Quantifying the ‘end of history’ through a Bayesian Markov-chain approach

Abstract

Political regimes have been changing throughout human history. After the apparent triumph of liberal democracies at the end of the twentieth century, Francis Fukuyama and others have been arguing that humankind is approaching an ‘end of history’ (EoH) in the form of a universality of liberal democracies. This view has been challenged by recent developments that seem to indicate the rise of defective democracies across the globe. There has been no attempt to quantify the expected EoH with a statistical approach. In this study, we model the transition between political regimes as a Markov process and—using a Bayesian inference approach—we estimate the transition probabilities between political regimes from time-series data describing the evolution of political regimes from 1800 to 2018. We then compute the steady state for this Markov process which represents a mathematical abstraction of the EoH and predicts that approximately 46% of countries will be full democracies. Furthermore, we find that, under our model, the fraction of autocracies in the world is expected to increase for the next half-century before it declines. Using random-walk theory, we then estimate survival curves of different types of regimes and estimate characteristic lifetimes of democracies and autocracies of 244 years and 69 years, respectively. Quantifying the expected EoH allows us to challenge common beliefs about the nature of political equilibria. Specifically, we find no statistical evidence that the EoH constitutes a fixed, complete omnipresence of democratic regimes.