“…Dahl, 1971;Huntington, 1968;O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986), but until now, we lacked sufficient data and methods to investigate the details of how democracy develops. With detailed measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem, Coppedge et al, 2019b), a large sample of liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2018 (FASDEM), and new domination analysis techniques adapted from sequencing methods in evolutionary biology (Lindenfors et al, 2018;Lindenfors, Krusell, and Lindberg, 2019), we can for the first time identify the relative order of how electoral democracy develops. Deciphering the pattern of development across the ordinal scales of 24 components of electoral democracy (Teorell et al, 2019), the domination analysis identifies which institutional reforms came earlier in the liberalization sequence.…”