Democracy and Dictatorship (9788245051674) by Fagbokforlaget

DEMOCRACY and DICTATORSHIP

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Foreword

This is the English translation of Demokrati og diktatur, originally written in Norwegian and published on Fagbokforlaget in 2021. Except for the language, I have only done minor corrections and changes to this English-language version. These minor changes include updating particular numbers (e.g., average scores on democracy indices) and figures with the most recently available data. Yet, I have not made any major adjustments to the structure or added newer, longer discussions of recent scholarly literature, unless such an update is clearly required. Hence, the two versions can be regarded as substitutes, for example if it is to be used in classes with both Norwegian- and English-speaking students. The following text in this Foreword also resembles that of the Norwegian version written a few years ago:

Authors often write in the preface that the process of writing the book has been long and arduous. The process of writing this book cannot be characterised in such a manner – on the contrary, the writing process was great fun and went relatively quickly. That being said, it has taken some time. Many thanks to my family – Angélique, Carl Frederik and Caroline – who have put up with me sneaking away in the evenings or on Sunday mornings to write about democracies and dictatorships. I would also like to thank Fagbokforlaget, and especially my editor, May Helene Solberg, for believing in and helping to inspire this project. May Helene has been very important both as a motivator and advisor in this process, and she has provided very thorough comments and many concrete suggestions for improvements throughout the text. She deserves a lot of credit for this book project being realised and for the quality of the final product. Special thanks go to Sirianne Dahlum, Bjørn Erik Rasch and Tore Wig for carefully reading the first draft of the book and providing extensive and very good feedback. The manuscript became much better after incorporating these comments and suggestions. Many thanks also to Harald Eia for comments and input.

The time that I spent studying the different phenomena that I write about on the following pages is of course much longer than the time it took to write

the book, as such, although it would still be wrong to call this lengthy process arduous. I have been fortunate enough to research and publish about many of the exciting topics and questions raised in this book’s various chapters, which is reflected in the many references to studies in which I have participated. Of course, the high number of self-references could be interpreted as a sign of a slightly over-inflated self-image; there might be something to that interpretation. A kinder interpretation is that this book represents research-based communication and that I have chosen to focus on topics and studies with which I am closely familiar.

The topic addressed in Chapter 6 – the economic consequences of democracy and dictatorship – is the one I have had the longest relationship with and the one that I have worked with the most. My bachelor’s thesis in political science (2004) and my master’s theses in political science (2006) and economics (2007) dealt with this topic. The same applies to my Ph.D. thesis in political science from 2011 and several research articles that I have written alone or with great colleagues. I have also long been passionate about the questions of how democracy and dictatorship should be defined and measured. The measurement of particular democracy concepts was the subject of my very first research article from 2010, and these topics are at the core of my work on the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), which I write about in Chapters 2 and 3. Moreover, I have worked extensively on various causes of regime change and regime stability in both democracies and dictatorships, with different collaborators. Many of these articles form the basis for various discussions in this book. I often refer to and briefly describe findings from regression analyses and other statistical analyses from these and other empirical articles, which allow me to avoid including this type of systematic analysis in the book. Interested readers are advised to look up the references and immerse themselves in these studies, which provide empirical evidence for the claims made here.

As a researcher I have learned an enormous amount from supervisors, students, research assistants, good colleagues and, not least, co-authors. It is appropriate to thank you all for your indirect – but no less important – contributions to this book. They are too many to list in this foreword. However, some should be emphasised; this book could not have been written without their important contributions to co-authored studies, data collection and many fruitful conversations about how democracies and dictatorships work. In particular, I would

like to thank my fantastic colleagues at the University of Oslo, PRIO and other institutions who have co-authored one or more of the articles that I have drawn heavily on in various chapters of this book: Sirianne Dahlum, Vilde Lunnan Djuve, Haakon Gjerløw, Håvard Hegre, Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, Magnus Bergli Rasmussen, Espen Geelmuyden Rød, Simone Wegmann and Tore Wig. You have all been great to work with!

I would also like to thank the large international team behind V-Dem for their hard work and great cooperation in collecting so much data and for coauthoring several studies that I have drawn on in this book. This group is too large to list, but I want to emphasise the other “V-Dem PIs” (current and former)

–Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Staffan Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning and Jan Teorell. I have learnt a lot from all of you!

Finally, I’d like to thank my family for the great time we spend together and for listening to and discussing democracy research with me. This book would not have been written without you, especially not without Angélique, to whom this book is dedicated.

Oslo, April 22, 2024

Carl Henrik Knutsen

Innhold

Chapter 1

What is democracy and dictatorship?

1.1 Mathieu Kérékou and Louis Napoleon –dictators and democratically elected leaders 11

1.2 Political regime and regime type 17

1.3 Minimalist, institutional understandings of democracy 21

1.4 Democracy in two dimensions: Competition and participation 25

1.5 Maximalist concepts of democracy and substantive definitions of democracy 29

1.6 Common

Chapter 2 How do we measure democracy and dictatorship?

2.1 Dichotomous measures of democracy: ACLP/DD and BMR

2.2 Continuous democracy measures: Polity and Freedom House

2.3 The Polyarchy Index from V-Dem

2.4 Different concepts of democracy require different measures: Thicker democracy indices from V-Dem 62

2.5 A dictatorship can be many things: Autocracy typologies

Chapter 3

The history of democracy from 1789 to the present day

3.1 Democracy waves globally and regionally

3.2 More nuanced trends: Institutional development throughout modern history 90

3.3 More waves? How regimes have collapsed 96

Chapter

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

6.4 Bad

8.5

Chapter 1 What is democracy and dictatorship?

1.1 Mathieu Kérékou and Louis Napoleon –dictators and democratically elected leaders

The country of Benin is a thin strip of land in West Africa, sandwiched between Togo and Nigeria. Benin is a relatively small country, with about 10 million inhabitants. Mathieu Kérékou, a military officer, was the country’s president from 1972 to 1991 and from 1996 to 2006. These two long periods as president make him the most central political figure in Benin after independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Why is he relevant to mention at the beginning of a chapter on democracy and dictatorship?

Kérékou is an especially interesting figure because he has led both a dictatorship and a democratic regime – he has been both a dictator and a democratically elected leader in Benin. As late as 1989, he responded to strikes and emerging mass protests with brutal repression, leading to numerous arrests and deaths (Allen 1992: 47). A few years later, he served as the leader of a democratically elected government. Barring the possibility that Kérékou experienced a moral epiphany, this example undermines the widespread notion that democratic leaders are always morally superior to ‘evil’ dictators. So, what separated Kérékou’s two presidential terms?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Benin was characterised by strikes (among university students, teachers and bureaucrats) and mass protests that would undermine the foundations of Kérékou’s one-party socialist regime. Under

massive pressure, the old dictator made a surprise announcement on 5 December 1989: The People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin abandoned its ideological commitment to Marxist-Leninism. On 9 December that year, he accepted the transition from a one-party to a multi-party regime and free elections (Bratton & van de Walle 1997:1). A major national conference was held in February 1990, with participants from various organisations, opposition groups and social classes. The participants at this conference eventually decided to declare the old constitution null and void. A new constitution came into force, and various civil rights were given stronger protection. Furthermore, parliamentary and presidential elections were held in early 1991, in which Kérékou lost to Nicéphore Soglo. Kérékou accepted the defeat and expressed regret and a willingness to change (Bratton & van de Walle 1997: 2). Benin’s transition to a democratic regime was thus completed. Nevertheless, in the next election in 1996, Kérékou actually returned to the political scene and won.

With these developments, Benin became one of the earliest examples of democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa. Its early experiences with democracy were initiated by popular mobilisation and further developed through the abovementioned national conference (an example emulated by other African countries experiencing democratisation later in the 1990s). In several (though far from all) African countries that underwent democratisation during the 1990s, democratic forms of government survived, with the protection of various political and civil rights and incumbent governments resigning voluntarily in the event of electoral defeat – a key characteristic of a well-functioning democracy (Przeworski et al. 2000).

These features – free multi-party elections and protection of civil rights (e.g. related to freedom of association and freedom of expression) – are among the most important ones when researchers try to define what a democracy is and how it differs from dictatorship. This is also reflected in Benin’s changing score on the Polyarchy Index in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset (Coppedge et al. 2024a) around 1990; with the introduction of free multi-party elections, the country’s score increased notably (see Figure 1, which uses version 14 of the V-Dem dataset).

The Polyarchy Index is one of several democracy measures described in more detail in section 2.3. It is worth mentioning here that Polyarchy can vary between 0 (least democratic) and 1 (most democratic) and that it is a good measure of

what is called electoral democracy. By electoral democracy, we mean political systems where there is real competition (i.e., the opposition has a good chance of winning) for positions of power in multi-party elections, in which large parts of the population can vote. The main components of the Polyarchy Index are more specific sub-indices measuring freedom of expression, freedom of association, voting rights, whether there are free and fair elections and whether holders of key political offices are elected.

Figure 1 Benin’s score on the V-Dem Polyarchy Index from 1960 to 2023.

Notes: The solid line indicates the so-called point estimate (the best estimate of the Democracy score in a given year), while the dashed lines indicate the uncertainty in the Polyarchy Index score by indicating V-Dem’s “high code” and “low code” (±1standard deviation) respectively. See Section 2.3 for details on the structure of the Polyarchy Index.

Figure 1 shows Benin’s Polyarchy score from 1960 to 2023. Immediately after independence from French colonial rule in 1960, Benin’s score increased for a short period, before falling in the mid-1960s. It rose slightly in the late 1960s, before falling significantly after the military coup that brought Kérékou to power in 1972. By the mid-1970s, Benin’s score on the Polyarchy Index was down to

0.09.1 To illustrate how undemocratic this score is, consider that in 2018, only five countries in the world had a score of 0.09 or lower: Qatar, North Korea, China, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.

The most striking feature of Figure 1 is the dramatic jump that occurs around 1990. This increase in the Polyarchy score is in line with the above descriptions of the fall of the Kérékou regime and the rise of the new democratic regime. In 1989, Benin’s Polyarchy score was still at a very low 0.12, while by 1992 it had risen to 0.63 – not far behind established democracies with a longer history of free and fair elections measured in the same year, such as Botswana (score of 0.71), India (0.73), Japan (0.80) and the UK (0.82). Despite some variation, Benin – even in the years in which Kérékou has served as president after winning multi-party elections – remained fairly consistent with Polyarchy scores between 0.6 and 0.7 and earned the right to retain the democracy label, at least until the late 2010s. In recent years, Benin’s three decades old democracy has faced harder times, and the country has experienced a marked change in a more autocratic direction. In the early 2020s, it was less clear whether Benin could be called a democracy – the conclusion depends, inter alia, on how high of a bar we set for using the ‘democracy’ label. What is clear, however, is that Benin around 2020 was both a) less democratic than it was, say, ten years prior, and b) more democratic than it was under Kérékou’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s.

The example of Benin shows that countries can undergo democratic change relatively quickly, but also that former dictators can become democratically elected leaders. In these latter instances, when democratisation led to less repression and censorship, it was not because “new and kinder” leaders took over. Rather, the changes in Benin were due to a change in the political system, and the new system imposed completely different guidelines on how leaders could and would conduct politics and behave. The exact same leader may have incentives to pursue very different policies when the surrounding political system changes.

1 Note the dashed lines in Figure 1: they indicate the uncertainty around the best estimate of the Polyarchy score at any point in time. There are several sources of uncertainty in democracy measures such as Polyarchy. Among other things, even well-informed experts will assess countries’ political practices and how democratic they are somewhat differently. The uncertainty estimate in the Polyarchy Index is largely due to the fact that different country experts who contribute to the V-Dem coding have different assessments of everything from how free and fair the elections really are to how strong the protection of freedom of expression is in practice.

Before we move on to discuss definitions of democracy and dictatorship, we will briefly look at another example of a person who has served as both a democratically elected leader and a dictator. Louis Napoleon (1808–1873), or Napoleon III, was the nephew of the even more famous Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1848 – an important year in the history of European democracy, which is sometimes referred to as the “year of revolutions” – Louis Napoleon was elected, by a wide margin, as the first president of the Second French Republic. The elections were held with universal male suffrage and must be considered relatively democratic, at least compared to most other elections in the world in the 19th century.

However, Louis Napoleon and France were to move in the opposite direction of what Kérékou and Benin did 150 years later: Napoleon’s France moved from being relatively democratic to becoming relatively authoritarian. According to the Second French Republic’s constitution, presidents could only serve one term before relinquishing power. However, like many other leaders before and after

Notes: The solid line indicates the “best guess”, or point estimate, while the dashed lines indicate the uncertainty in the Polyarchy Index score by indicating V-Dem’s “high code” and “low code” (±1 standard deviation), respectively.

Figure 2 France’s score on the V-Dem Polyarchy Index from 1789 to 1870.

him, Louis Napoleon was unwilling to give up power. Therefore, on 2 December 1851, he carried out what is often called a “self-coup” (or autogolpe). When doing so, he had potential opponents arrested and introduced strict censorship. By introducing a new constitution in 1852, he further concentrated power in his own hands, and later that year he was proclaimed emperor with the title Napoleon III. He remained in power until 1870, when his army was surrounded by Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War, and he was forced to surrender.

France’s score on the V-Dem Polyarchy Index from 1789 to 1870 is shown in Figure 2. In the revolutionary year of 1848, France scored 0.40 on the index, up from 0.21 in 1847 (according to version 14 of the V-Dem dataset; Coppedge et al. 2023). France held the highest Polyarchy score in the world in 1848 and was thus the most democratic country according to this index, with Belgium in second place (0.34) and the USA in third place (0.33). By 1853, just after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, France’s Polyarchy score had more than halved from its 1848 value to a paltry 0.18. This placed France just behind countries such as Mexico (0.20) and Bolivia (0.21) that year in terms of degree of democracy. France remained relatively undemocratic until Napoleon III was driven from power, after being defeated by the Prussians and their allies. Hence, Louis Napoleon seized power in the most democratic country of the time in 1848 before staging a self-coup and returning France to a dictatorship. After he was driven from power, and with the introduction of the Third French Republic, France would once again become one of the world’s most democratic countries (Polyarchy score of 0.48 in 1872, beaten only by New Zealand, Switzerland and Australia that year).

This 170-year-old story of Louis Napoleon’s path to becoming Napoleon III is not only interesting for historical reasons. It remains highly relevant to understanding the current situation in many countries, in that it illustrates a common way that democracies “die” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018). Indeed, in recent decades, most democracies that have collapsed into dictatorships have not changed their regime due to military coups. Instead, democratic collapses, or at least the weakening of democracies, have resulted from the elected leader – such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey or Viktor Orbán in Hungary – concentrating power in their own hands and weakening or completely abolishing democracy “from within” (Svolik 2019). We will discuss this phenomenon in more detail in Chapter 3, when reviewing key developments among democracies and dictatorships around the world from 1789 to the present day. Before that, Chapter 2 will discuss how we can and should

measure democracy. Yet, before we can say anything about good and bad measurements, we need to know what the concept we want to measure is. Therefore, the rest of this chapter discusses definitions that deal with political regime types in general, and definitions of democracy and dictatorship, more specifically.

If we follow the practice of everyday language and simply refer to regimes as “democracies” or “dictatorships” without specifying exactly what we mean by the terms, and, by extension how we should measure them, we risk talking past each other and misclassifying regimes. With such inaccuracies and lack of precision, we also open the door for other psychological mechanisms to influence how we classify regimes. For example, political ideology can colour our perception of whether a regime is “good” or “bad” and thus whether it deserves the label “democracy” or “dictatorship”. To take two relevant examples from the early 2020s, those who ideologically lean towards the left and describe themselves as socialists might be more inclined to classify Nicolás Maduro’s “Bolivarian regime” in Venezuela as a democracy, while those who are ideologically closer to the populist right might be more inclined to classify Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as democratic.

If we allow such ideological perceptions to strongly influence our regime classifications, we are not being good political scientists. To be so, we need the help from clear and precise definitions of what democracy and dictatorship is. This will, in turn, allow us to measure these concepts more accurately, thereby enabling more valid comparisons across countries and over time. Clear definitions and good measures are also key to studying the causes and effects of democracy and dictatorship. In the rest of this chapter, we will therefore take a step back and discuss what we mean by democracy and dictatorship. How have these terms been defined throughout history by political scientists and others, and what are the prevailing definitions of democracy and dictatorship today?

1.2 Political regime and regime type

A political regime can be defined as the informal and formal rules that determine how to choose who holds political power (i.e., who are the leaders who make important political decisions) and how these leaders can be removed.2 Since

2 There are slightly different variants of the definition of a regime. In addition to rules for appointing and removing leaders, some add rules for how (important) political decisions are made as a characteristic of a regime.

leaders can be installed and removed in numerous ways, political regimes can also be grouped according to many different characteristics and placed in different categories.

One of the oldest categorisation schemes for political regimes can be found in Aristotle’s Politics (2000). In this almost 2,400 years old book, Aristotle classified regimes according to how many govern (one, few, or many) and whether the governing is based on the self-interest of those governing or the interests of the wider community. An example of a more recent principle for classifying political regimes is put forward in Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), where the authors distinguish between political regimes according to the number of members in the so-called winning coalition. The winning coalition is the group(s) – be they military officers, bureaucrats, landowners, business owners, or industrial workers – that the leader relies on to stay in power. Bueno de Mesquita et al. were primarily concerned with the number of people in the winning coalition, and how this characteristic shapes how leaders behave and what kind of policies are implemented. Another recent example is Tsebelis (2002), who distinguished regimes according to how many actors (including groups of people) and institutions can function as so-called veto players – i.e., the actors and institutions that are in a position to stop the development of new policies, if they so wish. When the number of veto players increases, it becomes more difficult to bring about political changes that break with the status quo, and policy will be characterised by greater stability and less dynamism. A third example comes from Cheibub et al. (2010). In addition to categorising regimes into (the main categories) democracy and dictatorship, these authors further divided democracies into parliamentary, semi-presidential and presidential democracies. They also divided dictatorships into authoritarian monarchies, military regimes and civilian dictatorships. These are just some of the many regime categorisations found in what is now an extensive political science literature on the subject. However, the most common way of categorising regimes among contemporary political scientists – and in public debate – is by degree of democracy. In other words, we talk about democracies and dictatorships as regime types, where dictatorships are often defined by their lack of democracy (see, e.g., Przeworski et al. 2000). Degree of democracy is one characteristic of a political regime, and it is a characteristic by which we can classify all regimes (across countries and eras, even eras before the breakthrough of ‘modern democracy’; see Knutsen, Møller

and Skaaning 2016). Of course, regimes with the same degree of democracy – be it high or low – may differ in other respects, for example in terms of the size of the winning coalition or the number of veto players, or in terms of presidentialism versus parliamentarism. Still, most political scientists regard the degree of democracy as one of the most important characteristics of a political regime. Even though we all refer to the terms “democracy” and “dictatorship” when we discuss with each other, and most people agree that the concept of democracy is linked to multi-party elections where a large proportion of the adult population has voting rights, the specific contents of the democracy concept are controversial. Countless definitions specify exactly what democracy is and what is required for us to have a democracy in practice. In fact, there are so many definitions of democracy that we need to sort them according to some characteristics. It is common to divide definitions of democracy into the following types:

1 continuous versus categorical (typically dichotomous) definitions

2 institutional versus substantive definitions

3 minimalist versus maximalist definitions

Before discussing these three common distinctions, let me emphasise that different definitions of democracy can combine different positions along the three distinctions. To suggest a couple of examples of concrete definitions that we will discuss below:

• Przeworski and colleagues’ definition of democracy in Section 1.3 is categorical, institutional, and minimalist

• Dahl’s definition of democracy in Section 1.4 is continuous, substantive, and minimalist

• Beetham’s definition in Section 1.5 is continuous, substantive, and maximalist

Many other combinations can be found in the literature. But let us take a closer look at what lies behind these three distinctions:

1) The distinction between continuous and categorical definitions concerns whether the definition of democracy allows for degrees of democracy, as measured on a continuous scale, or whether it operates with clearly separated

categories, where a regime either belongs to a particular category or not. Continuous definitions and measures of democracy – such as the Polyarchy measure used in the introduction – allow us to say, for example, that today’s Scandinavian countries are more democratic than a country like Indonesia, which in turn is more democratic than Russia, which in turn is more democratic than North Korea. Continuous definitions of democracy thus allow a more fine-grained ranking of countries by degree of democracy.

Categorical definitions of democracy do not allow for such a graded understanding of democracy but operate with crisp regime categories. The most common subtype of such categorical definitions of democracy is a dichotomous definition, which divide regimes into only two types: democracy and non-democracy. The latter regime type is also often called dictatorships, autocracies or authoritarian regimes. Unless otherwise specified, these three terms for non-democracies will be used synonymously in this book (as is also common practice in current political science).

2)The distinction between institutional and substantive definitions concerns whether the definition of democracy answers the core question “What exactly is democracy?” by referring to one or more concrete political institutions (such as multi-party elections, but also formal rights such as voting rights, etc.) or whether it refers to one or more abstract principles (political equality, popular control over politics, etc.). We refer to the former as institutional3 and the latter as substantive definitions of democracy.

It is already worth pointing out that those who favour substantive definitions of democracy do not mean that political institutions are insignificant for establishing a democratic regime. Rather, they believe that multi-party elections, voting rights, etc. are not the features that fundamentally define what it means to be democratic, even though most would say that multi-party elections, voting rights, etc. are necessary, in practice, to ensure that the principles underlying their substantive definition of democracy are fulfilled. For example, it is difficult to imagine that the principles of political equality and popular control over politics can be secured in modern largescale states, in practice, without multi-party elections in which all adult citizens can participate.

3 Institutional definitions of democracy are often also referred to as procedural definitions of democracy.

3) The distinction between minimalist and maximalist definitions concerns whether the definition requires one or a few aspects (e.g., only competition between different political parties or candidates in elections) or many aspects (e.g., broad participation rights within the population, protection of civil rights, rule of law, equal distribution of political resources among the population, space for open-minded and informed political debate, etc. in addition to competition between parties in elections) to be in place to ensure a high degree of democracy. Definitions that say something like “democracy is far more than just free and fair elections” and then list a number of factors that must be in place to ensure “true democracy” are maximalist definitions of democracy.

We will begin our review of democracy definitions by discussing a widely used minimalist definition. This definition is based on Joseph Schumpeter’s work, and it has been refined more recently by Adam Przeworski and colleagues. In addition to being minimalist, this definition is dichotomous (rather than continuous) and institutional (rather than substantive).

1.3 Minimalist, institutional understandings of democracy

An important starting point for the modern literature on democracy is Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of democracy from 1942. Schumpeter defined democracy, or more precisely the “democratic method”, as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (Schumpeter 1976: 269).

According to Schumpeter, a regime is democratic if elections are held with true competition, where different political elites – whether they be candidates or parties – compete for the favour of the voters. An important element in this respect is that such elections are held regularly (see, e.g., Alvarez et al. 1996; Przeworski et al. 2000), so that the population can change their minds and vote for new candidates or parties if they believe that the ruling parties and leaders have done a poor job.

This Schumpeterian understanding of democracy is an institutional (or procedural) one (Rasch 2000), where democracy is understood as a method of organising politics and leadership elections rather than as a value in itself. Schumpeter strongly believed that democracy could be important and desirable,

not primarily by virtue of its intrinsic value, but because the system of peaceful elite competition for power could lead to several other desirable consequences. Adam Przeworski and co-authors have further developed the Schumpeterian definition of democracy, notably in the book Democracy and Development from 2000 (see also, for example, Alvarez et al. 1996). Central to this minimalist understanding of democracy is that precise criteria must be used to define regimes to avoid subjective judgements and various measurement errors affecting how we score democracies and dictatorships. The phenomenon of “democracy” must therefore have clear boundaries so that it is not lumped together with other phenomena.4 Several other researchers (see, e.g., Munck & Verkuilen 2002) have praised Przeworski and colleagues’ definition of democracy and associated measures both for its clear logical structure and for its high degree of reliability (i.e., low degree of unsystematic measurement error). Przeworski and colleagues’ dichotomous categorisation of regimes is based on four criteria, and a regime must meet all four to call itself democratic (if it fails on at least one of the criteria, the regime is classified as a dictatorship):

1) Government elections are held.

2) Elections to parliament are held.

3) These elections have several alternative candidates or parties, and the elections must be regular.

4) The competition in multi-party or multi-candidate elections is genuine. (In practice, this means that we must observe that governments voluntarily resign after electoral defeats.)

According to Przeworski and co-authors, the first criterion for a regime to be able to call itself democratic is that the executive authority (i.e., government power) must either be appointed directly through elections (e.g., direct presidential elections) or indirectly via an elected legislative assembly (e.g., prime minister appointed by an elected parliament in a parliamentary system). The

4 According to Przeworski and colleagues, these are basic prerequisites for empirically analysing the causes and effects of democracy in a systematic way. If the definitions of “democracy” and, for example, “rule of law” overlap conceptually, there is little point in studying the relationship between democracy and rule of law empirically – by definition, we have already assumed such a relationship.

second criterion means that elections are also held to determine who will sit in the legislature.

The third criterion stipulates that such elections must present several alternatives to the voters. If party lists are voted on in a parliamentary election, it must be possible for several parties to submit lists, and if it is a presidential election, several presidential candidates must be able to declare their candidacy. The elections held in the Soviet Union, where only candidates from the Communist Party could stand for election, would not ensure democracy according to this criterion.

The third criterion further emphasises that elections must be relatively regular, and in particular, that elections should not be stopped and removed as an institution even if an elected leader or a parliament should attempt to do so. Many elected leaders throughout history have wanted to stop the practice of multi-candidate elections as soon as they have come to power, as we saw in the example of Napoleon III. This practice is not compatible with democracy, according to the third criterion in Przeworski and colleagues’ definition.

The fourth criterion required for a regime to call itself democratic is supposed to capture whether the competition in multi-party or multi-candidate elections is genuine. Whether the competition between candidates and parties is genuine has proved to be the most difficult criterion to specify and measure. We will return to this in the next chapter when discussing the operationalisation of Przeworski and colleagues’ concept of democracy. Nevertheless, this criterion is very important for distinguishing democracies from so-called electoral authoritarian regimes (which we will look at in more detail later); even when several alternative candidates or parties are officially allowed to run,5 an election does not necessarily imply real competition in practice. For example, it may be that the incumbent leadership can cheat or manipulate the election to guarantee their own victory, despite the opposition being formally allowed to put candidates on the ballot paper. The incumbent regime can achieve this through several means, such as stuffing ballot boxes full of fictitious ballot papers, beating up people queuing to vote in areas where the opposition is strong, or putting the

5 In other regimes, multiple candidates and parties are allowed to run, but there are still strict restrictions on who is allowed to run. In today’s Iran, for example, there are multi-candidate presidential elections, but the powerful, unelected Guardian Council carries out a rigorous screening of candidates before the elections.

opposition candidate in prison on false corruption charges during the election campaign. The list of ways to cheat is long, but the goal is the same; the incumbent regime’s candidates will win the contest no matter what. Few experts on Russian politics or citizens of Russia, for example, doubt that Vladimir Putin will win his next election, even though candidates from a large number of parties are (formally) competing.

As noted, for a regime to be able to call itself a democracy, Przeworski and colleagues require that all four of these criteria must be met. There must be elections to the legislature and executive (at least indirectly), there must be multiple parties/candidates in these elections, new elections must be held at regular intervals, and there must be genuine competition in the elections.

According to this understanding, dictatorships are simply those regimes that do not fulfil all these criteria. If a regime fails one or more criteria, it cannot be categorised as a democracy. Since we only operate with two regime categories here, the regime is then categorised as a dictatorship. A regime may violate all four criteria (as in today’s Saudi Arabia or the autocratic kingdom of Denmark-Norway from 1660 to 1814), or it may violate only one of them (such as today’s Russia, which has multi-party elections but where competition for government power is not genuine); the regime is categorised as a dictatorship regardless. This practice reflects a common understanding of the concept of dictatorship in contemporary political science, namely that dictatorship is an umbrella term for all regimes that are not democratic, or that score relatively low on democracy (if we operate with a graded/continuous understanding of democracy rather than a dichotomous one).

Schumpeter’s and Przeworski and colleagues’ definitions have been important for both theoretical and empirical democracy research in recent decades. However, these are not the only definitions of democracy, even if we narrow the focus to minimalist and institutional understandings of democracy. For example, Boix et al. (2013) provided a somewhat broader understanding of democracy (which is still minimalist) by requiring a certain minimum standard for how widespread voting rights are in the adult population, in addition to criteria relating to competitive elections. Boix and colleagues also modified and softened the criteria for judging the minimum standard of free and fair competition, relative to Przeworski and colleagues. Boix and colleagues did not require governments to have resigned voluntarily in elections, but they did

require the absence of evidence of electoral fraud to call elections free and fair. These authors thus defined a country as democratic if it also fulfils the minimum standards for voter turnout and competition in free and fair elections. The authors required that at least 25 per cent of the adult population should have voting rights. Throughout history, in practice, this has usually meant 50 percent of the adult male population.

Thus, like Przeworski and colleagues’ definition, Boix and colleagues’ definition is minimalist (although it is slightly broader in that it includes participation in the form of voting rights), it focuses on political institutions, and it is dichotomous. The next section will examine an important continuous definition of democracy, which classifies regimes along two dimensions.

1.4 Democracy in two dimensions: Competition and participation

Democracy can be defined more broadly than Schumpeter did by including several other dimensions. Schumpeter’s definition focuses on one particular aspect of democracy, namely the electoral (or competitive) aspect. As the discussion of Boix and colleagues’ (2013) definition in Section 1.3 above indicates, it is not only competition between several parties or candidates that is important for democracy, but also broad popular participation in political processes, and in particular, the right to stand for and vote in elections. A well-known definition of democracy that also captures this added dimension is the definition given by Robert Dahl in his 1971 book Polyarchy. In his schema, Dahl classified political regimes according to two dimensions: the degree of competition between elites in elections, and the degree of inclusion or participation. The latter relates to the extent of the rights to participate in political processes among the adult population, particularly voting rights in elections.

Both in Polyarchy and later books, such as On Democracy (1998), Dahl elaborated on the institutional and other conditions that must be in place to ensure that a country scores highly on competition and on inclusion/participation. We will not go into these details here, partly because we will take a closer look at one particular measure of democracy, the Polyarchy Index, in the next chapter on operationalisation and the measurement of democracy. This index seeks to measure (or “operationalize”) Dahl’s concept of regime and thus incorporates

several of the factors that Dahl believed were key to ensuring competition and participation, respectively.

Another important point, according to Dahl, is that in practice, it is simply impossible to achieve the highest possible score along the two dimensions. Having maximum scores on both dimensions simultaneously is only an ideal case, according to Dahl, and such a theoretical ideal can be called “democracy”. Ordinary regimes will probably never be able to fulfil these criteria, Dahl argued, but they can still score quite high along both dimensions, in which case we can call them “polyarchies”. Although this conceptualisation (‘polyarchies’ for actual regimes and ‘democracy’ only for the ideal) never quite caught on, many democracy researchers even today agree with Dahl that we can think of the ‘perfect democracy’ only as a theoretical ideal – no regime that we have observed empirically has managed to reach this ideal. This is reflected, for example, in that the V-Dem Polyarchy Index has never given any country a top score (of 1), despite the fact that measurements have been taken for 202 countries from 1789 to the present day. Denmark was the closest in 2012–2014 (according to the v.14 version of V-Dem released in 2024), with 0.92.

So, how do we characterise regimes that score very high on competition but low on inclusion? The widely used regime measure by Przeworski and colleagues (2000) was only based on the competition aspect. According to Dahl (1971), regimes that hold elections with real competition between parties or political elites cannot be considered democracies if they do not have a meaningful extension of voting rights (and other participatory rights). Instead, Dahl emphasises, these regimes can be called “competitive oligarchies”, where narrow elite groups rule rather than the broader population, even though these elite groups compete in elections.

A classic example of a competitive oligarchy is Britain in the early 19th century (especially before the so-called First Reform Act of 1832), where two parties (Tory and Whig) competed for power and took turns on having the prime minister. Just under five per cent of the adult population had the right to vote, exclusively men. Women’s right to vote in parliamentary elections was not introduced in the UK until 1918. So, in the early 1800s, there was fierce competition for power between different political elites in the country, but only a relatively small number of men decided the outcome of this competition. Figure 3 shows the proportion of the adult population with voting

rights in the UK from 1789 to 2018. The data is taken from the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2023a).

Figure 3 Proportion of the adult population with voting rights in the UK, 1789–2018. Data from V-Dem version 14 (Coppedge et al. 2023a).

Competitive oligarchies, such as Britain in the early 19th century and South Africa under the Apartheid regime, are not the only “asymmetrical” regimes that score high on one dimension but low on the other. There have been – and still are – many regimes that offer formal participation rights in elections to the country’s entire adult population (universal suffrage), but where the elections do not involve any real competition for power. In some regimes, such as the communist regime in the former Soviet Union, there was no formal competition between parties, despite universal suffrage. Voters could vote for or against a (pre-approved) list of candidates from the ruling communist party. This is an example of a regime with a high inclusion score but a low competition score. No political scientist would consider such a regime to be democratic.

In recent decades (see, e.g., Miller 2015a), an increasing number of non-democracies worldwide – for example, Russia under Putin, Turkey under Erdoğan and Venezuela under Maduro – have held multi-party elections. To the untrained eye, such regimes may appear to be democracies, at least in formal terms. Elections are

What is democracy, and how do we measure it?

What defines a high-quality democracy, and what factors increase the risk of countries sliding into dictatorship? How does democracy impact economic development, inequality, and education policy?

The study of democracy, democratisation, and autocratic politics is central to comparative politics and other subfields of political science, such as international relations and public administration, as well as to disciplines like economics, sociology, and history.

This comprehensive book provides an introduction to the study of democracy and autocracy. It includes chapters on defining and measuring democracy, the historical development of democracy, the causes of regime stability and change, and the developmental and other effects of democracy and autocracy. The book offers an up-to-date exploration of the important questions engaging democracy researchers.

Aimed at a broad audience, including bachelor students in introductory comparative politics courses, this book offers an accessible and current overview of what research reveals about democracy and autocracy, their causes, and their consequences.

Carl Henrik Knutsen (b. 1981) is Professor and Research Group Leader at the University of Oslo and a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Knutsen is co-PI and Steering Committee Chair of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and leads several research projects, including an ERC Consolidator Grant on autocratic politics. His work focuses on measuring democracy and dictatorship, the causes of democratisation and regime change, policy-making in dictatorships, and the economic consequences of democracy.

ISBN 978-82-450-5167-4

Democracy and Dictatorship (9788245051674)

Carl Henrik Knutsen and DEMOCRACY DICTATORSHIP