Beyond the Radial Delusion: Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy and Non-democracy

Typologies of political regimes in general and of democracy in particular proliferate in the literature. However, few efforts have been devoted to systematically scrutinizing the empirical relationship between the constitutive components of liberal democracy. In this article, we reassess the most promising such attempt, namely, the research agenda on “defective democracies.” Doing so, we identify a more general problem, which we term the “radial delusion.” This problem has to do with discarding the notion of a hierarchy among the attributes, thus creating empirically empty, diminished subtypes. We solve this by constructing an alternative typology that embraces well-established theoretical constructs and assigns referents to all relevant types. Furthermore, the empirical distribution virtually conforms to the hierarchical logic of a perfect simple order scale which justifies the construction of a democracy scale.