This chart is from The Center for Systemic Peace. The dashed line represents the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The graph is based on Polity IV data, where countries are ranked twice a year on a scale of -10 to 10.
Democracies
- Polity IV score > +5
- States similar to oligarchies but there is not a sharp and clear distinction between an elite and the rest of the domestic population. Usually, more than 2/3 of the males have the right to vote.
Anocracies
- Polity IV score between -5 and +5
- Societies where central authority is weak or nonexistent. Kinship bonds extended by personal allegiances to notable leaders are the principal relations. A society may in theory be a state but if the above applies, then Weart classifies it as an anocracy. Examples include tribes, Somalia, and the medieval Italian cities where influential families fought street battles and lived in fortified keeps. Importantly, there is no central authority which can effectively restrain personal violence such as raids which often escalate by involving friends and relatives to vendettas and wars. Some anocracic tribes may have a form of democracy in the extended kinship group but no effective control of personal raids against non-kin groups. Examples include the Iroquois who frequently raided and eventually destroyed most of the Hurons.
Autocracies
- Polity IV score < -5
- States where opposition against the current rulers are suppressed. There may be frequent shifts back and forth between anocracy and autocracy when a leader temporarily gains enough power to suppress all opponents in a territory.
* The definitions are from Wikipedia’s summary of Spencer Weart’s book Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another.
The Center for Systemic Peace also has similar graphs for each region and reports on individual countries on their website: SystemicPeace.org.
