Critical dynamics govern the evolution of political regimes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex, non-stationary dynamics of political regime evolution, revealing that regime changes follow universal stochastic principles with intermittent, heterogeneous patterns, modeled effectively by a continuous time random walk.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of regime dynamics using a two-dimensional space and demonstrates that political change follows universal stochastic laws with critical phenomena.

Findings

Regime dynamics exhibit weakly non-ergodic behavior in a shifting landscape.

Step sizes and sojourn times follow heavy-tailed distributions near critical regimes.

A continuous time random walk model accurately reproduces recent regime evolution patterns.

Abstract

The emergence and decline of democratic systems worldwide raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of political change. Contrary to the idea of a stable endpoint of liberal democracy, recent backsliding towards less democratic regimes highlights the non-stationary nature of regime evolution. Here, we analyse the historical trajectories of countries within a two-dimensional regime space derived from the principal components of the Varieties of Democracy dataset. We observe weakly non-ergodic dynamics unfolding in an effective landscape characterised by sparse and shifting basins of stability. Step sizes and sojourn times characterising this dynamics follow heavy-tailed distributions near the critical regime, in which mean values appear to diverge. These facts point to the intermittent and heterogeneous nature of the regime change dynamics. A continuous time random walk model reproduces the dynamics of the three most recent decades with remarkable accuracy. Together, these results suggest that some aspects of political regime evolution follow universal stochastic principles, while remaining punctuated by unique historical pathways.