Pirker-Diaz Paula, Wilson Matthew C, Beier Soenke, Wiesner Karoline
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. 2025 Aug 6;12(8):250457. doi: 10.1098/rsos.250457. eCollection 2025 Aug.
In light of the current rise of authoritarian regimes and the anti-liberal tendencies in some established democracies, understanding the dynamic and statistical properties of political regimes is of critical importance. Despite their relevance, a comprehensive quantitative assessment of these dynamics on a historical scale remains largely unexplored, and the notion that democratization is an irreversible process has gone mostly unchallenged. This study provides a rigorous and quantitative analysis of political regimes worldwide by examining changes in freedoms of expression, association and electoral quality throughout the twentieth century. Utilizing the multidimensional V-Dem dataset, which covers over 170 countries across more than a century, alongside tools from statistical physics, we demonstrate that historical political regime dynamics follow a scaling law, which is a hallmark of diffusion. We identify three distinct dynamical regimes in the data: super-diffusive behaviour in destabilizing autocracies, random-walk dynamics in hybrid regimes and sub-diffusive behaviour in democracies and stable autocracies. Using these results, we also offer a novel perspective on the propensity of civil conflict.
鉴于当前威权政权的兴起以及一些老牌民主国家中存在的反自由主义倾向，理解政治政权的动态和统计特性至关重要。尽管它们具有相关性，但在历史尺度上对这些动态进行全面的定量评估在很大程度上仍未得到探索，而且民主化是一个不可逆转的过程这一观念大多未受到挑战。本研究通过考察整个二十世纪表达自由、结社自由和选举质量的变化，对全球政治政权进行了严谨的定量分析。利用涵盖一个多世纪以来170多个国家的多维V-Dem数据集，以及统计物理学的工具，我们证明历史政治政权动态遵循一种标度律，这是扩散的一个标志。我们在数据中识别出三种不同的动态政权：不稳定独裁国家中的超扩散行为、混合政权中的随机游走动态以及民主国家和稳定独裁国家中的亚扩散行为。利用这些结果，我们还对国内冲突的倾向提供了一个新的视角。
