Contrary or Contradictory? Autocracies and Democracies between Dichotomy and Gradation

The ongoing debate about appropriate regime typology resembles trench warfare. Since the demise of the concept of totalitarianism, by and large there is agreement on the two polar types: liberal democracy and some form of “closed” authoritarianism. Approaches of how to organize the space in between, however, are largely irreconcilable. The classical dichotomous understanding of democracy and autocracy as mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive entities is challenged by vows for more fine grained gradation that either introduces intermediate categories - hybrid regimes - or follows the idea of a regime continuum. In this paper, the two perspectives of a dichotomous versus a gradual approach are confronted. Do autocracies and democracies follow an inherent logic that – as Sartori famously put it – turns them into contradictions that exclude a third? Is the inclusion of hybrid regimes a conceptual step backwards leading to a loss of analytical rigor? Or, in contrast, does the separation of the political map of the world in two camps – and two camps only – fail to do justice to complex political realities? Do we not miss out on the fine but crucial dynamics of the grey zone if we insist the world is black and white? We first elaborate on the general logic of typology building. We then critically review strategies of concept formation and typology construction on both sides of the trench. We show that scholars of both proveniences while formulating straightforward democratic minimum conditions often lack autocratic minima – with severe consequences for either form of typology. Following Adcock’s and Collier’s (1999) magisterial article on the topic, we go on to discuss the usefulness and effects of dichotomy and trichotomy when applied to specific research questions. Choice of concepts, it is shown, seriously affects the results of comparative study.