Tutorial
Group Wednesday 1510-1600
Team: We’re Realists,
No Need for Name. Power is Our Only Game.
Members:
Trevor Mosely, Louisa Hormann, Alexander Whitteker, Teng Zhang, Emma Pech, Sean
Miers, Lucia Waiker, Matt White
Project aim:
How can we separate regimes into classes?
The aim of
our classification system is to find a means to categorise regimes along a
scale of most to least democratic. To help in this we’ve identified five distinctive
“types” of regime:
-
Liberal
democracy (1-2 points)
-
Hybrid
democracy (3-4 points)
-
Competitive
authoritarianism (5-6 points)
-
Benevolent
dictatorship (7-8 points)
-
Totalitarian
dictatorship (9-10 points)
To classify a regime, we will use ten questions which will be answered
with a rank out of ten points, with zero being purely democratic and ten
amounting to a totalitarian regime, as correlates with the categories above. This
will leave each regime with a score up to one hundred, producing a natural scale
for states to be compared with each other.
-
Liberal
democracies will have a final score of 1-20 points
-
Hybrid
democracies will have a final score of 21-40 points
-
Competitive
authoritarian regimes will have a final score of 41-60 points
-
Benevolent
dictatorships will have a final score of 61-80
-
Totalitarian
dictatorships will have a final score of 81-100 points
The final
number will show where a state lies within the spectrum of that regime type,
and which factors most strongly contributed to their score. This will reveal
the “grey area” that comes as a consequence of categorising every regime into
one of the five broad groups.
The questions
we will use look at a broad range of a regime’ s characteristics, which
identify the extent of the state’s influence in everyday life. Each question
will involve the ideas of:
-
Freedom
of Press
o
Independent
or government ownership of media of all forms?
o
Restrictions/censorship?
-
Free
and fair elections
o
Right
to form and operate a political party
o
Right
to participate in elections without intimidation
-
Correlation
between coalition and selectorate
o
What
percentage of the electorate makes up the winning coalition?
o
Is
the selectorate identifiable by the voting populace?
-
Level
of suffrage
o
Does
the country have universal and equal suffrage?
o
To
what extent does the population receive suffrage?
o
Do
any forms of discrimination exist that prohibit the possibility of universal,
equal suffrage? (E.g ethnicity, gender, religion, assets)
-
Level
of civil liberties and human rights
o
To
what extent does the country in question honour the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights towards its citizens?
-
Freedom
of protest
o
Right
to assembly in protest or strike etc.
o
Freedom
to speak against the regime
-
Transparency
in government
o
Levels
of corruption
o
Transparency
of policy; freedom of information
-
Extent
of government control over economy
o
Free
market vs. government intervention
o
Extent
of nationalisation
-
Religious
involvement in governance
o
Religious
involvement in government policy
o
Level
of secularisation
-
Separation
of power
o
Separation
and the legitimacy of the three branches; the Executive, the Legislature and
the Judiciary.
Potential
sources:
- http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2002_EN_Complete.pdf
-
http://hdr.undp.org/en/nhdr/support/insights/2007-09/
-
http://unic.un.org/
-
http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/end-century-survey-finds-dramatic-gains-democracy
- http://www.hrw.org/
-
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
- www.freedomhouse.org
-
www.transparency.org
These are pretty good questions, though it might help to provide some guidance as to how particular cases should be scored. How many points should be assigned and in which circumstances?
ReplyDeleteAlso, it may not be necessary to label the results. You might gather information about all these indicators and then see what clusters come up from the data itself - that way you do not assume the answer to the question. (E.g., maybe regimes tend to cluster along high freedom of speech/low government control of economy/fair elections/etc.).
The different classes are really useful to categorize different regimes and it gives us more options than some other group. I like the scoring system by ranking each question out of 10 to the assigned country. This seems easy to classify a particular country to a regime
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of this system where a country ends up with a final score in a more or less transperant index. I would have liked to see some examples though to get a feeling of how you think it works in practice!
ReplyDeleteI think the number of categories gives a good range, but I'm with the others, I am not sure how it will work in practice. How do you decide exactly which grade a regime gets on each question?
ReplyDeleteI think the scale and idea of how to categorize the regimes is really good. Although, I do think that more options in the ten sections would make it easier to give the states a score from one to ten.
ReplyDeletei get the idea of each categories but the way the
ReplyDeletemark for the results work are confusing me. If you make the mark a bit easy to follow it will be very useful.
i get the idea of each categories but the way the
ReplyDeletemark for the results work are confusing me. If you make the mark a bit easy to follow it will be very useful.