Political Institutions and Their Historical Dynamics

Traditionally, political scientists define political institutions deductively. This approach may prevent from discovery of existing institutions beyond the definitions. Here, a principal component analysis was used for an inductive extraction of dimensions in Polity IV data on the political institutions of all nations in the world the last two centuries. Three dimensions of institutions were revealed: core institutions of democracy, oligarchy, and despotism. We show that, historically and on a world scale, the dominance of the core institutions of despotism has first been replaced by a dominance of the core institutions of oligarchy, which in turn is now being followed by an increasing dominance by the core institutions of democracy. Nations do not take steps from despotic, to oligarchic and then to democratic institutions, however. Rather, nations hosting the core democracy institutions have succeeded in historically avoiding both the core institutions of despotism and those of oligarchy. On the other hand, some nations have not been influenced by any of these dimensions, while new institutional combinations are increasingly influencing others. We show that the extracted institutional dimensions do not correspond to the Polity scores for autocracy, “anocracy” and democracy, suggesting that changes in regime types occur at one level, while institutional dynamics work on another. Political regime types in that sense seem “canalized”, i.e., underlying institutional architectures can and do vary, but to a considerable extent independently of regime types and their transitions. The inductive approach adds to the deductive regime type studies in that it produces results in line with modern studies of cultural evolution and memetic institutionalism in which institutions are the units of observation, not the nations that acts as host for them.传统上，政治学者以演绎范式界定政治制度。该范式或会阻碍研究者发现定义框架之外的现存政治制度。 本研究借助主成分分析（Principal Component Analysis），对覆盖过去两百年全球所有国家政治制度的Polity IV数据集开展维度的归纳式提取。研究共提取出三类核心制度维度：民主核心制度、寡头政治核心制度与专制核心制度。 研究表明，从全球历史维度考察，专制核心制度的主导地位首先被寡头政治核心制度取代，而如今寡头政治核心制度的主导地位又正日益为民主核心制度所替代。不过，国家并非遵循从专制、寡头政治再到民主制度的线性路径演进。恰恰相反，拥有民主核心制度的国家在历史进程中成功规避了专制与寡头政治两类核心制度。另一方面，部分国家未受上述任一维度的影响，而新型制度组合正日益对其他国家产生影响。 研究还发现，提取得到的制度维度与独裁、「威权民主混合政体（anocracy）」及民主的Polity指数并不匹配，这意味着政体类型的变迁发生于单一层面，而制度动态则运作于另一层面。 就此而言，政治政体类型呈现出「渠道化」特征：即底层制度架构确实会发生变化，但在很大程度上独立于政体类型及其转型过程。 归纳式研究方法弥补了演绎式政体类型研究的不足，其研究结果与现代文化演化及模因制度主义（Memetic Institutionalism）的研究结论相符——这类研究以制度作为观测单元，而非承载制度的国家。