Conceptualizing and Measuring the Liberalization of Autocracy and the Consolidation of Democracy across Regions of the World and from Different Points of Departure

When the present wave of democratization began in 1974 not only did no one imagine how
much of the surface of the political world would be affected by it, but also no one even considered the
possibility of measuring its depth and analyzing the force of its surge quantitatively. Each of the initial
instances in Southern Europe and Latin America looked quite peculiar in socio-economic context and
mode of transition. Moreover, the limited number of cases seemed to make it unproductive to try to
bring the power of probabilistic statistics to bear. Common Conceptualization + Qualitative
Description + Tentative Identification of Possibilistic Devices and Outcomes seemed the only
formula one could apply.
Now, after almost thirty years of political experience and innumerable academic controversies,
we have the potential raw material for measuring in a reliable, comparable and quantitative way the
changes over time that have occurred at the macro-level of national political regimes for a sufficiently
large number of cases. And by developing indicators (and, especially as we shall see, scales of
indicators) to measure the processes of liberalization of autocracy and the consolidation of
democracy, we may also be able to resolve some (but never all) of the disputes that have arisen
concerning whether it is correct to use the same concepts and assumptions across polities in a wide
range of cultural, political and economic settings. Presumably, if regime change in each of these world
regions or from each of these different points of departure really does require a unique form of
understanding/analysis ñ then, the standard items that we measure across all cases should not produce
significant patterns of association and, least of all, consistent scalar relations over time.
In this article, we report ìwork-in-progressî that began ñ thanks to a grant from the
Volkswagen Stiftung ñ with a comparative analysis of the Liberalization of Autocracy (LoA) and the
Consolidation of Democracy (CoD) in a limited number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Subsequently, its measurement instrumentarium
has been extended to cover earlier cases of regime change in Southern Europe, South America, Central
Europe and the Republics of the former Soviet Union