Att klassificera politiska regimer. Metod och metodologi i bruket av teori och empiri.

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Abstrakti

The art of classifying political regimes involves a series of rather complicated methodical and methodological choices and considerations. Using Arend Lijphart’s distinction between majority democracy and consensus democracy as an illustrative device, this article makes five specific points. First, regimes should be classified in terms of institutional rather than behavioural properties. Second, their institutional properties should be determined on the basis of theoretical argumentation rather than empirical derivation. Third, dispositional as well as relational properties should be included in the frame of analysis. Further, constitutional as well as non-constitutional properties should likewise be included. Finally, efforts to determine the extent to which actual political systems answer to the one or the other regime type should as a rule depart from normative rather than empirical properties. However, studies in this genre often involve specific questions that require the use of empirical categories.