Introduction
Scholars have employed terms such as dictatorship, tyranny, monarchy, oligarchy, and totalitarian regime, among others, to describe non-democracies, past and present. At its broadest, non-democracy refers to all forms of government that deny citizens meaningful institutional channels for making choices about their collective well-being. The choices can range from limited to no ability for public input in the selection of political leaders and/or limited or no decision-making power over the allocation of public resources.
While there are 'varieties of democracy' ranging from liberal to social democratic, with different institutional configurations such as presidential and parliamentary, there still exists common principles such as divided government and accountability to the people. All democracies have electoral systems, an executive, a legislature, and a judiciary. In contrast, non-democracies do not have any common organizational features. Instead, they run the gamut from rule by a single person with minimal institutionalization to complex bureaucratic systems under collective leadership. In this sense, non-democracies are a much broader and confounding collection of countries to study.
Empirically, non-democracies are also distinct from democracies in important ways. Non-democratic regimes are much more variable in their economic performance (Gandhi 2008), swinging from extreme levels of nationwide poverty to becoming economic dynamos, and presenting sustained economic growth rates unseen in recorded human history. An example would be China from 1978 to 2020. In a reversal of this pattern, the kingdom of Chad and the post-independence state of Chad (1960-present) went from being a major trading empire during the ninth through nineteenth centuries to becoming one of the poorest sub-Saharan countries in Africa today. Overall, non-democracies appear to experience deeper economic troughs and higher economic highs than their democratic counterparts.
All non-democracies share several overriding characteristics. These relate to accountability, competition, and freedom.
Accountability
Political accountability has many dimensions. In democracies, it exists between public officials and the public via the institution of free and fair elections. Accountability exists via other channels, such as through the free flow of information about political decisions and developments in society. Free and independent media can ensure this flow of information, along with monitors within the government. Accountability exists when different branches of government can check each other, for example through vetoes, court rulings, and divided authority.
In a non-democracy, some or all of these forms of accountability are compromised. For example,
- elections are rigged or don’t exist
- the media is muzzled or state-owned
- government exists to carry out the will of an unchecked political elite.
All non-democracies restrict channels for accountability of political authority to the governed. Take the example of Saudi Arabia. One of the few remaining absolutist monarchies in existence today, and all political authority lays with the Al Saud royal family. The Saudi king is the leader of this family, and he is also the head of state and head of government of Saudi Arabia. There is no legislature to pass laws, and Saudi citizens do not elect representatives or otherwise have institutional channels for providing input in the national policy-making process. In this polity, the ruling Al Saud family is not accountable to the Saudi people.
Competition
Non-democracies have limited to no competition for political office. Political parties may also be absence, as in the case of Saudi Arabia. Some non-democracies allow limited competition for public office, which was the case in Mexico under PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa described the party as “the perfect dictatorship” because it managed to remain the ruling party of Mexico for decades despite the existence of opposition parties. Slowly, the opposition parties began to win elections in the 1980s. In 2000, PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) presidential candidate Vicente Fox won national elections and overturned the single-party rule. Political parties are one way to observe the degree of competition in a political system, and serve as a proxy for a deeper and more meaningful competition of policy ideas. Competition of ideas is a critical marker of the debate, dissent, and diversity that characterizes a democratic system.
Freedom
Non-democracies lack a commitment to individual freedom, which is a hallmark of modern democracy. Elections and independent media are often manipulated or censored in a non-democracy. To justify the abrogation of individual freedoms, non-democracies may promote alternate values such as the importance of order and hierarchy over an individual will or the need to subsume the individual to a larger collective will (as mediated by those in power).
To capture these many aspects of non-democracy, across countries and within a country over time, there exist different measures.
- Polity Project (now in its fifth iteration) examines aspects of a political system, such as whether there is competition for executive positions and unconstrained participation in the political system. Polity scores for many countries around the world have been tracked from 1800 to the present. The data is publicly available and can be downloaded for analysis.
- Freedom House, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, that has tracked levels of political freedom and civil liberties in countries around the world since 1972. Freedom House scores, world maps, and reports are publicly available for download.
