Persistence and Change in Political Systems, 1800–1971

Abstract

This study reports the codification of basic authority characteristics of 336 national political systems (polities) that functioned in 91 nation-states between 1800 and 1971. In form the typical 19th-century polity was an autocracy with minimal functions. Its 20th-century counterpart was either an activist plural democracy or an activist autocracy. The incidence of system-transforming political change has been equally high and pervasive in both European and Third-world polities, but greater in the 20th century than the 19th. The data are used to test three hypotheses that attribute the persistence and adaptability of political systems to their authority characteristics. “Institutionalization” arguments about the stability-enhancing effects of complexity and directiveness receive no consistent support. Conventional beliefs about the greater durability of democracies vs. autocracies vs. anocracies (uninstitutionalized polities) are confirmed only in Europe in the 20th century. The most durable historical and Afro-Asian polities have been either autocratic or anocratic. The data generally support the hypothesis that “pure” political systems—consistently democratic or consistently autocratic—are more durable than systems of mixed authority characteristics. Long-term trends in political “development” and their determinants are discussed in the light of the findings.

Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

“…Finally, 'anocratic' polities that have values in the middle range of the Polity scale are often countries in transition, on the way to either democracy or autocracy, and tend to be less persistent than clear autocracies or democracies (see Gleditsch & Ward, 1997;Gurr, 1974). 3 Many have argued that political transitions themselves may influence the risk of violent conflict, and it can be difficult to separate the potential impact of transitions from the impact of anocratic polities per se (Gleditsch, 2002a;Hegre et al, 2001).…”

Democratic revolutions as institutional innovation diffusion: Rapid adoption and survival of democracy

“…Democratization on a world scale has typically been quantitatively analyzed in terms of the cumulative change into one minimum value of democracy, often on the basis of the polity data sets, in which institutional scores are available for all countries with populations of more than half a million (currently 164) and covering all years from 1800 [19,[28][29][30][31][32]. The value of this data set for studies of democracy has been questioned on the grounds that the ordinal scale character of data is seldom considered [33]; but here we exploit the categorical character for our analysis of transition paths to democracy.…”

“…The sum of these two scores in turn makes up the polity score, which functions as a measure of location on an autocracy-anocracy-democracy continuum for each nation ('anocracy' defined as having some but not all of either autocratic or democratic institutions) [30]. Anocracy is typical for a policy in transition from or to democracy, but may theoretically also be a state of stasis.…”

“…In the early 1970s, Gurr, analyzing his Polity data, reported that continents differ greatly in terms of democracy's persistence [30]. Not surprisingly, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, elections in Poland the same year, and subsequent years in other previously Soviet dominated nations and republics, lead first to intensive research on modes and paths of transition to democracy, and later to an increasing interest in the analysis of conditions for consolidation in newly established, "third wave" democracies [35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

Constructing Multivariate Analyses (of Dangerous Dyads)

“…In the first place, to repeat, their dependent variable is MIDs, not war, so their evidence does not establish that there is no correlation between democracy and peace, if the latter is defined as the absence of war (rather than the absence of a MID). There is also the possibility that democracy leads to stability (see, e.g., Gurr, 1974), rather than, or in addition to, stability leading to democracy. If so, then a control for stability would eliminate the relationship between democracy and peace because it is an intervening rather than a confounding variable.…”