Five Laws of Politics

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Political scientists tend to shy away from claiming that there are laws of politics.¹I submit that this diffidence is unwarranted. There are laws of politics that encompass both democracies and dictatorships. Drawing on the behavior of more than 36 regimes from around the world, two-thirds of which are democracies and the remainder autocracies, this article presents five such laws. First, however, I explain what is meant by a law of politics, define democracy and dictatorship, and discuss the data.

By a "law" of politics, I mean an invariant or almost invariant empirical regularity that is descriptive of intrinsic properties of politics and the state. By democracy, I understand a regime in which members of the legislature and the executive--the policy-making arms of the state--are chosen by a broad electorate from among competing political parties or candidates who are free to take their message to the public by whatever means available. This necessarily requires a political climate characterized by freedom of speech, press, and assembly, as well as a procedure for honestly counting votes that is acceptable to competing parties and the public. A presidential democracy is one in which the executive is independently elected; in a parliamentary democracy, it is selected by and typically from within the legislature. Finally, by autocracy, I mean any regime in which free competition among parties to fill the policy-making offices of the state is either absent or highly restricted; at best, a domesticated opposition is allowed to occupy a few seats in a "rubber-stamp" legislature. There are varieties of dictatorship (Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014; Przeworski et al. 2000) but in none is the ruling elite chosen in competitive elections.

The data include more than 400 elections in 23 democracies and more than 100 controlled "elections" in 15 dictatorships. The regimes hail from large and small countries and different times and cultures. Thus, there is sufficient variation in the data to enable one to generalize with confidence. All data were obtained from Wikipedia.²The initial election in each democracy depends on context. I chose the earliest election for which there was voting data, the electorate was comparatively inclusive (e.g., universal male suffrage), and the outcome...