Democracy and Dichotomies
A Pragmatic Approach to Choices about Concepts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6232903 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Donald Collier (0000-0003-4087-1559, University of California, Berkeley), David Collier (Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-1950), Robert Adcock (Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-1950) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 537-565 |
| Publication date | 1999-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Annual Review of Political Science (BOOK_SERIES) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1094-2939 • E-ISSN: 1545-1577 |
| Publisher | Annual Reviews (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.537 |
| OpenAlex | W2117967215 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 158 |
| References cited | 68 |
Prominent scholars engaged in comparative research on democratic regimes are in sharp disagreement over the choice between a dichotomous or graded approach to the distinction between democracy and nondemocracy. This choice is substantively important because it affects the findings of empirical research. It is methodologically important because it raises basic issues, faced by both qualitative and quantitative analysts, concerning appropriate standards for justifying choices about concepts. In our view, generic claims that the concept of democracy should inherently be treated as dichotomous or graded are incomplete. The burden of demonstration should instead rest on more specific arguments linked to the goals of research. We thus take the pragmatic position that how scholars understand and operationalize a concept can and should depend in part on what they are going to do with it. We consider justifications focused on the conceptualization of democratization as an event, the conceptual requirements for analyzing subtypes of democracy, the empirical distribution of cases, normative evaluation, the idea of regimes as bounded wholes, and the goal of achieving sharper analytic differentiation
Conceptualization · Democracy · Democratization · Dichotomy · Economics · Empirical research · Epistemology · Law and economics · Normative · Operationalization · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Computer Science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Political Philosophy and Ethics
Overview Of Political Methodology
Democracy, Professions and Societal Constitutionalism
The Global State of Democracy Indices Methodology
The Road to Repression
How Autocrats Compete
Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa
Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical Analysis
An Evaluation of Cross-National Measures of Judicial Independence
A Constructivist Approach to Continuous Variables in Macroscopic Social Research
Comparative Historical Analysis
The Origins of Elected Strongmen
Who Is a Political Prisoner
Ethnic Inclusiveness of the Central State Government and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
From Conceptual Misalignment to Reconceptualizing
Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Mapping State Structures—with an Application to Western Europe, 1950–2015
Philanthropy as an Essentially Contested Concept
Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy
When an integrity measure tends to disintegrate
Capitalism, Democracy, and Adam Smith
La institucionalización de los partidos políticos y su relación con la democracia
Using Machine Learning for measuring democracy
Democracy with adjectives? Economic development and democracy in the Middle East
Methodological challenges in the study of stateless nationalist territorial claims
Measuring Variance in Subnational Regimes
Resident Aliens? Explaining Minority Disaffection with Democratic Politics in the Baltic States
Varieties of vigilantism
Bringing Methodology (Back) in
Reversing regimes and concepts
Agenda Control, Intraparty Conflict, and Government Spending in Asia
Noisy Regimes, Causal Processes, and Democratic Consolidation
Will Vote for Food? Regime Type and Equity in the Developing World
Voting Amid Violence
What About Us? The Anglo-Caribbean Democratic Experience
Framing Environmental Responsibility
Comment observer la consolidation démocratique
Building Democracy to Last
Vote intent and beliefs about democracy in the United States
Democracy Manifest or Democracy Latent? A Unified Framework for Identifying Regime Types and Transitions
Varieties of Reconciliation
Political determinants of e-government performance revisited
Too good to be true? United Nations peacebuilding and the democratization of war-torn states
The Operationalization of Democracy and the Strength of the Democratic Peace
The European Union and Consolidating Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
Democracy and the press
Democratization in Conflict Research
Measuring Political Institutions in the Long Run
Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy
Beyond authoritarianism and liberal democracy
Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics
From Peril to Partnership
China's Gilded Age
Contestation and participation
Scaling Down
Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy
The limits of proceduralism
No limiar da ordem global
Notes From A Leisure Son
Rendición de cuentas horizontal y preponderancia presidencial
Concept-measure inconsistency in contemporary studies of democracy
Coding competitive authoritarianism
Gobernabilidad
Canons of research design in qualitative analysis
Regimes of the World (RoW)
Why Choice Matters
The Effects of Sociopolitical Factors on Divorce Rates after Political Upheavals in Post-Soviet Countries
Does democracy need sovereignty
Opposition parties and democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa
Do Democracies Spend Less on the Military? Spain as a Long-Term Case Study (1876-2009)
Forced to Be Free
Classifying Political Regimes in Latin
Beyond Authoritarianism
Cultural and economic prerequisites of democracy
Qualitative comparative analysis vis-à-vis regression
Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations
Women’s suffrage in the measurement of democracy
Decentralization
Regimes and Randomization
A new indicator of coalition size
Internationally Comparative Research Designs in the Social Sciences
Mapping accountability
Democratisation and Growth
Democratic Compromise
The Democracy Cluster Classification Index
Does the Choice of Democracy Measure Matter? Comparisons between the Two Leading Democracy Indices, Freedom House and Polity IV
Caught between stability and democracy in the Western Balkans
A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy
How Violations of Electoral Integrity Undermine Partisan Attachments
Cultura politica y democracia en Argentina
Probleme evaluierender Demokratieforschung
Democracy and Economic Growth
Democracy and Changes
Limits to non‐state market regulation
The methodological legacies of Theda Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions
The Ladder of Abstraction
Distinctions With a Difference
Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective
Measuring Party System Change
Episodes of liberalization in autocracies
Democracy for All
QCA, 25 Years after “The Comparative Method
Polyarchy
Prospects of Democracy
Paths toward Democracy
The Failure of Presidential Democracy
On the Theory of Scales of Measurement
How shall a thing be called?
Science as a Vocation
Hedges
The Conduct of Inquiry
The Theory of Democracy Revisited
IX.—Essentially Contested Concepts
Democracy and Its Critics
Capitalist Development and Democracy
Waves of Democracy
Anarchy, Order and Integration
Modern Politics and Government
Developing Democracy
Ideology
Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and the Provision of Collective Goods in Less-Developed Countries
Political Democracy
Classifying political regimes
Comparative Constitutional Engineering
Beyond Sovereignty
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
Purpose and Scientific Concept Formation
The Logic of Comparison
Narrative, Event-Structure Analysis, and Causal Interpretation in Historical Sociology
Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation
Gross Concepts in Political Argument
The Ladder of Abstraction
Comparing and Miscomparing
What Makes Democracies Endure
Democracy for the Long Haul
Delegative Democracy
Double Take
The Concept of Elite
Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America
Comparison Misconceived
Subjective Measures of Liberal Democracy
What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years
Cross-National Statistical Research and the Study of Comparative Politics
Gradations of Democracy? Empirical Tests of Alternative Conceptualizations
Doing Before Knowing
Liberal Democracy
Modernization
Democracy with Adjectives
The Dimension(s) of Democracy
Democracy, Stability, and Dichotomies
Issues in the Comparative Measurement of Political Democracy
The Aylwin Government and 'Tutelary' Democracy
"Protected Democracies" and Military Guardianship
The Concept of Social Movement
Some Social Requisites of Democracy
Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics
Translating Quantitative Methods for Qualitative Researchers
From Causes to Events
| Unique citing works | 158 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,64 |
| Citation span | 1998 - 2026 (29) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 158 |