism pays in terms of leader tenure, despite the fact that non-competitive regimes do not always last longer than competitive ones. The highest half-lives of leaders beyond monarchs are found in limited elite selection regimes, executive-guided transitions (where non-democratic leaders are changing the rules), and competitive authoritarian regimes; but democracies are more lasting than most of these regimes (except for monarchies; see above).

Another way of looking at this is to calculate what we might call the “personalization quotient” of a regime: divide the half-life of the leader (for a given regime) by the half-life of the regime to get an idea of the percentage of the regime half-life that a leader is expected to last. So a monarch is expected to last about 37% of the half-life his regime (31.86 / 12); this is the most intensely personalized of regimes, as one might have expected given that it is devoted to the maintenance of a family line. The next most personalized regimes are competitive authoritarian regimes (28%), “self-selection” regimes (15%), limited elite selection regimes (16%), and “executive-guided transitions” (40%; this is pretty much by definition, however, so I don't make much of them). A competitive electoral regime has a personalization quotient of 8% - an expected leader half-life of about 2, divided by an expected regime duration of about 17 years. From the point of view of such a leader, it pays to try to move towards a competitive authoritarian regime, and it pays for the leader of a limited elite selection regime to move towards a formal hereditary monarchy (as is happening, in a sense, in North Korea right now, and almost happened in Egypt and Libya). 

But are authoritarian regimes more risky, so that leaders will try to hang on to power more? We can also look at that using the archigos dataset. Though leaders in non-democratic regimes have a slightly higher risk of leaving office with their heads on pitchforks or hanging from lampposts, the vast majority leave by "regular" procedures.  

More, perhaps, could be said. I’ve been wondering, for example, about whether there is a relationship between the breakdown of particular regimes and the tenure of leaders, though I’m not sure how to go about tackling that question. From the point of view of the study of legitimacy, however, what strikes me is the general fragility of patterns of authority and rule: few patterns of authority are expected have half-lives that exceed a single generation, and most don’t last nearly as long, regardless of their “legitimation formula” – heredity, competitive elections, ideology, whatever. Of course, some beat the odds, especially some competitive regimes and some monarchies, and these shape history. But the historical evidence suggests that they are in a sense the exception rather than the rule.

Code necessary for replicating the graphs in this post, plus further ideas for analysis, here and here. You will need to download the Polity IV and ARCHIGOS datasets directly, and this file of codes from my repository.

[Update: fixed some typos,  9 Feb 2012]

Visualizing Political Change, now with Coups

Here's a version of the video below, but now with coups d'etat:

For a note on the sources, see my post below.

Visualizing Political Change

I am mulling over a post on the events in Tunisia, but I've been distracted. I may get around to it eventually, but right now I've been busy trying to make some animated maps for use in my "dictatorships and revolutions" class. Here's the first result:

I tried something like this a few months ago, but this is an improvement over the previous map. First, it uses the update to the Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, and Przeworski dataset of political regimes by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (the "DD" dataset) that covers the entire period 1946-2008 (not just to 2002). And second, it uses a dataset of historical maps of state borders by Nils Weidmann, Doreen Kuse, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch that allows you to visualize such things as the breakup of the Soviet Union or the reunification of Germany.

The DD definition of democracy is very minimalist: a country counts as a democracy if both the government and the legislature are elected in competitive elections. Thus, some countries are classified as democracies which seem to have all sorts of political problems. Moreover, by "competitive elections" CGV mean that a) the opposition can contest the election, and b) the government actually relinquishes power if the opposition wins. Since in some countries the current regime has never lost an election (e.g., Botswana), it is not always possible to unambiguously code the country as a democracy or a dictatorship given their coding rules. In such cases, they err on the side of classifying the country as a dictatorship (this is their "type II error" rule), which leads to some curious outcomes: for example, South Africa never turns into a democracy (look at the video at around the year 1994), and Botswana is always classified as a dictatorship. But they identify these cases with their "type II" variable, so it is possible to see which countries might be democracies but are classified as dictatorships: these are the "ambiguous" cases in the video.

One thing that comes out very clearly in the animation is that regime types tend to cluster temporally and spatially. There are waves of civilian dictatorships and of military dictatorships (see, for example, Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s), as well as of democracies. Most communist regimes clustered around the Soviet Union, and most absolute monarchies are in the Middle East/North Africa. There seem to be strong "regional" influences on regime change, which suggests that the events in Tunisia are unlikely to remain isolated.

Some people criticize the DD data for conceptualizing the democracy/dictatorship distinction as a categorical rather than a gradual distinction (most of my students, for example, really dislike this categorical distinction when I assign a reading from Gandhi in my class). So most political regime datasets (like Freedom House or Polity IV) have some kind of scale from most autocratic to most democratic. The choice is, to some, extent, pragmatic, but I think there is something to the idea that regimes come in types, not just gradations of a single underlying dimension. So I like CGV's effort to identify different regime types, and I am largely in agreement with many of their criticisms of "graduated" indexes of democracy like Polity IV here. Nevertheless, I've also made a similar animation using Polity IV data:

There is less to note here, except the march of democracy. You miss some of the geographic and temporal patterns visible in the DD data.

I'm thinking of making an animated map that shows coups as they happen (using the Coups d'Etat dataset by Marshall and Marshall) now that I've mastered the process of making these maps (it took a while: R and ArcGIS are not the most easy to use pieces of software). Other ideas?

Update, 1/21/2011: I went ahead and did the animated map showing coups d'etat.