regimes. The former Soviet Bloc (eight states in the Derbyshires’
study) and apartheid South Africa might have been candidates for
this description in the 1980s, totalling approximately 5 per cent of
states but a much higher proportion of the world’s population. By
2008, however, only China, North Korea and Cuba could arguably be
described as members of such a category.
We will now look in more detail at some sub-types of each of these
categories – republican and totalitarian in turn. In terms of ‘repub-
lican’ regimes we will concentrate on the different kinds of modern
representative democracies. From Crick’s ‘autocratic’ category we will
consider military government and some modern civilian despotisms –
mainly in the South. Totalitarian government will be discussed both
in general terms and in its communist and fascist variants.
Democracy, the welfare state and the market
In recent years the number of democratic states has dramatically
increased, with the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc and a marked
trend to democratisation in Latin America. Larry Diamond (in LeDuc
et al., 2002: 211) documents the dramatic trend over recent decades
(Table 6.1).
We could go further and assert that free elections along with a
competitive free economy (modified by some commitment to a
welfare state) have become in some sense the norm for a modern
state. This combination of representative democracy and capitalism
is frequently described as ‘liberal democracy’. In Europe, for instance,
the members of the European Union are all states of this type and for
those states that aspire to join the EU, membership requires a com-
mitment to democracy, the free market (capitalism) and a minimum
standard of social policy.
STATES 139Table 6.1 The trend to democracy, 1974–2000
Year Number of Number of Democracies as
democracies countries a percentage
1974 39 142 27.5
1988 66 167 39.5
1991 91 183 49.7
1996 118 191 61.8
2000 120 192 62.5
Source: Larry Diamond (in LeDuc et al., 2002: 211)