Asymmetrical Constraints on Democratic Regime Types : A Comparative Study

In two recent retrospectives – marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Transitions From Authoritarian Rule – Philippe Schmitter and Guillermo O’Donnell argue that the easy spread of democracy in the latest decades has much to do with its bare-bones character. Based on these interventions and on other recent contributions, we pose three interrelated propositions: First, structural factors today impact the level of democracy more when it is understood in a relatively ‘thin’ (minimalistic) way than when it is understood in a relatively ‘thick’ (maximalistic) way. Second, this asymmetrical pattern has been on the increase over the latest decades. Third, the years 1989-91 constitute a crucial breaking point in this respect. Even though these – or very similar – claims are frequently put forward in the literature, they have not been subjected to a systematic, large-N empirical appraisal yet. We do so by employing a two-step approach. In the first step, we test the extent to which a set of structural factors have different scales of effects on thin and thick types of democracy differently today. Second, based on a somewhat cruder measurement of thin and thick types of democracy, we expand the analysis to the whole period of the third wave, using a sliding series of OLS-regressions. These analyses, covering virtually all countries from 1973 and onwards, corroborate all the three propositions