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  • Deconstruction of the One-Dimensional "Democracy-Autocracy" Scale: Elaboration of a Multidimensional Approach to the Evaluation of Political Regimes

Deconstruction of the One-Dimensional "Democracy-Autocracy" Scale: Elaboration of a Multidimensional Approach to the Evaluation of Political Regimes

Student: Grishin Anton

Supervisor: Ilya Lokshin

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Political Science (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2020

This paper presents a multidimensional approach to the evaluation of the political regimes based on the deconstruction of the one-dimensional "democracy-autocracy" scale. The modern concept of democracy has been forming and changing from Antiquity to the present day, which has led to its internal complexity and multiplicity. The analysis of relevant literature made it possible to reveal that this concept combines various dimensions, which fall under the opposition of liberal and democratic aspects. Further, on the basis of a combined database of panel data on three democracy indexes - The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, Varieties of Democracy and Freedom in the World - a method of factor analysis revealed latent variables that capture the meaning of particular dimensions of the political regime. After these variables were substantively interpreted. At the next stage, the indicators for the identified dimensions were clustered. Multinomial logistic regression models based on the labels of the obtained clusters and the initial database confirmed the robustness of the results of factor analysis. In the final stage of the work, radar plots were constructed. They reflected the distribution of countries in 7 groups according to their performance on 4 indicators: the level of institutionalization of liberal principles, equality, intensity of participation and democratic decentralization. These patterns were also interpreted in a meaningful way.

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