Institutionalized autocracy - Governance & partnership - Development outcomes - African Development Indicators
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"Authoritarian regime" in Western political discourse is a pejorative term for some very diverse kinds of political systems whose common properties are a lack of regularized political competition and concern for political freedoms. The term Autocracy is used and defined operationally in terms of the presence of a distinctive set of political characteristics. In mature form, autocracies sharply restrict or suppress competitive political participation. Their chief executives are chosen in a regularized process of selection within the political elite, and once in office they exercise power with few institutional constraints. Most modern autocracies also exercise a high degree of directiveness over social and economic activity, but we regard this as a function of political ideology and choice, not a defining property of autocracy. Social democracies also exercise relatively high degrees of directiveness. We prefer to leave open for empirical investigation the question of how Autocracy, Democracy, and directiveness (performance) have covaried over time. An eleven-point Autocracy scale is constructed additively. Operational indicator of autocracy is derived from codings of the competitiveness of political participation using the following weights:
Authority Coding Scale Weight
Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment (XRCOMP):
(1) Selection +2
Openness of Executive Recruitment (XROPEN):vonly if XRCOMP is coded Selection (1)v
(1) Closed +1
(2) Dual/designation +1
Constraints on Chief Executive (XCONST):
(1) Unlimited authority +3
(2) Intermediate category +2
(3) Slight to moderate limitations +1
Regulation of participation (PARREG):
(4) Restricted +2
(3) Sectarian +1
Competitiveness of Participation (PARCOMP):
(1) Repressed +2
(2) Suppressed +1
The logic of this "institutionalized autocracy" scale is similar to that of the institutionalized democracy scale, below, and it is subject to the same kinds of operational redefinition to suit different theoretical purposes. Note that the two scales do not share any categories in common. Nonetheless many polities have mixed authority traits, and thus can have middling scores on both Autocracy and Democracy scales. Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2006, annual, cross-national, time-series and polity-case formats coding democratic and autocratic "patterns of authority" and regime changes in all independent countries with total population greater than 500,000 in 2006 (162 countries in 2006; SPSS and Excel data; PDF codebook). Note: Individual Polity IV Country Reports can be examined by checking the website http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity06.htm; changes made during the most recent update (2006) are listed in an Excel file in http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm Source: Center for Systemic Peace with reference to the Polity IV Web site at www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm
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