Abstract
This article is about how political regimes should generally be classified, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945–99 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes.
This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine-grained measure would require.
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Scott Mainwaring is Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and Eugene Conley Professor of Government at the University of Notre Dame. His latest books areRethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford University Press, 1999);Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, coedited, 1997); andBuilding Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 1995, coedited).
Daniel Brinks is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has a J.D. from Michigan Law School and practiced law for nearly ten years before coming to Notre Dame.
Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He will begin a position as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall 2001 semester.
We thank David Collier, Michael Coppedge, Caroline Domingo, Frances Hagopian, Charles Kenney, Steven Levitsky, Gerardo Munck, Guillermo O'Donnell, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Claudia Baez Camargo, Carlos Guevara Mann, Andrés Mejía, and Carlo Nasi provided suggestions for our regime classifications.
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Mainwaring, S., Brinks, D. & Pérez-Liñán, A. Classifying Political Regimes in Latin. St Comp Int Dev 36, 37–65 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687584
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687584