Accountability and legitimacy: towards a new proposal of typology of the authocratic and democratic systems

Abstract

In this article we intend to introduce the concept of political system as the basis for the development of an empirically useful tool to divide the political systems in categories that allow us to draw conclusions. The concept of system incorporates the framework of objectives, rules and structures in which actors perform in order to respond to the demands (inputs) of the population, incorporating both the regulatory framework, as the interaction of the actors with goals, standards and structures and the feedback process. In this study, we identified within the systemic approach two moments: the system as demands processing (inputs) and the system as producing results (outputs). We focus in this article in the systems as input processing in order to create our typology, based on two basic concepts for Political Science, accountability and legitimacy.

Focusing our analysis on how claims are processed we applied three classification criteria: the actual number of actors and groups of articulation of demands beyond which the system is held accountable, the principle of legitimacy and civilian or military nature of the system leadership. Finally in this article we proceed to apply the categories resulting in all countries between 1960 and 2006, concentrating more in the comparative analysis with other large scale classifications.