Democracy-Dictatorship Index

Based on the regime binary classification idea proposed by Mike Alvarez in 1996, and the Democracy and Development (or DD measure, ACLP dataset) proposed by Przeworski, Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland developed a six-fold regime classification scheme, resulting what the authors called as the DD datasets. The DD dataset covers the annual data points of 199 countries from 1946 (or date of independence) to 2008.

Six-fold regime classification scheme and its rules

The DD index first classifies the regimes into two types: democracies and dictatorships. For democracies, it categorizes them into three types: parliamentary, semi-presidential and presidential democracies. For dictatorships, monarchic, military and civilian dictatorship. " Based on a "minimalist" theory of democracy, the index relies on rules regarding the existence of competitive elections. Resorting to democratic concepts by Karl Popper and Joseph Schumpeter, Przeworski defended the minimalist approach, citing Popper that "the only system in which citizens can get rid of governments without bloodshed."

Four rules

For a regime to be considered as a democracy by the DD scheme, it must meet the requirement of four rules below:

The chief executive must be chosen by popular election or by a body that was itself popularly elected.
The legislature must be popularly elected.
There must be more than one party competing in the elections.
An alternation in power under electoral rules identical to the ones that brought the incumbent to office must have taken place.

Some regimes may meet the first three rules, but lack an alternation in power in its historical past; these regimes are classified as dictatorships because of cases where the incumbent only allows elections as long as they keep winning, and would refuse to step down if they lost. However, since they might also give up power willingly, the regime is marked with a type II value to signal potential classification errors where a democratic regime may be falsely classified as dictatorship.. This does not indicate cases of semi-democracy or semi-dictatorship.. The authors acknowledged that the last rule is more complicated to implement, but stated that it helps researchers to control potential errors and removes subjective judgement from the classification.

3 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

Countries

Note: the most recent dataset was released in 2008.

The Democracy-Dictatorship Index has the main regime types of "democracy" and "dictatorship" and three sub-types for each as well. Democracies can be either parliamentary, semi-presidential, or presidential and dictatorships can be civilian, military, or royal. Many countries which are seen as otherwise democratic are dictatorships because there has yet to be an alternation in power since their incumbent government has never lost an election. Therefore, it is impossible to know if the regime is a democracy or a dictatorship, so DD Index considers them dictatorships until an alternation in power occurs.

Democracy classification

Democracies are classified by the rules in which executives can be appointed or removed and can be either presidential, mixed or semi-presidential, or parliamentary. These names do not have to correspond to the official or colloquial titles of any of the countries offices. For example, DD could classify a country which has a legislative assembly whose official name is "the parliament" but still classify it in any of the three categories. The classification depends on the rules outlining the relationship between a country's government, legislative assembly (often called the legislature), and head of state. The government composes the chief executive and the heads of the executive departments. The chief executive can take many titles including chancellor, prime minister, or premier and the heads of the executive departments can bear different titles and be called different things. In the United Kingdom, for example, the chief executive is the prime minister, and the ministers are the heads of the executive departments, which together compose the government.

Legislative responsibility

The first distinction made is whether a country has a government has legislative responsibility, i.e. whether a majority vote in the legislature can remove the sitting government without cause. The required majority needed to remove the sitting government varies between countries but is termed a vote of no confidence. Some countries (such as Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Israel) require that the vote of no confidence also specify who is going to replace the sitting government to minimize the time without an interim government, essentially replacing one government with another. This type of vote is termed a constructive vote of no confidence. Sometimes sitting governments will attach a vote of no confidence clause to a piece of legislation they want passed, effectively tying the survival of the government on the piece of legislation.

Head of state

The second distinction made is whether the head of state is popularly elected for a fixed term. The head of state may be unelected and still be classified as a democracy. Popularly elected means that the head of state is directly elected by the citizens or elected by an assembly which then elects them (an example being the electoral college in the United States). In Germany, the head of state is elected by regional legislatures and not popularly elected. Elected heads of state are usually referred to as "president." The phrase "fixed term" indicates the once the head of state is chosen, they serve a known and a limited number of years before another election is held, and they cannot be removed from the office in the meantime via a vote of no confidence.

The head of state in most parliamentary democracies formally appoint the head of government. Some countries, such as Greece and Bulgaria, stipulate who the head of state chooses as head of government. In the former, for example, the President must appoint as Prime Minister the leader of the largest party in parliament, who has three days to gain the confidence of a majority thereof. Some countries, such as Sweden, instead charge another person entirely with choosing the head of government, such as the presiding officer of the legislative assembly.

Classification

The first distinction made is whether a democracy's government is responsible to the legislature. If it is not responsible, it is a presidential democracy. If it is, then a further distinction is made between democracies where the head of state is popularly elected and those where the head of state is not popularly elected. If the head of state is popularly elected for a fixed term then, the democracy is mixed or semi-presidential. If the head of state serves for life or is not popularly elected or a fixed term, then the democracy is parliamentary.

Definitions

A presidential democracy has a government that does not need the majority support of a legislature to stay in power. A semi-presidential (mixed) democracy has a government that needs the majority of support from a legislature to exist and whose head of state is popularly elected for a fixed term. Parliamentary democracy is the same as semi-presidential but has heads of state which are not popularly elected for a fixed term, typically either monarchs or officials not chosen by popular elections.

Comparison with other democracy-measuring data sets

The DD dataset is limited to 199 countries after 1946, whereas Boix, Miller, & Rosato, 2013 proposed a data set from 1800 to 2007, covering 219 countries. The 2010 version of Polity data series covers 189 countries from 1800 to 2009. Gugiu & Centellas developed the Democracy Cluster Classification Index that integrates five democracy indicators (including the DD dataset, Polity dataset), clustering 24 American and 39 European regimes over 30 years.