The heat maps used in the animation I posted yesterday plotted change over time in counts of countries in each cell of a two-dimensional space representing different kinds of politcal institutions. Over the 211 years in question, however, the number of countries in the world has grown dramatically, from about 50 in 1800 to well over 150 in 2011. For that reason, a couple of commenters wondered whether we would see something different if we plotted proportions instead of counts, using the size of the total population as a denominator in each cell. Proportions better fit the ideas behind a fitness landscape, so I added a line to my code and gave it a whirl. Here’s what I got:

To my eye, there aren’t any big differences in the patterns we see here compared with the ones based on counts. Re-watching the animation today, though, here are a few other things that caught my attention:

• The predominance in the mid-1800s of intermediate forms combining authoritarian selection with highly polarized political participation—what Polity calls “factionalism.” This peak in the middle left of the heat maps shows how popular mobilization generally led to competitive elections, and not the other way around. As historian Sean Wilenz wrote, “Democracy is never a gift bestowed…It must always be fought for.” It also reminds us that popular mobilization was initially quite polarized in the “developed” world (ha!), just as it often is poorer countries today.
• The wide variety of intermediate forms present in the early 1900s. Here we see a bunch of cases in the upper left-hand quadrant, combining authoritarian selection procedures with open and well-regulated participation. This is a combination we almost never see nowadays. It looks like there were some interesting experiments occurring in the wake of the industrial explosion that occurred in richer countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
• The sharp bifurcation of the fitness landscape after World War II. Before the war, the peak in the lower left-hand corner representing closed dictatorships had shrunken, and there seemed to be more action in the upper left and lower right quadrants. After the war, the peak in the lower left rose again and remained there until around 1990. This pattern makes clearer that the evolution of the past two centuries has not been a steady march toward democracy. It’s interesting—and potentially chilling—to contemplate how much the fitness landscape of the past 70 years might have differed had World War II taken different turns.

The GIF below—click on it to make it play—animates a series of 211 heat maps summarizing annual data on national political regimes around the world from 1800 to 2010. The space in the heat maps represents two of the “concept” variables from the Polity IV data set—executive recruitment and political competition—that roughly correspond to the dimensions of contestation and participation Robert Dahl uses to define modern regime types. In the animated maps, the lower left is least democratic, and the upper right is most democratic. The darker the grey, the higher the number of cases in that cell. [NB. For a version that uses proportions instead of raw counts and some additional thoughts on patterns over time, see this short follow-up post.]

[Fellow propeller-heads: I built this in R with helpful suggestions from Trey Causey and Tom Parris along the way. The heat maps were made with a function appropriately called ‘heatmap’, and I used the ‘animation’ package to compile those images into a .gif. Ping me if you’d like to see the script.]

I made this animation because I think it supports the idea, discussed briefly in my last post, that political development is an evolutionary process. Evolutionary processes feed on diversity and mutation, but the results of evolution are not randomly distributed. Borrowing from Daniel Dennett, we can imagine evolution occurring in a multidimensional design space that contains all possible combinations of a particular set of building blocks. In biology, those building blocks are genes; in politics, they might be simple rules.

For present purposes, let’s imagine that there are only two dimensions in this design space. Those two dimensions suggest a map of the design space that evolutionary biologists call a fitness landscape. The topography of this landscape is determined by the fitness of specific combinations, as indicated by sizes of the relevant populations. That’s what the heat maps in the animation above are showing.

The existence of the system is a matter of chance, but once an evolutionary system emerges, we can expect to see certain patterns. The selection pressures present in any particular environment mean that some combinations will be fitter than others, producing visible and often durable peaks in that fitness landscape. Mutation—and, in the case, of social technologies like government, deliberate tinkering—will keep producing new varieties, but most won’t be fit enough for the environment of the day to survive and spread. As a result, most of the variation will cluster around the existing peaks, because small differences in design will often (but not always!) produce small differences in fitness.

When selection pressures change, however, the designs embodied in the previous peaks will often become less fit, and new designs will emerge as stronger competitors. Importantly, though, that transition from the old peaks to new ones usually won’t be smooth and direct. Instead, as Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould describe in their model of punctuated equlibrium, we can expect to see bursts of diversity as the evolutionary engine “searches” for new forms that better fit the changing environment. As the selection pressures settle into a new normal, the fitness landscape should also settle back into the familiar pattern of clearer peaks and valleys.

The two Polity variables used here are, of course, gross and conceptually biased simplifications of complex phenomena. Underlying each of these dimensions are a few component variables that are themselves simplifications of complex sets of written and unwritten rules. Still, the Polity data are the best we’ve got right now for observing change in over a long period of time, and it’s pretty hard for us humans to visualize four- or seven- or thirty-dimensional space. So, for now, I’m using these two summary indices to get a very rough map of the design space for modern political institutions.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias at work, but when I watch the animation above, I see the patterns evolutionary theorists tell me I should see. In 1800, the fitness landscape is dominated by a single peak representing highly undemocratic regimes—mostly monarchies with virtually no popular participation. If we could extend the movie back several more centuries, we would see the same pattern holding through the entirety of human civilization since our hunter-gatherer days.

Pretty soon after we drop in to watch, however, things start to move. In the early 1800s, a couple of new lumps rise as popular participation expands in some regimes. Most countries still select their rulers by hereditary lineage or other closed means (the peak in the middle left), but some start using competitive elections to pick their governments. By the late nineteenth century, a second peak has clearly emerged in the upper right-hand corner, where rulers are chosen through competitive elections with broad participation. [NB: I think Polity rushes things a bit here by ignoring the disenfranchisement of women, but we go to publish with the data we’ve got, not the data we’d like.]

Through most of the twentieth century, the same general pattern holds. There’s a fair amount of variation, but most regimes are concentrated in the same few patches of the design space. At the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries, however, we see a burst of diversity. The authoritarian peak shrinks, the democratic peak holds, and large swathes of the design space that have rarely been occupied bubble with activity.

To my eye, this very recent phase looks like one of Eldredge and Gould’s punctuation marks, that is, an episode of heightened diversity caused by a significant shift in selection pressures. Most observers of international politics won’t be surprised to see this pattern, and many of them would probably attribute it to the end of the Cold War. I’m not so sure. I’m more inclined to see the collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion in the diversity of political forms as twin consequences of deeper changes in the global system that seem to be favoring democratic forms over authoritarian ones. What new peaks we’ll see when the system settles down again—and on what heretofore hidden dimensions of political design space they might draw—is impossible to know, but it sure is fascinating to watch.