Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics

3 Drawing Boundaries: The Crafting of Intermediate Regime Categories

38 THREE Drawing Boundaries The Crafting of Intermediate Regime Categories ........................................................................................................................... The notion of convergence around a single political model, a matter of much discussion in the heady days of 1989, increasingly seems to run counter to political realities in the post–cold war era. Thus, even as scholars have recognized the unprecedented shift toward democracy—for the first time in history it is credible to claim that more than half the countries in the world fulfill the requisites of a minimalist definition of democracy—they have also grappled with the variety of ways that politics is practiced around the globe. One important strand of thinking has focused on the quality of democracy (O’Donnell 2004b; Munck 2004: 450–56; Diamond and Morlino 2005). Another potentially fruitful literature, which serves as the point of reference for this chapter, has focused on cases that have been variously characterized as instances of semidemocracy (Case 1996), illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997), semiauthoritarianism (Ottaway 2003), authoritarian democracy (Sakwa 1998), competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2002), electoral authoritarianism (Schedler 2002) or, more generically, hybrid regimes (Karl 1995; Diamond 2002). This literature on hybrid regimes seeks to exploit a key insight: a considerable number of countries seem to be neither fully democratic nor blatantly authoritarian and thus are best characterized with intermediate categories. Yet, even as this literature calls attention to the broad variety of current political regimes and exposes the limitations of concepts that are conventionally used to describe political practices, it suffers from its own problems. Methodologically, it tends to ignore standard practices that have been refined in the literature on measurement and that for some time have been used to generate large-N datasets on regimes and democracy. Substantively, it largely overlooks an established theoretical literature on democracy and political parties that offers key insights relevant to the methodological choices in- DRAWING BOUNDARIES 39 volved in the creation of measures that envisage intermediate categories. In short, though this literature focuses on a real-world problem of great import, it has still not proposed a clear and methodologically appropriate way to generate data, let alone presented systematic data that could be used to conduct a rigorous empirical analysis. This chapter seeks to show how the insight at the heart of the literature on hybrid regimes might be developed by focusing on the methodological issues involved in crafting intermediary categories of political regime. It emphasizes basic issues regarding the methodology of measurement but also argues that new thinking about core methodological issues is called for. Specifically, the central point of this chapter is that the measurement of each regime dimension requires an appreciation of the fundamental role of equivalence-difference relationships that upsets the deeply ingrained perception that researchers must choose between measures that highlight distinctions of kind or of degree. A secondary point is that more attention needs to be given to the decisions involved in the aggregation of measures of multiple regime dimensions and, specifically, to the way in which these decisions revolve around a distinct type of part-whole relationship. These are complicated matters, and it is important to be sensitive to the manner in which methodological discussions can turn into a long detour that slows down progress in responding to pressing questions about politics. Yet it is equally important to recognize that circumventing methodological issues most likely leads to unwarranted knowledge claims. Thus, it is advisable to tackle these methodological questions head on and to build on the accomplishments of existing scholarship, drawing whenever possible on clues offered in the substantive literature as to how various methodological choices might be confronted. 3.1. Boundaries and Intermediate Categories: Some Preliminary Considerations ........................................................................................................................... From a methodological perspective, a central issue raised by the recent literature on hybrid regimes concerns the identification of thresholds that establish boundaries between categories and between cases and, relatedly, the development of measures that include multiple thresholds and thus entail intermediate categories and cases. This is, of course, not a new issue in political science. After all, Aristotle’s classical typology is based on a trichotomous 40 MEASURING DEMOCRACY distinction regarding the number of power holders (one vs. few vs. many) and a dichotomous distinction regarding the use of power (the common good vs. private interest). Yet students of political regimes have still to address in a satisfactory way the methodological issues that are relevant to drawing boundaries and exploring intermediate categories. One of...