Thanks for writing this, I found it very interesting.
You make it sound like democracies are all relatively quite similar—e.g. basically copies of either the UK or the US political systems, with few refinements. In contrast, the autocracies vary quite broadly, and the autocrats have potentially more room to change their institutional setup. So maybe our binary/linear categorisation is misleading—really there is a narrow cluster in polity-space of democracies, and the rest is all ‘autocracy’. Democracy spread very easily during a narrow window of history that favoured this cluster, but our prior should be against this persisting.
Hahaha I love hearing someone else say “cluster in polity-space”. I use that phrase often but the other political scientists never do. It’s an incredibly useful framework for describing correlated variations and side-stepping pointless debates about definition.
That’s all spot on. Stable alternative models are rare and poor performing (Belgium, Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya).
The steel man for a democratic long run future: In the long run, the political system that survives longer should dominate. Once democracies pass a production threshold around 10,000 gdppc transitions become extremely rare. The half-life of a rich parliamentary system is really long > 200 years. By comparison autocracies have been unstable so far in all periods.
Thanks for writing this, I found it very interesting.
You make it sound like democracies are all relatively quite similar—e.g. basically copies of either the UK or the US political systems, with few refinements. In contrast, the autocracies vary quite broadly, and the autocrats have potentially more room to change their institutional setup. So maybe our binary/linear categorisation is misleading—really there is a narrow cluster in polity-space of democracies, and the rest is all ‘autocracy’. Democracy spread very easily during a narrow window of history that favoured this cluster, but our prior should be against this persisting.
Hahaha I love hearing someone else say “cluster in polity-space”. I use that phrase often but the other political scientists never do. It’s an incredibly useful framework for describing correlated variations and side-stepping pointless debates about definition.
That’s all spot on. Stable alternative models are rare and poor performing (Belgium, Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya).
The steel man for a democratic long run future: In the long run, the political system that survives longer should dominate. Once democracies pass a production threshold around 10,000 gdppc transitions become extremely rare. The half-life of a rich parliamentary system is really long > 200 years. By comparison autocracies have been unstable so far in all periods.