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Abstract
The main contribution of this study is to identify democracies in the world that are at risk of becoming non-democracies. It is hypothesized that if democracies have a low level of legitimacy and have low effectiveness, they are at risk of becoming non-democratic regimes. These types of democracies are called weak democracies. Of the seven democracies that are identified as weak democracies between 2000 and 2010, the weakest of them, Mali, has already fallen. However, looking at the results of this study, it is not surprising that the democratic regime in Mali fell. The other six countries that are identified as weak democracies are Benin, Mongolia, Lesotho, El Salvador, Belize, and Mexico. The democratic regimes in these six weak democracies should be observed in more detail in the future to predict whether they are close to falling and losing their democratic institutions, or whether they will recover and no longer be weak democracies.
Notes
1 The underlying concept for Freedom House is freedom and not democracy, but the Freedom House data (political rights, civil liberties, and freedom status) are often used by researchers and others as measures of democracy.
2 For an exception, see Linz and Stepan (Citation1978).
3 For a similar standpoint see, for example, Morlino (Citation2009).
4 With regard to the measurements of the indicators of the quality of democracy, voter turnout is measured as the percentage of those registered on the electoral list who cast a vote (number voted/number registered) in parliamentary elections (lower house in countries with a bicameral parliament). Party competition is measured as the percentage of seats held by parties other than the largest party in parliament (lower house in countries with a bicameral parliament). Women's representation in parliaments is measured by the percentage of women's representation in countries' parliaments (lower house in countries with a bicameral parliament). Women's representation in governments is measured by the percentage of women's representation in countries' governments. To measure corruption, the Control of Corruption Index (World Bank: The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project) is used.
5 Regarding the index construction, the four dimensions of democratic quality are treated as equally important dimensions, and so the four dimensions are weighted equally. However, as the political equality dimension is measured with two indicators and the other dimensions are measured with one indicator, to avoid overestimation of the equality dimension, each indicator of the equality dimension (women's representation in parliaments and women's representation in governments) is weighted to half of its original value. To combine the four dimensions into a summary measure (index), the dimensions are first standardized, so each dimension has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 (Z-scores), and then the average value of the four dimensions ((political participation + political competition + political equality + rule of law)/4) is used as a summary measure of the quality of democracy.
6 The results of the simple and multivariate regressions are not included for reasons of space, but may be obtained from the author upon request (john.hogstrom@miun.se).
7 For an overview of the suggested causal mechanisms between the quality of democracy and the 10 conditions, see Högström (Citation2013b). See also Lipset (Citation1994).
8 The conditions that were tested but did not have any strong effect on the quality of democracy are: area size, compulsory voting, district magnitude, population density, population size, quotas, percentage of protestants in the population, territorial organization, unicameralism, and women's suffrage.
9 The sources that have been used for the study are named in the appendix.
10 The 10th percentile for ENPP is 1.64 and the 20th percentile is 1.99, but, for the ENPP, I apply the cut-off point suggested in the party systems literature instead of applying a cut-off point by using the percentile data of the ENPP.
11 The data sources which are used in this study contain no information about the conditions ENPP and electoral disproportionality in the Marshall Islands or the condition electoral disproportionality in Mali. Therefore, I consulted additional sources such as Mozaffar (Citation1997), Anckar and Anckar (Citation2000), Mozaffar (Citation2002), Lindberg (Citation2005), Siaroff (Citation2006) when I coded these three conditions. Deriving from the information in the additional sources results in Marshall Islands being coded to have a low level of ENPP and a high level of electoral disproportionality, and Mali being coded to have a high level of electoral disproportionality.
12 I distinguish the concept quality of democracy from the concept democracy. I argue that democracy itself is a type of democratic regime, and that in democratic regimes, democratic qualities such as political participation, political competition, political equality, and the rule of law can be examined. Accordingly, I do not consider the level of democracy as an indicator of the quality of democracy.
13 The six borderline countries are Argentina, Brazil, Lesotho, Mexico, Peru, and Serbia (Serbia and Montenegro).
14 There are data sources that code Mali as a presidential executive system. However, as also presidential systems have a negative effect on the quality of democracy, the coding of the executive power (presidential or semi-presidential) of Mali does not affect the result in this study.