‘Determining the nature of each regime was not completely straightforward either’ and ’historically accepted nature’ — Could you elaborate a bit? Was the threshold simply ‘peaceful transition of power from one leader to the next after holding free and fair elections’ – probably the absolute minimum one could come up with – or were there other conditions that had to be met?
The Swiss federal state, for instance, dates back to 1848 – but women’s suffrage at the federal level was only introduced in 1971. Judging by today’s standards one could easily argue that pre-1971 Switzerland was not really a democracy, yet a hundred years ago she certainly was considered an example to follow.
You could pretty much say the same thing about the evolution of almost all Democracies over 100 years old. Regarding Switzerland, for this study, it would have still been classified as a democracy because the decision-making was of a democratic, not autocratic, nature. Of course, in 1970 Swizerland would have likely been considered a flawed democracy due to its lack of suffrage, but in this study we are not looking at the variation in democratic-quality (as we did in the previous post) just if the over-all mode of decision making was considered democratic or not.
One could try to expand the analysis by determining the failure rate based a qualitative understanding of democratic, or less democratic regimes, but this would be require a different set of metrics that could be applied, relatively uniformly, too hundreds of regimes spanning back to 1900. This would, of course, be interesting but it would represent a significantly larger project.
‘Determining the nature of each regime was not completely straightforward either’ and ’historically accepted nature’ — Could you elaborate a bit? Was the threshold simply ‘peaceful transition of power from one leader to the next after holding free and fair elections’ – probably the absolute minimum one could come up with – or were there other conditions that had to be met?
The Swiss federal state, for instance, dates back to 1848 – but women’s suffrage at the federal level was only introduced in 1971. Judging by today’s standards one could easily argue that pre-1971 Switzerland was not really a democracy, yet a hundred years ago she certainly was considered an example to follow.
You could pretty much say the same thing about the evolution of almost all Democracies over 100 years old. Regarding Switzerland, for this study, it would have still been classified as a democracy because the decision-making was of a democratic, not autocratic, nature. Of course, in 1970 Swizerland would have likely been considered a flawed democracy due to its lack of suffrage, but in this study we are not looking at the variation in democratic-quality (as we did in the previous post) just if the over-all mode of decision making was considered democratic or not.
One could try to expand the analysis by determining the failure rate based a qualitative understanding of democratic, or less democratic regimes, but this would be require a different set of metrics that could be applied, relatively uniformly, too hundreds of regimes spanning back to 1900. This would, of course, be interesting but it would represent a significantly larger project.