Democracy and Dictatorship - Three measures of Democracy and Dictatorship - The Democracy-Dictatorship (DD) measure

3 important questions on Democracy and Dictatorship - Three measures of Democracy and Dictatorship - The Democracy-Dictatorship (DD) measure

The conceptualization of democracy according to DD has two primary components:

  • Governmental officies
  • Contestation, which entails the following three elements:
    • ex ante uncertainty: unknown election outcomes beforehand
    • ex post irreversibility: the winner of the election actually takes office
    • repeatability: elections must occur at regular and known intervals

According to DD, a country is classified as a democracy if all of the following conditions apply:

  1. The chief executive is elected.
  2. The legislature is elected.
  3. There is more than one party competing in the election.
  4. An alternation in power under identical electoral rules has taken place.
A country is classified as a dictatorship if any of these four conditions do not hold.

The DD measures builds om Dahls insights in two respects:

  • It is based on a purely procedural, or minimalist, view of democracy, because the classification rules make no mention of the substantive outcomes produced by differed political regimes.
  • It focuses strongly on Dahl's notion of contestation,
-> one obvious difference is that the DD measure completely ignores Dahl's dimension of inclusion.

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