Svend-Erik Skaaning

Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach

InthewakeoftheColdWar,democracyhasgainedthestatusofamantra.Yetthereisnoconsensusabouthowtoconceptualizeand measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argueforanewapproachtoconceptualizationandmeasurement.Wefirstreviewsomeoftheweaknessesamongtraditionalapproaches. Wethenlayoutourapproach,whichmaybecharacterizedas historical, multidimensional, disaggregated,and transparent.Weendby reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

Assessing the Robustness of Crisp-set and Fuzzy-set QCA Results

Configurational comparative methods constitute promising methodological tools that narrow the gap between variable-oriented and case-oriented research. Their infancy, however, means that the limits and advantages of these techniques are not clear. Tests on the sensitivity of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) results have been sparse in previous empirical studies, and so has the provision of guidelines for doing this. Therefore this article uses data from a textbook example to discuss and illustrate various robustness checks of results based on the employment of crisp-set QCA and fuzzy-set QCA. In doing so, it focuses on three issues: the calibration of raw data into set-membership values, the frequency of cases linked to the configurations, and the choice of consistency thresholds. The study emphasizes that robustness tests, using systematic procedures, should be regarded as an important, and maybe even indispensable, analytical step in configurational comparative analysis.

Measuring the Rule of Law

This article offers a comparative review of seven rule of law measures. It demonstrates that the measures differ in both form and appropriateness and that the differences have consequences for the empirical results. The shortcomings are, among others, restrictions in scope and availability of disaggregate data, insufficient codebooks, and unjustified aggregation procedures. In most cases, the task of conceptualization is not grounded in theory, and key principles of the rule of law are left out while more inappropriate elements are included. These findings suggest that more precaution is required in the construction and employment of rule of law measures.

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.

A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy

Recent years have seen an efflorescence of work focused on the definition and operationalization of democracy. One debate concerns whether democracy is best measured by binary or graded scales. Critics of binary indices point out at that they are overly reductionist, while defenders counter that the different levels of graded measures are not associated with a specific set of conditions. Against this backdrop, we propose to operationalize electoral democracy as a series of necessary and sufficient conditions arrayed in an ordinal scale. The resulting “lexical” index of electoral democracy, based partly on new data, covers all independent countries of the world from 1800 to 2013. It incorporates binary coding of its subcomponents, which are aggregated into an ordinal scale using a cumulative logic. In this fashion, we arrive at an index that performs a classificatory function—each level identifies a unique and theoretically meaningful regime-type—as well as a discriminating function.

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.

Measuring High Level Democratic Principles Using the V-Dem Data

While the definition of extended conceptions of democracy has been widely discussed, the measurement of these constructs has not attracted similar attention. In this article we present new measures of polyarchy, liberal democracy, deliberative democracy, egalitarian democracy, and participatory democracy that cover most polities in the period 1900 to 2013. These indices are based on data from a large number of indicators collected through the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. We present and discuss the theoretical considerations and the concrete formula underlying the aggregation of indicators and components into high level measures of democracy. In addition, we show how these measures reflect variations in quality of democracy, given the respective ideals, in 2012. In the conclusion scholars are encouraged to make use of the rich dataset made available by V-Dem.

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.