Scaling laws of political regime dynamics: Stability of democracies and autocracies in the 20th-century

In light of the current rise of authoritarian regimes and the anti-liberal tendencies in some established democracies, understanding the dynamic and statistical properties of political regimes is of critical importance. Despite their relevance, a comprehensive quantitative assessment of these dynamics on a historical scale remains largely unexplored, and the notion that democratization is an irreversible process has gone mostly unchallenged. This study provides a rigorous and quantitative analysis of political regimes worldwide by examining changes in freedoms of expression, association, and electoral quality throughout the 20th century. Utilizing the multidimensional V-Dem dataset, which covers over 170 countries across more than a century, alongside tools from statistical physics, we demonstrate that historical political regime dynamics follow scaling laws, which are a hallmark of diffusion. We identify three distinct types of scaling laws in the data: super-diffusive behavior in dest..., , # Scaling laws of political regime dynamics: Stability of democracies and autocracies in the 20th-century

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j7m](10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j7m)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data and Python scripts used to generate the analysis and figures used in the work under the title \"Scaling laws of political regime dynamics – Stability of democracies and autocracies in the 20th-century\". The source data was taken from the V-Dem project data set (v12) and the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; and the code was developed by the authors.

### Files and variables

#### File: vdem-anomalous-diff-results.py

**Description:** Python code that generates all figures shown in the referenced work, taking the data from *data_vdem_dm.csv* and *output-msd-r-0p1-dm123-with-suffr-in-orig-t10.csv.*

Warning: This code takes the V-Dem data and the armed conflict data from the file *data_vdem_dm.csv*, but the present version of this file does not include them. To run this...,