Document Type

Article

Abstract

In light of the current rise of authoritarian regimes and the anti-liberal tendencies in some established democracies, understanding the dynamic and statistical properties of political regimes is of critical importance. Despite their relevance, a comprehensive quantitative assessment of these dynamics on a historical scale remains largely unexplored, and the notion that democratization is an irreversible process has gone mostly unchallenged. This study provides a rigorous and quantitative analysis of political regimes worldwide by examining changes in freedoms of expression, association and electoral quality throughout the twentieth century. Utilizing the multidimensional V-Dem dataset, which covers over 170 countries across more than a century, alongside tools from statistical physics, we demonstrate that historical political regime dynamics follow a scaling law, which is a hallmark of diffusion. We identify three distinct dynamical regimes in the data: super-diffusive behaviour in destabilizing autocracies, random-walk dynamics in hybrid regimes and sub-diffusive behaviour in democracies and stable autocracies. Using these results, we also offer a novel perspective on the propensity of civil conflict.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.250457

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

APA Citation

Pirker-Diaz, P., Wilson, M. C., Beier, S., & Wiesner, K. (2025). Scaling laws of political regime dynamics: stability of democracies and autocracies in the twentieth century. Royal Society Open Science, 12(8). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.250457

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