Unidimensional measures of democracy fail to account for the complex and varied nature of political systems. We disaggregate the concept of democracy and propose a multidimensional conceptualization to account for this variation in institutional configurations.
Three theoretically informed dimensions are featured: participation, electoral contestation, and constraints on the executive. Instead of aggregating all democracy-relevant indicators into a one-dimensional measure, we present separate measures for three dimensions that are theoretically distinct. We invoke two common dimensions of electoral democracy, namely contested elections to public offices and extent of political participation (e.g., Dahl (1971), Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008)). We also measure a third a dimension pertaining to constraints on executive decision-making authority to capture core features of common understandings of “liberal democracy” (e.g., Coppedge et al. (2011), Gates et al. (2006)). We draw on these three dimensions to construct a cube of democracy patterns since 1789.
The three dimensions constitute a cube covering all regime types, in which we place countries using V-Dem data from 1789 to 2019. The cube’s main diagonal runs from a democratic to a non-democratic corner. In the democratic corner, countries enjoy the highest levels of participation, constraints and contestation, whereas in the non-democratic corner countries have very little of that. Different other parts of the cube represent quite distinct political regimes (e.g., early 19th century Britain and contemporary Russia) that might receive similar scores on aggregated democracy indices such as Polity2 or V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index.
Below, you find two animated versions of our cube of democracy patterns. They display how countries have been evolving and moving through the three-dimensional regime space since 1789. Each dot is a given country in a given year, colored by it's Regimes of the World category (Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg, 2018). We provide two alternative approaches to three-dimensional democracy measurement: a narrow participation (left) and a broad participation (right) model.
Three theoretically informed dimensions are featured: participation, electoral contestation, and constraints on the executive. Instead of aggregating all democracy-relevant indicators into a one-dimensional measure, we present separate measures for three dimensions that are theoretically distinct. We invoke two common dimensions of electoral democracy, namely contested elections to public offices and extent of political participation (e.g., Dahl (1971), Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008)). We also measure a third a dimension pertaining to constraints on executive decision-making authority to capture core features of common understandings of “liberal democracy” (e.g., Coppedge et al. (2011), Gates et al. (2006)). We draw on these three dimensions to construct a cube of democracy patterns since 1789.
The three dimensions constitute a cube covering all regime types, in which we place countries using V-Dem data from 1789 to 2019. The cube’s main diagonal runs from a democratic to a non-democratic corner. In the democratic corner, countries enjoy the highest levels of participation, constraints and contestation, whereas in the non-democratic corner countries have very little of that. Different other parts of the cube represent quite distinct political regimes (e.g., early 19th century Britain and contemporary Russia) that might receive similar scores on aggregated democracy indices such as Polity2 or V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index.
Below, you find two animated versions of our cube of democracy patterns. They display how countries have been evolving and moving through the three-dimensional regime space since 1789. Each dot is a given country in a given year, colored by it's Regimes of the World category (Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg, 2018). We provide two alternative approaches to three-dimensional democracy measurement: a narrow participation (left) and a broad participation (right) model.
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Left: Narrow Participation Model
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Right: Broad Participation Model
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This cube of democracy patterns reveals several interesting observations. We trace historical patterns of democratization, and discuss how countries across the world have taken different paths at different times. Our conceptualization shows that political systems with a similar score along a unidimensional scale are often quite distinct. In addition, across the globe for 200 years, certain configurations of political institutions rarely occur. Furthermore, our approach reveals patterns of regime convergence and divergence over time. Finally, we show that the typical pathways to democracy have changed since 1789. This multidimensional conceptualization ultimately opens up new avenues for research in which institutional variation and change can be studied in greater detail.
