Wiesner Karoline, Bien Samuel, Wilson Matthew C
Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2024 Oct 9;11(10):240262. doi: 10.1098/rsos.240262. eCollection 2024 Oct.
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard tool to study this question, are based on the assumption that improvement in any individual feature strengthens democracy overall. We show that this assumption does not always hold. We use the V-Dem dataset for a quantitative study of electoral regimes worldwide during the twentieth century. We find a so-far overlooked trade-off between election capability and civil liberties. In particular, we identify a threshold in the democratization process at which the correlation between election capability and civil liberties flips from negative to positive. Below this threshold, we can thus clearly separate two kinds of non-democratic regimes: autocracies that govern through tightly controlled elections and regimes in which citizens are free but under less certainty-a distinction that existing democracy indices cannot make.
当今社会面临的一个关键问题是全球范围内民主的兴起与衰落。然而，选举和公民自由等民主特征如何影响这种变化尚不清楚。民主指数是研究这一问题的标准工具，它基于这样一种假设，即任何一项个体特征的改善都会总体上增强民主。我们表明，这一假设并非总是成立。我们使用V-Dem数据集对20世纪全球选举制度进行定量研究。我们发现了选举能力与公民自由之间一种迄今被忽视的权衡。特别是，我们确定了民主化进程中的一个阈值，在这个阈值上，选举能力与公民自由之间的相关性从负变为正。因此，在这个阈值以下，我们可以清楚地区分两种非民主政权：通过严格控制选举进行治理的独裁政权和公民自由但不确定性较小的政权——这是现有民主指数无法做出的区分。
