The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: More on Benevolent, Malevolent, and Unconstrained Regimes

(Quick graphical follow up to this post on malevolent democracies and benevolent autocracies; part of this series, asymptotically approaching 2. For discussion of the measures of physical integrity, regime types, democracy, and executive constraint used here see the previous post. Because I just can't help myself).

After finishing the previous post, a clearer way of presenting the idea of a "benevolent" regime occurred to me. Essentially, we can classify all regimes along two dimensions: the degree to which the executive is constrained by formal institutions, and the degree to which the state (directed by the executive) engages in killing, political imprisonment, torture, and so on. Using the CIRI data on the protection of physical integrity rights, the Polity IV measure of executive constraint, and the DD measure of political regimes (by Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland) we then get the following four-fold classification:

Benevolent regimes are on the upper left hand quadrant: here, rulers are formally unconstrained but nevertheless have, on average over the last 30 years, respected the physical integrity rights of their subjects. These tend to be relatively wealthy, as we can see, and many of them are absolute monarchies: the Qatar of al-Thani (2001-2008), the Oman of Sultan Qabus ibn Sa'id (1981-2008), Swaziland under various monarchs, Bhutan under Sigme Wangchuk (I've labeled the top 5% of the regimes by the benevolence measure, though they may be hard to see, and some are missing from the plot because they don't have GDP data). But many of them are poor countries (even if their GDP figures are occasionally inflated by oil discoveries, for example) and frankly a bit surprising: Gabon under Bongo (1981-2008), Burundi under Buyoya (1981-1991), Malawi under Banda (1981-1993), for example. All of the latter were rulers who consolidated their power long before 1981, I think; so perhaps with a longer dataset we would get somewhat different results. But still, it is worth noting that "the good" are sometimes long-established autocrats.

The bad are typically regimes that hold elections and have formally constrained executives, but where public opinion and the political class is indifferent or even supports violating the rights of various groups of people: Colombia, India, Israel, Indonesia, all make appearances here, as well as South Africa under Apartheid and Peru during the Sendero Luminoso years. The constraints have stopped working with respect to particular groups - poor peasants in Colombia, native peoples in rural areas in Peru, people who are thought to be associated with separatists in the Philippines, Palestinians in Israel. 

The ugly are the usual suspects: your typical unconstrained, megalomaniacal dictator, like the regimes of Gaddhafi in Libya, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Milosevic in Serbia, Mobutu in Zaire, Marcos in the Philippines, Galtieri in Argentina, al-Bashir in Sudan, Hoxha in Albania, Taylor in Liberia, and so on. It's the dismal roster. Interestingly, Buyoya of Burundi appears again here (1996-2000) among the unconstrained  - a striking illustration of the fragility of mere benevolence. 

The constrained are the boring regimes - not without problems, to be sure, but about as well-functioning as we usually get. (Though some, of course, may note that constrained regimes "internally" does not mean that the regime will be constrained "externally"; as I mentioned in the previous post, threats to the state seem to turn constrained regimes bad). 

Here, just for the hell of it, is a list of countries ranked by their average degree of benevolence; the boxes tell you were how much their "benevolence" has varied over time, and the dots are the outliers - years where their benevolence has strayed far from the mean:

Fig. 2. Regime rankings by benevolence. Dashed lines identify the USA, Venezuela, and New Zealand

We can see at a glance that "benevolence" is mostly a phenomenon of autocracy, though a few democracies have above-average levels of it; and that malevolence is mostly a democratic phenomenon. Yet benevolence among autocracies varies a bit more than among democracies; your average benevolent despot is not extremely reliable, perhaps. (Note also how Burundi is represented at the top and the bottom of the scale, with two different regimes). It is mostly countries in the middle of the distribution that have consistent records of protecting rights, though they are not unblemished.

Here a final picture ranking countries by their average levels of protection of physical integrity rights (thickness of the line represents democracy level; color represents level of protection - darker blue is better; each colored line shows changes from 1981 to 2008): 

Fig. 2: Ranking of countries by avg. levels of physical integrity protection, showing changes during the 1981-2008 period. Dashed lines identify the USA, New Zealand, and Venezuela

New Zealand has done very well during this period (by this measure at least), but the USA ranks 35 out of 167, with a big dip at the end of the period, and a spotty record (note the light blues in earlier years); and Venezuela's state has been going bad since 1989, with the Caracazo. More dictatorships appear at the bottom of the scale, but also many democracies. Interestingly, the end of the cold war seems to have produced improvements in the protection of rights in very few countries; at a glance, only Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Albania stand out. But New Zealand is only in the middle of the benevolence ranking; it does well because its constraints have worked, not because its rulers are unusually benevolent, though perhaps its constraints have worked because public opinion has been reasonably enlightened, and public opinion has been reasonably enlightened because it has faced no big conflicts in the recent past.

(Some messy code that produces these and other graphs is here).

Of Malevolent Democracies and Benevolent Autocracies: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes, Part 1.9325

(Continues my occasional series on the history of political regimes, part 1.9325. Lots of charts and graphs and a slideshow, using the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) human rights dataset and the Political Terror Scale.)

About a month ago, Reed Wood over at the blog Political Violence @ a Glance expressed doubts that there had been much if any meaningful improvement in the extent to which states engaged in torture, beatings, etc. over the past three decades. Neither the Political Terror Scale (measuring the degree to which states engage in torture, political imprisonment, or political murder) nor the Physical Integrity Index of the CIRI dataset (which measures more or less the same thing in a somewhat different way) show any improvement over the last three decades or so, despite the fact that (as we have seen here, here, and here in much greater detail) the world is a more "democratic" place today than three decades ago:

Figure 1. Global mean of the CIRI Physical Integrity Index,  1981-2010 (higher means more protection of physical integrity rights, on a 0 to 8 scale) 

Figure 2. Global mean of the Political Terror Scale,  1976-2011 (higher means more state use of torture, murder, and other physical integrity violations, on a 1 to 5 scale) 

Figure 3. Global mean of the polity2 score,  1976-2011 (higher means more democratic, on a -10 to 10 scale) 

If anything, a slight worsening trend in the extent to which states engage in torture, killing, and so on is detectable here, despite the increase in democracy over the same period. This piqued my curiosity; what is going on here? And what has been the relationship between political regimes and the protection of basic "physical integrity" rights, historically speaking?

Neither the CIRI dataset nor the Political Terror Scale are ideal for answering these questions in sufficient depth; for one thing, their data collection starts just after "peak authoritarianism" in the mid 1970s, and hence misses much of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in the 50s and 60s. Moreover, it is very likely that the lack of improvement we see above is at least partly an artifact of better reporting and a broader understanding of what counts as a violation of physical integrity by the state, as Anne Marie Clark and Kathryn Sikkink argue in a forthcoming piece. But they can still help us understand broad correlations between political regimes and the malevolence (or restraint) of the state.

Using the CIRI data and a typical measure of democracy (the Polity IV scale, discussed here in more detail), the first thing we note is that, though the overall trend in the protection of physical integrity rights is negative across all regime types, democracies have had on average a better record than other political regimes over the last 30 years:

Figure 4: Trend lines for physical integrity rights by regime type. "Democracy" is defined as a polity score greater than 6; "Autocracy" is defined a polity score lower than - 6. Each point represents a country-year; points are jittered to avoid some overplotting. 

Though we see dictatorships that appear not to engage in torture, killing, and so on, in every year, as well as democracies that do engage in such practices, on average democracies score about 2 points higher in the CIRI Physical Integrity Rights index than autocracies and "anocracies" (the Polity IV term for various hybrid regimes; the picture does not change if we use the Political Terror Scale instead). Since the CIRI index is additive over four measures of state malevolence - extrajudicial killings, disappearances, political imprisonment, and torture, each of which is scored as 0 if the violations are judged to be frequent and widespread, and 2 if they are judged not to have occurred during a particular year (see here for more details) - we could say that democracies on average have committed one fewer crime than autocracies over this period. (Democracies: statistically less criminal than autocracies for over 30 years!). Indeed, nearly 80% of all regimes that receive a perfect 8 in the CIRI index are democracies, while nearly 75% of the regimes that receive a 0 in the index are autocracies or anocracies:

Figure 5: Distribution of regimes accross CIRI index categories. 8 means a high level of protection of physical integrity rights; 0 means widespread violations. "Interruption" includes Polity categories for breakdown of central authority, foreign occupation, and transitional forms.

Moreover, it is also worth noting that the average difference between democracies and autocracies has not changed at all over the entire 30 year period, even as both democracies and autocracies seem to be becoming worse (i.e., more likely to engage in torture, killing, etc.). To me, that looks like prima facie evidence that the lack of improvement in these indexes is at least partly a reporting artifact, though other stories are possible. For example, suppose that the least malevolent autocracies are most at risk of turning into democracies. But they do not immediately become "high quality" democracies; political competition restrains states slightly better than before, but still not well. As more countries become democratic, the average malevolence of both democracies and autocracies should increase - in the first case due to the influx of low-quality democracies into the population (dragging the mean down) - and in the second case due to the exit of less-repressive autocracies from the population. I don't know that this story is correct, but it's worth considering, and some of the trends I discuss below are consistent with this relationship. In particular, if the story is correct, we should see a (slight) strengthening of the correlation between measures of democracy and measures of physical integrity over time - and in fact we do see this.

At any rate, the correlation between democracy and a lower average level of state malevolence remains striking, if perhaps unsurprising given common ideas about democracy. But couldn't it be the case that the correlation is built into the measure of democracy we are using here? Though the Polity IV measures are basically institutional (conceptualizing democracy as a variety of political competition, without assuming much of anything about whether or not democracies are more or less malevolent state forms), it may still be the case that they assume too much. Perhaps coders tend to give "nice" regimes higher scores; some of the political competition categories in the Polity IV index are notoriously opaque. Yet the correlations are the basically the same if we use the most minimal measure of democracy we can think of (the dichotomous DD measure, discussed here, which defines democracy as a regime where the leadership of the state is selected through competitive elections and nothing else):

Fig. 6: Distribution of democracies and dictatorships across CIRI scores. Dichotmous measure of democracy from the DD dataset by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland.

As before, it looks like most "benevolent" states (those scoring high in the CIRI index of physical integrity protection) are democracies, and most "malevolent" states are dictatorships (or more precisely, regimes where the political leadership is not selected via competitive elections; whether we want to call these regimes "dictatorships" is basically a question of nomenclature). (Results are basically identical if we use the PTS). But there remain a good number of elective regimes who score very low on the index, as well as a good number of non-elective regimes that score high on this index. Let's call the former malevolent democracies and the latter benevolent autocracies. What can we say about them?

Consider first the distribution of CIRI scores across regime types (using the DD measures of regime types):

Parliamentary democracies (59 of them in the dataset, nearly 1000 country-years in total with data on physical integrity protection) and mixed presidential/parliamentary democracies (36 of them, about 500 country-years) are the clear winners here - the least overtly criminal regimes over the past 30 years. Monarchies, however, (14 of them in the dataset, for about 300 country-years) did quite well; few of them appear to have engaged in any significant malevolence during the 1981-2008 period (and most of it was concentrated in Nepal, Morocco, and Saudia Arabia during this time). Indeed, the mean level of "physical integrity rights protection" in monarchies is nearly as high as in parliamentary democracies, and higher than in presidential democracies, which have been the worst of the democratic regimes. Civilian dictatorships appear just as likely to be "good" as to be "bad," and military dictatorships are the worst of the bunch. No non-democracy (monarchic or otherwise), scores a perfect 8 average for the period, whereas some democracies do (mostly small places like Iceland or Tuvalu, or very new democracies that have not yet have time to besmirch their records), though of course a number of democracies score very low too. (The rankings of regime types don't look any different if we use the PTS instead of the CIRI index).

Perhaps more interesting is to look at the most benevolent autocracies and most malevolent democracies over the period. The color of each glyph in the map below represents the average level of the CIRI index for the years for which data exists; the size of the glyph represents the number of years with data (ranging from 1 to a maximum of 30); and the shape represents the average Polity2 score over the 1981-2010 period, split into three broad categories: circles represent countries that have been mostly democratic over the last three decades; triangles represent countries that have been mostly "anocracies" (hybrid regimes); and squares represent countries that have been mostly autocratic. So if the correlation between regime type and the protection of physical integrity rights were perfect, we would expect squares in the map below to be red, circles to be blue, and triangles to be light colored. Red circles thus represent malevolent democracies, and blue squares benevolent autocracies (I've labeled the most malevolent democracies and the most benevolent non-democracies below):

Fig. 8. Average levels of physical integrity protection, 1981-2010, by regime type as defined by the Polity IV score

The top benevolent non-democracies by this measure (average CIRI index greater than 6, average polity2 lower than -6) are a mixed bunch: Suriname, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Gambia, Benin, Gabon, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Taiwan, Singapore, and Fiji. Among these, Oman[!] has the best overall record, with an average CIRI score of 7.17, better than the USA average for the period. Some of these regimes are basically electoral but noncompetitive regimes, such as Singapore; others democratized substantially during the period in question, though reports of torture or political imprisonment appear never to have been common even during more authoritarian times, or were concentrated at the beginning of the period (Taiwan, Poland, Hungary); and others are rich gulf monarchies (Oman, UAE, Qatar). Perhaps the most surprising cases are Gambia, Benin, and Gabon, none of which appear to have engaged in much direct political violence against their own citizens (at least none that was noticed by the State Department or Amnesty International, the ultimate sources for the CIRI index), despite being very poor countries. Happy autocracies, pace Tolstoy, are not all alike.

The top malevolent democracies by this measure show more commonalities: El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, and India. These are almost all countries that faced or face substantial internal conflicts - the FARC insurgency in Colombia, Kashmir and Nagaland in India, the conflict with the Palestinians in Israel, conflicts with Kurds and between the secularists in the military and more religious civilian forces in Turkey,very sharp class conflicts in Venezuela, Brazil, and El Salvador. "Internal" threats to the state turn democracies bad. Just look at the CIRI graph for the USA for the period, and check out the dip after 2001 for further evidence:

Fig. 9. CIRI index of physical integrity rights for the USA, 1981-2010

And all this time the USA received a polity2 score of 10 - the highest possible.

Obviously, these overall judgments have to be taken with a grain of salt; as the cases of Poland and Hungary show, the cutoff for the dataset may mean that more repressive periods are excluded from consideration, or it may mean that they are included when there has in fact been a qualitative break in the nature of the state. Furthermore, there may be other factors that are related to the level of physical integrity protection; the level of economic development, inequality, and the rate of economic growth all come to mind, among many other possibilities (some of which are explored below).

One may think that the key factor ensuring that the regime is not criminal is the degree of executive constraint, not the whole degree of democracy. So let's define a benevolent regime as a regime where the executive is highly unconstrained but nevertheless does not act in a criminal way (though it could do so with impunity) and a malevolent regime as one where the executive is so constrained but nevertheless is not prevented from killing, torturing, or imprisoning for political beliefs at least some of its citizens, perhaps because the people who constrain the executive are complicit in its criminality. Now, Polity actually includes a measure of executive constraint, which is highly correlated, but not perfectly, with the CIRI index. (Better, in fact, than the overall democracy measure). We can then ask: are there truly constrained malevolent democracies? Or truly unconstrained benevolent autocracies? Using the DD measure of regime type and the polity measure of executive constraint we can produce an independent "index of benevolence" (essentially, we multiply both, after reversing the exconst measure, and take the square root) - higher is more benevolent, with a median of 4:

Average degree of benevolence/malevolence, by country and regime type (as measured in the DD dataset)

As we can see, democracies are typically constrained but not benevolent; almost all of them score lower than the median of benevolence. The top 10 "benevolent" regimes are all non-democracies (except for Bhutan for a few years, which is a hard case), and we have to go down to Mali to find a regime coded as democratic by DD that also had a relatively unconstrained executive and a reasonable record of not torturing, killing, or imprisoning its citizens. By the same token, most dictatorships overperform a bit; their records are better than the degree of executive constraint would lead one to expect.

The top 10 benevolent autocracies by this method are similar to the ones identified above. Many are absolute monarchies - Qatar, Oman, Swaziland; constrained, perhaps, more by tradition and culture than by formal institutions, as Victor Menaldo has argued (ungated). Some are expected, though still puzzling (why so restrained?): Singapore, Hungary during the last decade of the communist system. Others are very unexpected - many very poor African autocracies - Gabon, Benin. At the other end of the scale we find that malevolence (executive constraints plus torture and imprisonment) is almost always a democratic phenomenon; India, Israel, Colombia, and Jamaica bring in the bottom of the table. When unconstrained dictators do these things it's expected, but when democracies do it it's malevolent.

A temporal view may be interesting too. In the slideshow below, the size of each dot represents the actual level of protection of human rights, the color of each dot represents the naive deviation from the expected level of protection of human rights given the polity score, and the shape of the dots represents the regime type. So red dots are more malevolent than expected given the polity score of the country and blue dots more malevolent, while white dots are at the expected level of human rights protection. The measure for the deviation here is not empirically derived - it's not the residual of a regression of the physical integrity index on the polity score - but normative; a democracy with a perfect polity score that does not engage in torture, killing, and so on is not "benevolent" but merely doing its job properly, whereas a completely unconstrained dictatorship with a polity score of -10 that does not engage in torture, killing, and the like of political opponents is being "merely" benevolent. Hence dots representing democracies with a score of 10 never look blue on the map, and dots representing dictatorships with a score of -10 never look red. I've labeled the countries that have the largest deviations from a simple naive relationship between polity2 and the level of protection of physical integrity.

(Best viewed in full screen by clicking on the link on the lower left corner). Note how the period starts with a lot of benevolent autocracies (including a large number of African countries whose polity score belies the relative benevolence of their states by this measure) and democracies that generally respected human rights. As the nineties come along, there are many new democracies that "underperform"; from a blue and white world (with an even split between benevolent autocracies and democracies that do their job), we come to a world that is mostly pink (with many new and underperforming democracies), consistently with the selection hypothesis mentioned above. Things then take a sharp dive in the aftermath of September 11; most democracies - including most established ones in North America and Western Europe - become more malevolent in the years after 2011. In some cases we can easily point to the specific events that turn countries red in the map: the Sendero Luminoso years in Peru in the 1980s, the Caracazo in Venezuela in 1989, the endless conflict with the Palestinians in Israel. But though many countries in the map appear as benevolent autocracies or as malevolent democracies for short periods, most countries seem to settle to their expected level; both benevolent autocracy and malevolent democracy seem to be fragile, though benevolent autocracy is more common than malevolent democracy.

It is also worth looking at how the relationship between democracy and human rights protection varied over this period. We simply fit a simple linear model regressing the Physical Integrity Index against the Polity2 score for each year, and look at how the coefficient for the polity2 score has changed over time:

Fig. 11: Coefficient of polity2 in the model PHYSINT ~ a*polity2 + b estimated for each year. Shaded areas represent the 95% confindence interval for a.

The picture is suggestive of a structural break in the relationship between democracy and state malevolence with the end of the Cold War. States that had apparently been more autocratic than their record of benevolence suggested suddenly found their expected level of democracy, consistent with the hypothesis mentioned above. But not every country has benefited from increases in democracy. Among countries where we observe changes in their level of democracy in this period as measured by the polity2 score only about half of them (56% or so) seem to have experienced changes in the level of state malevolence that are in the right direction. In other words, it is only in about half the cases in the sample that increases in democracy are (statistically) associated with greater state benevolence (and vice-versa: decreases in democracy are statistically associated with greater state malevolence); in the other half, increases in democracy are associated with greater state malevolence (and vice-versa), though the magnitude of the association appears to be small in most cases:

Fig. 12: Magnitude of the relationship between polity2 and CIRI, per country, 1981-2010. Lines show 95% confidence intervals for the polity2 coefficient

In countries to the left of the red line, increases in democracy were associated in this period with more state malevolence (or vice-versa, i.e., increases in autocracy with more benevolence); in countries to the right, increases in democracy are associated are associated with more state benevolence (as we would naively expect). The striking thing here is how little of a pattern there is; though there are some slight regional associations (democratization appears to have been more correlated with state benevolence and vice-versa in the Americas than elsewhere), and some events are not captured by the graph above (for example, the change in democracy levels and state benevolence among the successor countries of the Soviet Union; this could be done, but I'm not up to it right now), no obvious associations jump out. A better test, perhaps, would look for changes in the degree of executive constraint (indeed, it looks as if changes in executive constraints do have a positive effect on a larger proportion of countries - 63% in my sample instead of 53%); but whether or not political regimes are associated with state malevolence and benevolence, other factors must be swamping much of their influence. Consider, for example, GDP per capita:

Fig. 13: GDP per capita (from the PWT) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

As we might expect, in every regime type except for military dictatorships state benevolence is correlated with income per capita; the state is usually tamer in richer countries, though military dictatorships seem to get more malevolent the richer they are, even as they also become sparser as income increases. Or consider inequality (a much more striking picture):

Fig. 14: Inequality (measured using the UTIP data) and the Physical Integrity Index, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset)

The malevolence of the state seems to be exquisitely sensitive to inequality in democracies, in contrast to non-democracies; the less repressive regimes are almost all on the upper left hand quadrant. This makes sense in light of the Acemoglu-Robinson story about the relationship between inequality and regime types: democracies enable class conflict, and hence the state is more likely to get more repressive as that conflict intensifies, whereas a dictatorship has "settled" such conflicts - arrived at some repressive equilibrium that is not especially sensitive to inequality. But of course other stories are also possible (not least that the data on inequality is not great); this is not a test of anything. It is also plausible to speculate that as the world became both more democratic and more unequal over the past 30 years, we would have seen a generally flat trend in the mean CIRI index; rising inequality would have cancelled out the effects of rising democracy.

Finally, consider economic growth:

Fig. 15: The Physical Integrity Index and per capita gdp growth, by regime type (as measured by the DD dataset) 

I confess that I found this picture surprising: I thought there would be an association between low levels of economic growth and greater repressiveness, but apparently not.

We could put this all together in some more complex model. But a structural break seems to remain; adjusting for gdp per capita does not change the picture in figure 11 much, though adding inequality softens the relationship a bit. At any rate, it seems as if the old idea of checks and balances is at least somewhat vindicated by the evidence of the last three decades: constraints matter, and don't count on benevolent autocrats.

(Code for all the graphs in this post is available here; as usual, it's very messy. You will also need this file of codes, plus the Penn World Table data, the CIRI dataset, the Political Terror Scale, the Polity data, the DD dataset, and the UTIP inequality dataset).

[Update 13/12/2012 - minor wording changes for the sake of clarity]

[Update: a quick graphical followup to this post here]

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]

Democracy and development since 1950 in one chart

My previous post, in one chart:

(Click here for larger size).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

these broad regime categories:

Unified Democracy Scores, 2008

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

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

Distribution of regime types since 1950

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

Income per capita per year and regime type

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

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

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

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

Economic growth by regime type per year

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

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

Economic growth by regime type per year

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

Growth advantage of democracy per year

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

Growth advantage of democracy per region

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

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

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

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