Jørgen Møller

Beyond the Radial Delusion: Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy and Non-democracy

Typologies of political regimes in general and of democracy in particular proliferate in the literature. However, few efforts have been devoted to systematically scrutinizing the empirical relationship between the constitutive components of liberal democracy. In this article, we reassess the most promising such attempt, namely, the research agenda on “defective democracies.” Doing so, we identify a more general problem, which we term the “radial delusion.” This problem has to do with discarding the notion of a hierarchy among the attributes, thus creating empirically empty, diminished subtypes. We solve this by constructing an alternative typology that embraces well-established theoretical constructs and assigns referents to all relevant types. Furthermore, the empirical distribution virtually conforms to the hierarchical logic of a perfect simple order scale which justifies the construction of a democracy scale.

The Third Wave: Inside the Numbers

Recent democratic setbacks have raised the specter of a reverse wave of democratization and emphasized the importance of the gray zone between closed autocracy and liberal democracy. Mapping the frequency of different regime types in different world regions (1972–2012), we identify a set of interesting cross-regional similarities and differences and show that the recent setbacks have affected only some regions. We conclude that much indicates that we have entered a situation of overall democratic stagnation. While this entails a lot of movement forth and back, these movements are mostly confined to the gray zone regime types of electoral autocracies and minimalist democracies.

Regime Types and Democratic Sequencing

Many countries today appoint their governments on the basis of competitive elections but fall short with respect to other properties of liberal democracy. Such regimes can be classified in a conceptual typology based on a hierarchical distinction between electoral rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Empirical realities provide an almost perfect match with this hierarchy as high respect for the rule of law hardly ever exists without high respect for civil liberties, which almost never exists without high respect for electoral rights. This finding questions the potential of an ‘authoritarian’ pathway to liberal democracy which privileges the rule of law over electoral rights.

Autocracies, democracies, and the violation of civil liberties

Research on autocracies and their consequences has been a growth industry in the latest decade. Nonetheless, the relationship between the type of autocracy and the violation of civil liberties has largely been ignored. In this article, we employ a new dataset, which includes cross-temporal data on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly/association, freedom of religion, and freedom of movement, to shed light on this issue. Analysing 182 countries in the period 1979–2008, we show that democracies repress civil liberties less than autocracies do, whereas we find little evidence to the effect that different kinds of autocracies violate civil liberties to different degrees. However, we also show that the differences between democracies and autocracies have declined starkly since the Cold War. Finally, our results demonstrate that the difference in the extent to which democracies and autocracies repress civil liberties is larger for the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly/association than for the freedom of religion and freedom of movement. We take the general difference between the two categories of liberties as evidence that autocracies repress political liberties more than private liberties because the former presents levers for oppositional activity. We argue that the cross-temporal differences are a consequence of the spread of more minimalist democracies since the end of the Cold War.

The three worlds of post-communism: revisiting deep and proximate explanations

Since the upheavals of 1989–1991, the post-communist countries have embarked upon three distinct political trajectories: a path leading to democracy in the Western part of the setting, a path leading to autocracy in the Eastern part of the setting, and an intermediate path – both in geographical and political terms – leading to ‘defective’ democracy. This article seeks to explain the emergence of these three worlds of post-communism. Using typological theory as the principal methodological tool, we revisit Herbert Kitschelts distinction between deep (structural) and proximate (actor-centred) explanations. The empirical results show that the post-communist setting is characterized by striking regularities in the form of clustering in the explanandum as well as the explanans. The orderings of referents on both the deep and the proximate attributes show a remarkable co-variation with the political pathways of post-communism – and with each other. The presence of such systematic empirical regularities lends support to two conclusions. First, both kinds of explanations elucidate the present variation in post-communist political regime types. Second, the variation on the deep factors largely explains the variation on the proximate factors. Kitschelts general plea to dig deeper is thus supported, and the explanatory quest turns into a challenge of theoretical integration.

The state-democracy nexus: conceptual distinctions, theoretical perspectives, and comparative approaches

The notion that the state and the political regime are conceptually distinct but causally intertwined figures prominently in Western political theory. It is all the more surprising that the potential relationships between the state and democracy have tended to be neglected in empirical research. To systematically interrogate the state-democracy nexus, we argue that three criteria must be fulfilled. First, it is necessary to distinguish conceptually between three distinct aspects of stateness, namely, monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement. Second, the theoretical relationships between each of these attributes and democracy must be considered. Third, the consequent propositions must be assessed using comparative approaches. We place the different contributions to this special issue in this framework.

State capacity and political regime stability

Two recent strands of research have proposed that state capacity facilitates autocratic and democratic survival, respectively. While convincing arguments sustain each of these expectations, prior research has neglected a crucial distinction with respect to state capacity: that between monopoly on violence and administrative effectiveness. In this article, we first formulate propositions about the relationship between each of these different aspects of state capacity and political regime stability. We then subject these propositions to empirical assessment through cross-national, statistical analysis. Our findings show that state capacity does indeed tend to enhance regime stability in both autocracies and democracies. Yet, the analyses also reveal that what primarily matters in autocracies is the monopoly on violence whereas administrative effectiveness is what stabilizes democracies. Finally, we discuss alternative interpretations of the patterns and conclude that our results go a long way toward making sense of apparent inconsistencies in the findings of previous studies.

Explanatory Typologies as a Nested Strategy of Inquiry Combining Cross-case and Within-case Analyses

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing the general explanatory power of a typological theory on the cross-case level have been devised. Second, rigorous selection procedures for within-case analysis are lacking. Against this background, we introduce a systematic measure that helps researchers assess the explanatory power on the cross-case level, first, within the scope set by a particular typological theory and, second, by investigating the transferability of the theory beyond these scope conditions via an increase in the number of cases. Drawing on recent methodological works on nested analysis, we show how researchers can identify key cases for process tracing based on the cross-case explanatory fit of the typological theory. We illustrate the purchase of our procedures by revisiting seminal studies from the field of comparative historical analysis.

The Medieval Roots of Democracy

A point of consensus in the so-called “sequencing debate” is that in Europe state-building preceded the development of political accountability, eventually in the form of democratization, by centuries. This is arguably a misrepresentation of the European sequence. Strong institutions of constraints were an integrated part of the political regime form when large-scale state-building began following the sixteenth-century military revolution. European state-builders were therefore checked by countervailing political power but were also able to channel authority through existing institutions. A comparison with Russia shows that it was on this basis that both the modern state and modern democracy emerged and took root in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

On the limited interchangeability of rule of law measures

During the latest decade, empirical research on the causes and consequences of the rule of law has expanded and, in the process, become extremely influential. However, we show that a number of widely used indices of the rule of law are not interchangeable. This lack of interchangeability is reflected in the fact that they are based on different defining attributes, to some extent cover distinct empirical scopes, do not correlate highly with each other, and support different explanatory factors. Until a consensus has been established with respect to the conceptualization of the rule of law, scholars are thus not free to opt for the measure that fits their data requirements best regarding spatial and/or temporal scope. Instead, they must carefully assess the content validity vis-a-vis their stipulated definition of the rule of law. Given the amount of money and time poured into the rule of law agenda, the problems identified reflect the lack of maturity of ‘good governance’ research.