Transitions to nowhere: Western teleology and regime-type classification

Abstract

Comparative Political Communication studies often take the same basic regime-type Stage of Democracy Development (SDD) classification as a basis for analysis. In this model, societies can fall into three basic categories: (1) established democracies; (2) transitional democracies; or (3) authoritarian regimes. This article presents a critique of the SDD model. First, it enshrines ethnocentric prejudices as a basis of global comparison in political communication research. It also lacks analytical consistency and scholars using these categories do not feel compelled to justify their choices. Not rarely, they outsource the task of classifying societies to non-scholarly institutions. This makes the model vulnerable to institutional political bias. Finally, the SDD model—which originated in the time of the US global hegemony—is becoming growingly obsolete, in a time when the global order evolves toward a more multipolar structure, and western democracies (the US, in particular) experience a major crisis.