The principal components of electoral regimes

A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however,  how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard tool to study this question, are based on the a priori assumption that improvement in any individual feature strengthens democracy overall. We show that this assumption does not always hold. We use the V-Dem dataset for a quantitative study of electoral regimes worldwide during the 20th century. We find a so-far overlooked trade-off between election capability and civil liberties. In particular, we identify a threshold in the democratisation process at which the correlation between election capability and civil liberties flips from negative to positive. Below this threshold we can thus clearly separate two kinds of non-democratic regimes: autocracies that govern through tightly controlled elections and regimes in which citizens are free but under less certainty -- a distinction that existing democracy indices cannot make.

Methods
We use version 12 (2022) of the V-Dem data (https://www.V-Dem.net) and apply standard principal component analysis (PCA). Following standard procedure, we normalized each V-Dem variable (i.e. centered it to a mean of zero and rescaled it to a variance of one) prior to performing PCA. For better readability of the plots, we rescaled all principal components uniformly such that the first component has a maximum absolute value of one (i.e. its values are bounded by [-1,1]) while preserving the mean of zero for all components. We further re-oriented each component such that its strongest loading is positive.