When characterizing a country, we inescapably ask whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship. That is the question of the political regime. As gross domestic product (GDP) is for macroeconomics, the political regime has become the master variable for macro political analysis. Most big events in the political history of the modern world, including the French Revolution (1789–1799), the rise of Nazism, and the fall of the Soviet Union (1991), involve struggles over democracy and dictatorship. The regime question is a key research topic in political analysis because the selection of the political regime is a central conflict in human affairs: it shapes who has what political rights.
Conceptualizations Of Political Regime
The definition of regime types has been a perennial concern in political analysis. Some scholars, following Aristotle, focus on the question How many rule? The answers—one, few, or many—originate the classical classification: autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. Others emphasize the related but distinct question Who rules? They may follow Karl Marx in identifying the regime type in terms of the dominant social coalition (e.g., bourgeois democracy or proletarian dictatorship), or the tradition of Italian realism that points to the hegemony of a “political class.” Others, following Charles-Louis Montesquieu, emphasize the question of How do rulers rule? The key alternative is whether rulers abide by constitutional principles, which differentiates republican from despotic rule. Finally, some scholars focus on the question Why do the ruled obey the rulers? For Max Weber, options include fear, tradition, admiration, normative commitment, and rational calculation.
Building on the conceptual insights of the classics of political and social thought, the contemporary literature on regimes has evolved in two directions. One strand refined the classical analytical dimensions, seeking to add nuance to the overarching distinction between dictatorship and democracy. In order to differentiate forms of dictatorship, Juan Linz (2000) introduced the key distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and called attention to sultanism as a third type of nondemocratic regime. In turn, Arend Lijphart (1999) distinguished among democracies through his contrast between majoritarian and consociational (or consensus) democracy. The richness and fertility of this conceptual work notwithstanding, its limitations from the perspective of scholars who sought to move from conceptualization to explanation were readily apparent.
One problem was that many regime conceptualizations were tailored to the characterization of sets of cases that were of interest to different scholars, which led to the proliferation of regime subtypes, and even variations on subtypes, based on an ad hoc addition of particular conceptual attributes as opposed to general conceptual attributes. Indeed, even the best of this conceptual work focused primarily either on dictatorships or democracies, rather than give the same degree of attention to the two key options simultaneously, and thus did not lend themselves to generalizations. A second problem was that even the more general conceptualizations combined attributes that were intrinsic to the characterization of regimes with other attributes that were probably better understood as possible causes of regimes (e.g., various actor characteristics) or consequences of regimes, making them analytically problematic for the purposes of causal theorizing.
Responding to these shortcomings, researchers interested in explanation largely gravitated to a second strand in the conceptual literature on regimes. This alternative revolved around Robert Dahl’s (1971, 1989) definition of democracy as a regime type characterized by competition and participation in the access to power; that is, the election of rulers in contests between two or more parties with universal suffrage. This conceptualization was narrower than the ones offered in other classifications and typologies; Dahl’s concept of political regime referred only to the procedures regulating access to top legislative and executive positions in a country or, for short, access to control of the state. But the payoff of this parsimonious conceptualization was important. It offered something the alternative approach did not: a minimum set of shared concepts around which a large community of scholars could converge. Indeed, taking Dahl’s elegant conceptualization as a point of reference, regime analysts turned their attention to an explanatory question: why do democratic regimes emerge and endure? And this research generated many rich debates that, as the following section shows, were organized along the lines of various rival explanatory factors.
Explanations Of Regime Change And Stability
Explanations of regime change can be distinguished depending on whether they focus on distant versus proximate causes, structure versus agency, and economic versus political factors. The classic debate in the study of regimes concerns the relationship between economic development and regimes. A founding observation in the study of regime change, and the core claim of modernization theory, is that richer countries are more democratic. The micro foundations of this correlation are still unclear. Critics of modernization theory share an emphasis on the conflicting nature of capitalist development, and see democracy and dictatorship as the reflection of alternative balances of power among social classes, either between the landed upper class and the urban bourgeoisie, or between the bourgeoisie and the working class. A recurrent point of reference in this debate has been Barrington Moore’s (1966) thesis that the social origins of democracy can be found in the transition to commercial agriculture, and that the rise of an urban bourgeoisie is the driving force behind democratization. But the argument that the bourgeoisie is the chief sponsor of democracy has been challenged on various grounds, including Göran Therborn’s (1977) argument that none of the great bourgeois revolutions actually established democracy. An alternative thesis, which claims that it is the strength of the working class that actually explains the rise of democracy, has been proposed and, in turn, questioned. Beyond the developed world, the rise of strong military dictatorships in countries undergoing rapid modernization in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea) motivated the insight that the relation between development and democracy may be nonmonotonic. The key insight in Guillermo O’Donnell’s work (1973) is that the process of industrialization in middle-income, dependent countries gives rise to political tensions that jeopardize the “deepening” of economic development and spur the formation of a coup coalition including business elites, civilian technocrats, and the military.
A second classic debate in the study of regimes concerns the relationship between regimes and the state. This literature focuses on the impact of state formation on democracy and explains different political regimes in terms of alternative resolutions to the struggles involved in the construction of modern state structures; that is, struggles between the state making elite and regional groups resisting incorporation into a national territory and taxation from a distant political center. A widely shared thesis is that the stronger the resistance state making elite must overcome in order to build modern state structures, the larger the scope of political rights conceded by state-builders. Yet the specific determinants of the resistance against state-making initiatives are a major focus of contention. Thus, whereas for Charles Tilly (1990) the resistance is a function of the prior social organization of the population that was eventually incorporated into the state’s territory (in particular, the level of urbanization), for Thomas Ertman (1997) it depends on the institutional organization of the Medieval representative bodies that preceded the onset of the state formation process.
Consistent with an emphasis on theories of action, a more recent body of work focuses on proximate factors of regime transformation; namely, the very processes through which political change occurs and the choices made by actors that have a direct impact on these processes. Although originally applied to the analysis of democratic breakdown, this action centered approach has flourished in concomitance with the Third Wave of democratization. In this approach, democratization is viewed as an open negotiation between moderates within the pro-democratic and authoritarian camps, who in turn are placed in strategic interaction with radical groups within the state and society.
Another body of literature focuses on political institutions, which are seen as intermediate causes: more proximate than capitalist development and state formation, but more distant than the choices of political actors. In fact, political institutions are conventionally regarded as the link between structural forces and political decisions, refracting the former and constraining the latter. The current literature on institutions is largely centered on variations in the institutional setup within the family of democratic regimes (the literature on nondemocratic institutions is considerably less developed), and hence seeks to illuminate the institutional conditions of the stability of democracy, as opposed to the causes of transitions to democracy. Debates in the institutional literature have largely centered on the durability of presidential, parliamentary, and semi presidential democracies, and the suitability of power-sharing arrangements, including federalism, for culturally diverse societies.
Recent research in formal political economy can be viewed as a systematic attempt to integrate structural and strategic explanations of democratization. Like class analysis, this literature views the emergence of democracy as the response of the elite in authoritarian regimes to revolutionary threats from below. The key contribution of this research is the understanding of democratization as an institutional change involving power sharing. In contrast to simple policy concessions, for instance, economic transfers that can be terminated as soon as revolutionaries are demobilized, power-sharing reforms are by their very nature harder to reverse. Democratization thus provides a credible mechanism to avoid costly revolutionary conflict.
In sum, the study of regimes has largely focused on the distinction between democracy and its various authoritarian alternatives, one of the oldest and most enduring distinctions in political theory. It has addressed issues of regime change and durability or, more concretely, regime democratization and dedemocratization. And it has been closely associated with some of the central themes in classical social theory, such as capitalist development and state formation, and some of the most pressing concerns within current political science, such as the attempt to build theories of political institutions and of strategic interaction. Indeed, regime analysts have engaged in wide ranging theorizing with a distinct political edge.
Research Frontiers
Recent assessments of the knowledge on regimes that has been accumulated through the work of regime analysts differ considerably. Some authors offer largely positive assessments of this literature, while others are decidedly more critical. Whatever assessment is correct, a lot of work remains to be done to capitalize on the important research on regimes done over the past five decades.
Delimiting The Dependent Variable
One weakness of the literature is its failure to clearly delimit the dependent variable of concern. One manifestation of this weakness is the tendency to conflate and confuse two different questions: whether a regime is democratic and whether a democracy is stable. Although identified in the 1970s, this problem has crept back into the literature on democratic consolidation and, as a result, theorizing has been hampered by the lack of a clearly specified outcome that requires explaining.
Another manifestation of this weakness is the persistent tendency not to distinguish adequately actors from the rules or procedures that are defining features of political regimes. This problem is readily apparent in explicit definitions of regime that include a reference to features of the actors that gain access to the state, such as the social base and support coalition of rulers, either in addition to or instead of the rules that regulate access to the state. Likewise, this is a problem with typologies of regimes that are based on social characteristics of the ruling personnel, such a being a member of the clergy, the nobility, or the populace, or other characteristics of the rulers, such as a commitment to an ideology. The negative consequences of such conceptualizations are severe. By failing to distinguish clearly between actors, a part of explanations of regimes and rules, the constitutive element of regimes, causal theorizing about regimes is necessarily confused in that a distinction between explanatory and outcome variables is not appropriately introduced.
Disaggregating The Dependent Variable
A second weakness of the literature is its failure to disaggregate the dependent variable of concern and to consider the way in which a disaggregated view of the outcome of interest might offer a way beyond the impasse in certain debates. For example, the Dahlian distinction between two regimes dimensions, competition and participation, can help clarify the debate regarding the impact of the bourgeoisie on democracy. Thus, the discrepancy between Moore and Therborn can be disentangled by showing that the bourgeois revolution explains one necessary but not sufficient component of democracy, the competition component, in that bourgeois revolutions led to the development of a peculiar institutional configuration that allows for the peaceful expression of political disagreements. It does not explain, however, the extension of the franchise to allow for the political participation of labor.
Likewise, the introduction of a distinction between competition and consultation can help clarify the debate regarding the impact of state making on democracy. Thus, the discrepancy between Tilly and Ertman can be resolved by showing that Tilly’s research goal is the same as Moore’s; that is, to account for the competition dimension of democracy; whereas Ertman is concerned with consultation, a third dimension of democracy—implicit in Robert Dahl’s definition of democracy—which basically refers to constitutional arrangements of power sharing between the executive branch and collegial bodies of decision making. In short, the literature on regimes would benefit from greater attention to the multiple dimensions of democracy and from an analysis that recognizes that different components of democracy might be explained by different factors.
Integrating Causal Theories
Another challenge facing students of regimes concerns the integration of causal theories. As discussed above, explanations focus on distant versus proximate causes, structure versus agency, and economic versus political factors. Moreover, within these families of explanations, a plethora of potential factors are routinely discussed. Some efforts have been made to integrate the considerable variety of explanatory factors. But the literature on regimes has prized more the introduction of new variables than the development of theoretical syntheses, and this emphasis has entailed some serious costs. Indeed, causal models in the statistical literature routinely include a large number of explanatory variables, usually presented as though they constituted wholly unrelated variables, a strategy that rarely leads to strong empirical tests. Thus, efforts to integrate causal theories are likely to lead to the formulation of more testable hypotheses, and even hold the promise of theoretical breakthroughs, and are well worth encouraging.
Testing Causal Hypotheses
Finally, a fourth problem with the literature on regimes concerns the way in which hypotheses have been tested. The study of regimes, for a long time the province of qualitative scholars, has benefited greatly from the recent reliance on quantitative methods. But qualitative and quantitative tests of the hypotheses in this literature have rarely been complimentary. The qualitative literature has largely used dichotomous measures and typologies, while the quantitative literature has used interval measures and indices. And the differences have been large, to the point that qualitative and quantitative scholars have actually used different measures of key dependent variables such as democracy, democratic transition, and democratic consolidation. Moreover, qualitative and quantitative scholars have focused on different explanatory variables. Specifically, while the qualitative literature has placed great emphasis on actors and choices, the quantitative literature has overwhelmingly focused on economic and institutional factors. Thus, the development of empirical tests that adequately draw on qualitative and quantitative methods remains a challenge that regime analysts must address.
The Normative Stakes
To conclude, the question Why do political regimes matter? merits a few words. This is not a simple issue to resolve. The normative import of variations in regime has usually been discussed in terms of the consequences of different regimes. In particular, a rich literature has developed on the impact of democracy, as opposed to authoritarianism, on economic growth and the respect for human rights. This research has yielded unstable results and thus has not provided a strong basis for arguing about the benefits of democracy. But such a perspective overlooks the most obvious value of a democratic regime: its intrinsic, as opposed to its instrumental, worth.
The intrinsic value of democracy is frequently overlooked because democracy, as a type of regime, consists of a set of procedures. And the tendency to consider procedures as no more than a method or a mean to arrive at an end and hence as “incapable of being an end in itself,” as Joseph Schumpeter (1942) argued, has been associated with evaluations of democracy and other regimes in terms of their results. Yet such a perspective errs in counterposing process to substance and hence failing to see, as Dahl has pointed out, that “the democratic process is packed to the full with substantive values” (1989, 164) Indeed, the value of democracy as a regime resides in its provision, in contrast to its various alternatives, of a peaceful way for all adult members of a political community to participate in the making of the decisions they are legally bound to obey. Although democracy might not be considered an absolute value, it can certainly be treated as an end in itself.
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