Categorizing Political Regimes: New Data for Old Problems

Democratization and the dynamics of income distribution in low- and middle-income countries

“…To measure democratization, I focus on how legislatures and executives are elected and the degree to which there are vertical checks on their power. This clearly reflects only a minimal understanding of democracy, but one that is quite important for current debates about the future of the 'third wave' in developing countries (Knack, 2004;Reich, 2002). Such a measure is provided by the POLITY IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers, 2002), 8 which allows us to differentiate on an 11-point scale between an authoritarian regime (0) on one end of the spectrum and a full electoral democracy (10) on the other.…”

“…The Political Regime Change dataset (PRCD), developed by Gasiorowski (1995) and updated by Reich (2002) introduces an important distinction between liberal democracies on the one hand, and 'incomplete' or 'failing' or 'pseudo' democracies (i.e., semi-democracies) on the other. This distinction reflects a growing concern in democracy studies that the third wave of democratization has introduced competitive elections to many polities that have not had them before, but that in many cases this has not produced fundamental changes to the way in which power and privilege are organized in these societies.…”

Survival and Accountability: An Analysis of the Empirical Support for “Selectorate Theory”

“…Indeed, there is a wide literature attacking what Karl (1995) calls the “fallacy of electoralism.” 27 Nevertheless, this analysis shows that the only real explanatory value derived from the measure of selectorate theory is in comparing electoral versus nonelectoral regimes. For the interested reader, online Appendix D includes an analysis with the three‐level PRC variable, which includes a category for hybrid regimes (Gasiorowski 1996; Reich 2002). The results demonstrate that the electoral/non‐electoral distinction is key for explaining Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s results.…”

EU Democracy Promotion and the Arab Spring

“…Political liberalization is an important dimension in many indices that try to capture the '(un)democratic quality' of political regimes beyond their typological classification. These include, for example, the 'Freedom in the World' index (Freedom House 2014), the 'Polity' score of the Polity IV project (Marshall et al 2014b), and those 'democracy' indices developed by Tatu Vanhanen (Vanhanen 2000), Mike Alvarez and others (Alvarez et al 1996;Cheibub et al 2010;Przeworski et al 2000), and Gary Reich (Reich 2002). While these and other indices all have some methodological and/or conceptual flaws, such as favouring some regime characteristics over others, and correlate only to some extent (Hadenius and Teorell 2005;Högström 2013), they are indispensable for systematically comparing a larger number of countries over an extended period of time.…”