Democracies and Dictatorships
The prototype of democratic politics that underlies this analysis reflects Schumpeter's
(1942) focus on filling governmental offices by elections. Democracy is a political regime
in which rulers are selected through free and contested elections. Operationally, democracy
is a regime in which incumbents lose elections and leave office if they do. Hence, my
definition of democracy is Schumpeterian or “electoralist.” Dictatorships are treated as a
residual category, “non-democracies.”
Obviously, one can argue about definitions, and indeed there is a vast literature attempting
to define what we should deem to constitute a democratic regime. But while one can, and
some do, engage in endless hair splitting, most people readily agree whether a particular
country is a democracy. Inkeless (1990: 5-6) found that the scales of democracy developed
independently by Gastil (1990), Coppedge and Reinicke (1990), Bollen (1980), and Gurr
(1990) are all highly correlated. Przeworski et al. (2000: 56) reported that their dichotomous
classification of regimes is almost perfectly predicted by all these scales. Any two informed
persons asked whether a particular country has a democratic regime during a particular year
would almost certainly say the same, even if no criteria were specified in advance to
influence their judgments. Hence, the results presented below do not depend on the
particular classification of political regimes.