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.