Giulia Mallone

DEMOCRACY AND DICHOTOMIES:

A Pragmatic Approach to Choices about Concepts

David Collier and Robert Adcock

STRUCTURE

1. INTRODUCTION

2. CONCEPT FORMATION

3. EXAMPLES OF GENERIC JUSTIFICATIONS

for gradations

for dichotomy

1. EXAMPLES OF SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATIONS

study of events and subtypes

empirical distribution and normative evaluation

“bounded wholes” and sharper differentiation

1. CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTIONShould scholars engaged in comparative research on democracy treat the distinction between democracy and nondemocracy as a dichotomy, or in terms of gradations?

What conceptual reasonings justify the different approaches?

Dichotomy: political systems composed of different dimensions but still to be treated as a single entity, that can be either fully democratic or not at all. It involves the establishing of a single cut-point to represent the lowest level of democracy accepted. “Half-democratic” cases are not acknowledged. More fine-grained information might be underutilized How to update the cut-point with the evolving of the theoretical understanding and of the empirical knowledge? How to set it in the first place?

Gradations: democracy is always a matter of degree. It detects incremental effects and specificities of the systems, without the bias of a pre-determined cut-point. What procedure to use for aggregating observations in scales?

Pragmatic approach: While constrained by broader scholarly understanding of a concept's meaning, specific methodological choices are better understood in light of the theoretical framework, purpose and context of the research. Concepts and operationalizations may evolve with changes in the goals and contexts.

CONCEPT FORMATIONG. Sartori:

A classificatory reasoning, based on the setting of cut-points, is necessarily the first step in concept formation → Dichotomies are fundamental.

Intermediate positions:

CONTRADICTORIES vs CONTRARIES alive – dead; big – small democracy - not

OBJECT CONCEPT vs PROPERTY CONCEPT “bounded whole” characteristic that cases →DICHOTOMY display to various degrees →GRADED TREATMENT

→ More productive to establish an interpretation justified by its suitability to the immediate research, rather than trying to build a definitive interpretation of a concept's meaning.

GENERIC JUSTIFICATIONSGradations Bollen: democracy as “the extent to

which the political power of the elite is minimized and that of the non-elite is maximized”. Democracy as a continuous concept, that regimes display in different degrees.

→ measurement error is less with a graded approach, assuming democracy to be a continuous concept.

Dahl: democracy as an ideal type that regimes approach to various degrees. The classificatory treatment is an undesirable simplification of the wide space created in between the two extreme dimensions.

Dichotomies Sartori: “what makes democracy

possible should not be mixed up with what makes democracy more democratic”.

→ gradations only as a second step, to be applied to cases previously classified as democratic through the use of an initial dichotomy. On the basis, idea of democracy as “bounded whole”.

Przeworski: ambiguity of classification not due to the approach but instead to inappropriate scoring procedures or insufficient information.

Some regimes are more democratic than others. Where offices are not contested, they should not be considered democratic to any degree.

SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATIONS 1/3

Focus on eventsO'Donnell & Schmitter: transition as the interval between one political regime to another → calls for dichotomous approach to establish a threshold.

Bollen & Jackman: how to establish conceptual equivalence across different historical contexts? Where to locate a single starting date for democracy?

Responses: adopt a context-specific approach (ex. Compare regimes with regards to the norms of a relevant time period); focus on two or more successive thresholds → introduces gradations. Dichotomy still applicable to cases of abrupt processes of democratization.

Focus on subtypesO'Donnell: “delegative democracy” as a subtype of democracy, specifically defined as a regime that is above a dichotomously established threshold of democracy but with some further differentiating attribute. Inclusion in a subtype conditioned to the belonging to a larger and dichotomously defined set of democratic countries.

SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATIONS 2/3

Empirical distribution of casesWhere a gap is observed between cases of democracy and nondemocracy, a dichotomy may provide a more adequate summary of the empirical contrasts, while a graded approach can successfully evaluate whether a gap exists. Gradation is more suitable to capture a highly uniform distribution.

Huntington: democracy treated as dichotomous, with few intermediate cases. More recently observed that due to the growing diffusion of democratic institutions, democracy itself is becoming more differentiated.

Diamond: proportion of intermediate cases has doubled between 1990-1997.

Normative evaluationO'Donnel & Schmitter: “procedural minimum” version of democracy as normative point of departure. “Political democracy” composed of free and fair elections, universal suffrage, protection of political and civil liberties (from Latin American and Southern European experiences). → dichotomous distinction.

Dahl: dichotomy is morally inadequate because it fails to see the empirical variety → not embedded in a specific historical episode, the approach is more flexible.

SPECIFIC JUSTIFICATIONS 3/3

The idea of bounded wholesSartori: systems characterized by constitutive attributes that are either present or absent. If one of these defining attributes is not present, the other ones change their meaning.

When a freely elected government lacks effective power to rule, is the attribute of competitive elections to be considered as meaningful? → supports the bounded wholes approach.

When in many new democracies the elected president governs with authoritarian undercurrents, is his being an elected leader completely irrelevant? → rejects the bounded wholes approach.

Sharper differentiationDahl and Diamond: combine gradations with named categories, applying to marginally democratic types names that convey further information (ex. “partially illiberal democracy”).

Collier & Levitsky: use “diminished subtypes”, with adjectives that cancel part of the original meaning (ex. “male democracy” lacks of women's suffrage). →proliferation of subtypes may lead to conceptual confusion.

CONCLUSION

There is no single, “best” meaning for all concepts.

Justifications for the use of a dichotomous or graded approach: have to focus on specific arguments about the goals and context of research should be as specific as possible may change according to the evolution of goals and context should allow scholars to choose, from a range of alternatives, the most suitable context-specific meaning, and still to recognize the validity of other decisions in other contexts.