The principal components of electoral regimes: separating autocracies from pseudo-democracies

Abstract

A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard tool to study this question, are based on the a priori assumption that improvement in any individual feature strengthens democracy overall. We show that this assumption does not always hold. We use the V-Dem dataset for a quantitative study of electoral regimes worldwide during the twentieth century. We find a so-far overlooked trade-off between election capability and civil liberties. In particular, we identify a threshold in the democratization process at which the correlation between election capability and civil liberties flips from negative to positive. Below this threshold, we can thus clearly separate two kinds of non-democratic regimes: autocracies that govern through tightly controlled elections and regimes in which citizens are free but under less certainty—a distinction that existing democracy indices cannot make.