Classifying Political Regimes in Latin America, 1945-1999

By Scott Mainwaring, Daniel M. Brinks, A. Pérez-Liñán. 2001

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is about two related subjects: how to classify political regimes in general, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945-1999 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes. This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine grained measure would require.

Subfields: Development, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5426ede2a07c9d471910207c50925fd9c990abc8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Development

In Political Science and International Relations

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Economic and Social Factors Driving the Third Wave of Democratization (2008, background): “Recent studies in political science (e.g. Munck and Verkuilen, 2002; Mainwaring et al. 2000) show that the FH method is biased against socialist regimes, left-wing governments, and closed to international trade countries.”
Democratization and Growth (2008, methodology): “In addition Munck and Verkuilen (2002) and Mainwaring et al. (2000) show that the FH method appears to be systematically biased against socialist regimes, left-wing governments, and countries not open to international trade.10 We code a permanent regime change when the FH status characterization…”
Democracy and dictatorship revisited (2010, background): “There are many researchers who believe it is not (e.g., Diamond 1999; Mainwaring et al. 2001; Weeden 2004).”