I’m embarrassed: Democratic peace is something that I am studying over the summer; I’d planned on writing a paper for Dean’s World about it. Had I been reading your posts more carefully, I’d have known that was superfluous...
Though it turns out that there might just possibly have been one war between Democratic nations. In The Spanish/American war (1898), Spain has been counted as a democracy according to some measures...
Also, there have definitely been wars between democratic states; you just have to go back to ancient Greece to find them. And for another point: The UK and Finland were on opposite sides of WWII, and had mutual declarations of war. But they never actually attacked eachother...
Bonus: if you write about it for school, you can site it directly, and you'll seem really smart. You can cite Rudy as well, since he's one of the foremost experts on it. ;-)
Extremely interesting. I have not heard of any wars between the United States and Canada lately. Nor have I heard of Norway declaring war against Italy in an effort to prove that the Vikings built the Roman Empire. On the other hand, Franco and Salazar, who dictated over Spain and Portugal, respectively, for several decades, seem to have got along OK. Perhaps because both were Catholic. Interesting about it all....
Question: Is it necessary for women to vote for a country to be a democracy? I know I'll sound like a "Transcendental Scientist", but I'm going to have to say no. There has never been a more passionate devotee of democracy than G. K. Chesterton, and yet he opposed women voting for 3 reasons:
1) Most women at the time didn't want the vote, and, if they were allowed to vote on whether they should be allowed to vote, the majority of them would have voted against it.
2) Women, being essentially holier than men, should not participate in the organized coercion which is the essence of government.
3) Men have a better understanding and appreciation of the idea of an impersonal rule of law, while women gravitate toward more personal rule, and hence are more suited to be despots, whether in the home or on the throne. HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!!
Transcending "Transcendental Science"?
This brings me to something I have thought about for a long time, and was thinking about this morning. Chesterton said that there are essentially two kinds of government, rule by a rule and rule by a ruler. In other words, republics and monarchies. And I have long thought that the latter tends to be the more instinctual or "default" type of rule, that toward which the hearts of both men and women incline. This ties in with the two hemispheres of the brain, the left (or "math") hemisphere vs. the right (or "myth") hemisphere. The Left ("Liberty, Equality, Fraternity") vs. the Right ("Throne and Altar"). Benjamin Disraeli once defined liberalism as "loyalty to abstractions" and conservatism as "loyalty to persons". I think this ties in with atheism vs. theism as well.
The earliest forms of government were monarchies, the kings of Sumer and Babylon, the Pharaohs of Egypt, the princes of India, the kings and then emperors of China and Japan, the chiefs and kings of the Mayas, Olmecs, Toltecs, Aztecs, and Incas and of all the Native American tribes as well as those of Africa, the kings of Hawaii, the kings of Europe. The Greeks of the Homeric era had kings, as did the earliest Romans. The Greeks and then the Romans were the first to try republics, and the first to philosophize abstractly about alternative forms of government. But even the Greeks finally surrendered to the despotism of Alexander, and the Romans to the Caesars.
In the late 18th century, America and France established republics. But France soon fell to the rule of Napoleon, and then spent the next century alternating between republics and monarchies. In America, George Washington explicitly refused the crown, and we have remained a republic ever since. But, even here, we have always had the tendency to endow our more popular Presidents (e.g., JFK, FDR, Lincoln, even Washington himself) with quasi-monarchical grandeur.
I have long ago concluded that the ideal form of government is a Constitutional monarchy, combining the rule of an overarching impersonal law with that loyalty to a person to which the human heart has always gravitated. A Queen, Beatrix, sits upon the throne in the Netherlands, perhaps the freest of all lands, and also democratic in its governance. As to war and peace, I have not heard of Holland declaring war on Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, or the United States. But, as Pim Fortuyn warned, she may soon have to declare War against a subversive element within her midst....
Technically women don't have to have the vote to be considered a democracy but you can't be considered a liberla democracy unless you have universal franchise (which of course would include women).
I think this is an interesting topic, and I agree with most of the conclusions reached by the researchers. This is an interesting observation, and it makes a lot of sense.
But I do have one comment. I didn’t see any mention of how population size or density of a particular state might factor into the equation. It seems to me (no proof) that the majority of democracies are now, and have been, smaller population-wise than many states with other forms of government.
Or stated another way, it seems a much larger percentage of the world’s population has been historically represented by non-democratic governments. And the larger the population, the greater demand for resources, the greater the opportunity for internal conflict, and quite possibly a greater propensity for war.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of democracy, and I believe it is the best form of government ever conceived. So I hope these guys are right. And I am involved in research myself, so I know you have to constrain these problems carefully. And you will always get the inevitable, “why didn’t you look at this?”, and “why didn’t look at that?,” etc., etc. So I feel their pain in that respect.
But population size seems important here. Maybe the studies could compare not simply the number of states, but the number of people each of those states represent.
Dean wrote:
"Technically women don't have to have the vote to be considered a democracy but you can't be considered a liberla democracy unless you have universal franchise (which of course would include women)."
A system in which only women are allowed to vote would a Femocracy. A liberal Femocracy would be one in which the men are let out of their cages every once in a while.
Cynical: 1) Argentina had been taken over by a military junta at the time, and 2) far less than a thousand casualties.
Jay: Nope. Population-wise, India is the world's second largest country, with over a billion citizens--and is the world's largest democracy. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world with 300 million citizens--and is the world's second largest democracy. Both nations have been growing steadily ever since they became democracies. Indonesia recently got on the road to democracy--they haven't yet had a peaceful transition of power, so they aren't proven yet--but they are close and they have an enormous and burgeoning population.
Liberal democracies have been proven never to commit mass murder of their own citizens. No liberal democracy has ever done this. By comparison, non-democracies frequently murder their own citizens by the millions. China, North Korea, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Saddam's Iraq all spring immediately to mind.
Simply put, most people's thinking on this is exactly backwards: if you want to get rid of poverty, democracy needs to be the first thing you implement. If you want to improve human rights, democracy is the first thing you implement. If you want to feed the hungry, democracy is the first thing you implement. If you want to see increased lifespans, democracy is the first thing you implement.
I am not arguing with the premise. It does make sense to me, and I hope it is completely correct.
But my (relatively) unbiased, inner researcher is wondering how population numbers would effect the study. That seems to me like it could be a very important variable, and I don’t see any mention of it anywhere.
Hell, it might end up making the argument even stronger, for all I know.
Jay: I don't know what to tell you but to repeat my advice that you read the materials I have linked, and to repeat what I just said.
If you would look at the materials I have linked, Jay, you would find that every liberal democracy on Earth and every democracy in history has been examined, from tiny ones with less than a million, to smallish ones with a few million, to largish ones with tens of millions, to enormous ones with hundreds of millions. Not one has ever gone to war with another democracy--not once, not ever. Not one has experienced a famine--not once, not ever. Not one has committed mass slaughter of its own citizens--not once, not ever.
What more can I tell you? These questions have been examined already. Read the James Lee Ray paper.
You don’t have to say anything more. I have read and re-read that paper several times.
I think I understand your point completely, and I agree completely.
I’m suffering through some communication challenges here. I think the study should go a bit further, and I’m having trouble explaining why I feel that way.
But the real world is calling, so any further discussion will have to wait. Or if it just vaporizes into the Ether, I won’t feel bad at all.
Now, any nation that allows slavery can hardly be called a liberal democracy, but the USA was a democracy by most standards, and by the standards of the day, one of the most liberal.
Still, a single counterexample doesn't detract from the main point: if you want to fix the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia, democracy is the first step.
Michael: By the terms of political scientists, the United States was not a democracy at the time of the civil war. Once again, please note the definition in use here.
Yes, the US was far more liberal and progressive than most of the world at the time. But it was not a democracy. It was a republic, one in which only a minority of citizens had the franchise. Not even 50% were eligible to vote.
Thus the US civil war is not an exception. So far, there are no exceptions.
America's Civil War proves that enough Americans hated slavery that they were willing to fight such a War in order to finally put an end to it (or at least contain it and watch it wither away, as was Lincoln's original goal before the South wouldn't stand for even that compromise). What other nation can say the same? God bless America!
I of all people am sensitive to readers redefining words, so I understand that if I do so then the consequences of the altered definition are my responsibility alone. I'm not really competent to produce a rigorous definition of "democracy" (for instance, does a republic count?) but I have studied war quite extensively.
My own definition of war is "any use or threat of force in order to achieve a political goal against the will of someone else not in the same body politic". A different way to say that is that "war" is anything that obeys the principles laid out by Clausewitz. My definition is much more broad than yours, Dean; it includes what you call "war" (which I refer to as "violent war") but my definition also includes such things as "trade wars" and "wars of words".
If you use my more expansive definition and if you subdivide war into "violent war" and "nonviolent war" I think what you find is that democracies never engage in violent war with one another (I agree with that point), but they engage in nonviolent war with each other more often than non-democracies do.
And I think that this supports Dean's point rather than impeaching it. Democracies engage in cold war with each other, but never hot war. There can be and have been cold wars with non-democracies, but between democracies it's the preferred way to go about it.
It's acceptable to say you're using the word differently; just be aware that when you do so, you are shifting the terms of the debate. If the goal is to obfuscate, that's a cheap trick, but if the goal is to shed light, then it's fair game.
I note only again: the Democratic Peace Theory isn't my pet theory or belief. It is the single best-supported and most widely accepted theory in the field of Political Science. It is not mush-headed feel-good crap, and it is not the "Bush line" or anything like that. It's a scientific theory, a very rigorous and quite well-supported one. I repeat once again: read this paper. If you understand everything in it, then you have a firm understanding of Democratic Peace Theory.
So again: 1) Within this theory, "War" equals battle confrontations in which at least 1,000 individuals are killed in battle. 2) "Democracy" equals a nation in which 50% or more of the populace can vote, in which there are competitive elections with at least two independent political parties, in which both the executive and legislative branches have been put into office by such elections, and in which there has been at least one peaceful transfer of power between independent political parties.
Got it? Those are the terms. In that case the equation is simple: Democracies never make war on each other.
The United States was not a democracy at the time of its great civil war. Neither the US nor the UK were democracies at the time of the Revolutionary War. Spain was not a democracy at the time of the Spanish-American war. And so on and so forth.
In furtherance of understanding the theory, a liberal democracy is one in which not only the four conditions described above hold, but in which free press, free speech, and universal or near-universal franchise is granted. In that equation:
1) No liberal democracy has ever gone to war with any other democracy (liberal or nonliberal)
2) No liberal democracy has ever experienced a famine.
3) No liberal democracy has ever experienced a civil war (again see the definition of "war" given above), and
4) No liberal democracy has ever committed mass murder against its own people.
All of those hold true. None of them are debatable. We have a huge dataset from which to draw and there are no exceptions to be found anywhere in the historic record at all, anywhere.
Given the number of wars which have been fought in history, and the number killed in those wars, and the opportunities democracies have had to go to war with each other, the odds of this all being simply coincidental are literally astronomical; Rummel's calculations put it at 8.017E-36--odds of getting hit by a meteor are probably higher.
Once you understand this theory, and the extraordinary amount of data that underlies it, you start to understand its significance--and conversations about trade wars and whatnot become interesting, but take place on an entirely different plane. I'll merely note that at one time a "trade war" literally involved shooting at people, wars in which thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands might die or be enslaved (and by "enslaved" I don't mean "wage slave" or "not making a fair wage," I mean enslaved, motherfucker).
Democracies often go to war, and are extremely good at it. In their interactions with each other, however, they restrict themselves to non-lethal forms of conflict most of the time.
Stephen: Yes your point does support mine--I merely repeat for emphasis because I feel that I cannot repeat the fundamentals often enough.
You say here:
There can be and have been cold wars with non-democracies, but between democracies it's the preferred way to go about it....But don't ask me to explain why, because I can't.
I again recommend this paper. You should have no trouble digesting it.
But to give you a short response: there are several theories as to why this is, but it mostly boils down to the fact that elected leaders who lose wars lose their jobs, and further, Game Theory would support the contention that the average citizen--and remember, the "average citizen" is either a voter or at least a close friend and relative of a voter in any democracy--stands to lose the most in a war and generally won't support it without strong reason.
In essence, Stephen, the traditional liberal worldview is simply pervasive: people don't much like war and don't generally favor it. If they did, the entire globe would be a cinder by now.
Note that within this theory there are several percolating effects which you can see; democracies have a harder time with longer and more protracted wars than do autocracies, for example.
Dean,
There is a project called “POLITY” (Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Principal Investigators Monty G. Marshall, Project Director Ted Robert Gurr, Founding Director). POLITY is on it’s 4th iteration and ranks the worlds nations, year by year according a bunch of different variables to determine what sort of government they have. This one of the most rigorous and widely used datasets available. It uses different definitions than Prof. Ray...
It ranks nations on a pair of 10 point scales, one for democracy, one for autocracy. These categories are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they tend to be. The US has never ranked above a 3 on the autocracy scale (1800-1809), and never below a 7 on the Democracy scale (same time period). Even during this time, we rated as a Democracy, though it was a near thing...
From 1854-1865, we rated as 8,0 [Demo, Auto]. According to Political Scientists, we ranked as a Democracy during the US Civil war...
Andrew: If you consult either Rummel or Ray, both say the US did not qualify as a democracy during the period from 1854-1865--and they quote numerous other poli-sci sources which agree with this.
However I'd be interested to know if you have a link to the Marshall and Jaggers material.
Though it turns out that there might just possibly have been one war between Democratic nations. In The Spanish/American war (1898), Spain has been counted as a democracy according to some measures...
Also, there have definitely been wars between democratic states; you just have to go back to ancient Greece to find them. And for another point: The UK and Finland were on opposite sides of WWII, and had mutual declarations of war. But they never actually attacked eachother...
Bonus: if you write about it for school, you can site it directly, and you'll seem really smart. You can cite Rudy as well, since he's one of the foremost experts on it. ;-)
Question: Is it necessary for women to vote for a country to be a democracy? I know I'll sound like a "Transcendental Scientist", but I'm going to have to say no. There has never been a more passionate devotee of democracy than G. K. Chesterton, and yet he opposed women voting for 3 reasons:
1) Most women at the time didn't want the vote, and, if they were allowed to vote on whether they should be allowed to vote, the majority of them would have voted against it.
2) Women, being essentially holier than men, should not participate in the organized coercion which is the essence of government.
3) Men have a better understanding and appreciation of the idea of an impersonal rule of law, while women gravitate toward more personal rule, and hence are more suited to be despots, whether in the home or on the throne. HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!!
Transcending "Transcendental Science"?
This brings me to something I have thought about for a long time, and was thinking about this morning. Chesterton said that there are essentially two kinds of government, rule by a rule and rule by a ruler. In other words, republics and monarchies. And I have long thought that the latter tends to be the more instinctual or "default" type of rule, that toward which the hearts of both men and women incline. This ties in with the two hemispheres of the brain, the left (or "math") hemisphere vs. the right (or "myth") hemisphere. The Left ("Liberty, Equality, Fraternity") vs. the Right ("Throne and Altar"). Benjamin Disraeli once defined liberalism as "loyalty to abstractions" and conservatism as "loyalty to persons". I think this ties in with atheism vs. theism as well.
The earliest forms of government were monarchies, the kings of Sumer and Babylon, the Pharaohs of Egypt, the princes of India, the kings and then emperors of China and Japan, the chiefs and kings of the Mayas, Olmecs, Toltecs, Aztecs, and Incas and of all the Native American tribes as well as those of Africa, the kings of Hawaii, the kings of Europe. The Greeks of the Homeric era had kings, as did the earliest Romans. The Greeks and then the Romans were the first to try republics, and the first to philosophize abstractly about alternative forms of government. But even the Greeks finally surrendered to the despotism of Alexander, and the Romans to the Caesars.
In the late 18th century, America and France established republics. But France soon fell to the rule of Napoleon, and then spent the next century alternating between republics and monarchies. In America, George Washington explicitly refused the crown, and we have remained a republic ever since. But, even here, we have always had the tendency to endow our more popular Presidents (e.g., JFK, FDR, Lincoln, even Washington himself) with quasi-monarchical grandeur.
I have long ago concluded that the ideal form of government is a Constitutional monarchy, combining the rule of an overarching impersonal law with that loyalty to a person to which the human heart has always gravitated. A Queen, Beatrix, sits upon the throne in the Netherlands, perhaps the freest of all lands, and also democratic in its governance. As to war and peace, I have not heard of Holland declaring war on Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, or the United States. But, as Pim Fortuyn warned, she may soon have to declare War against a subversive element within her midst....
But I do have one comment. I didn’t see any mention of how population size or density of a particular state might factor into the equation. It seems to me (no proof) that the majority of democracies are now, and have been, smaller population-wise than many states with other forms of government.
Or stated another way, it seems a much larger percentage of the world’s population has been historically represented by non-democratic governments. And the larger the population, the greater demand for resources, the greater the opportunity for internal conflict, and quite possibly a greater propensity for war.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of democracy, and I believe it is the best form of government ever conceived. So I hope these guys are right. And I am involved in research myself, so I know you have to constrain these problems carefully. And you will always get the inevitable, “why didn’t you look at this?”, and “why didn’t look at that?,” etc., etc. So I feel their pain in that respect.
But population size seems important here. Maybe the studies could compare not simply the number of states, but the number of people each of those states represent.
"Technically women don't have to have the vote to be considered a democracy but you can't be considered a liberla democracy unless you have universal franchise (which of course would include women)."
A system in which only women are allowed to vote would a Femocracy. A liberal Femocracy would be one in which the men are let out of their cages every once in a while.
HAIL TO THE QUEEN OF ALL EVIL....!!!!
Jay: Nope. Population-wise, India is the world's second largest country, with over a billion citizens--and is the world's largest democracy. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world with 300 million citizens--and is the world's second largest democracy. Both nations have been growing steadily ever since they became democracies. Indonesia recently got on the road to democracy--they haven't yet had a peaceful transition of power, so they aren't proven yet--but they are close and they have an enormous and burgeoning population.
Liberal democracies have been proven never to commit mass murder of their own citizens. No liberal democracy has ever done this. By comparison, non-democracies frequently murder their own citizens by the millions. China, North Korea, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Saddam's Iraq all spring immediately to mind.
Simply put, most people's thinking on this is exactly backwards: if you want to get rid of poverty, democracy needs to be the first thing you implement. If you want to improve human rights, democracy is the first thing you implement. If you want to feed the hungry, democracy is the first thing you implement. If you want to see increased lifespans, democracy is the first thing you implement.
I am not arguing with the premise. It does make sense to me, and I hope it is completely correct.
But my (relatively) unbiased, inner researcher is wondering how population numbers would effect the study. That seems to me like it could be a very important variable, and I don’t see any mention of it anywhere.
Hell, it might end up making the argument even stronger, for all I know.
If you would look at the materials I have linked, Jay, you would find that every liberal democracy on Earth and every democracy in history has been examined, from tiny ones with less than a million, to smallish ones with a few million, to largish ones with tens of millions, to enormous ones with hundreds of millions. Not one has ever gone to war with another democracy--not once, not ever. Not one has experienced a famine--not once, not ever. Not one has committed mass slaughter of its own citizens--not once, not ever.
What more can I tell you? These questions have been examined already. Read the James Lee Ray paper.
You don’t have to say anything more. I have read and re-read that paper several times.
I think I understand your point completely, and I agree completely.
I’m suffering through some communication challenges here. I think the study should go a bit further, and I’m having trouble explaining why I feel that way.
But the real world is calling, so any further discussion will have to wait. Or if it just vaporizes into the Ether, I won’t feel bad at all.
Now, any nation that allows slavery can hardly be called a liberal democracy, but the USA was a democracy by most standards, and by the standards of the day, one of the most liberal.
Still, a single counterexample doesn't detract from the main point: if you want to fix the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia, democracy is the first step.
Mike
Yes, the US was far more liberal and progressive than most of the world at the time. But it was not a democracy. It was a republic, one in which only a minority of citizens had the franchise. Not even 50% were eligible to vote.
Thus the US civil war is not an exception. So far, there are no exceptions.
My own definition of war is "any use or threat of force in order to achieve a political goal against the will of someone else not in the same body politic". A different way to say that is that "war" is anything that obeys the principles laid out by Clausewitz. My definition is much more broad than yours, Dean; it includes what you call "war" (which I refer to as "violent war") but my definition also includes such things as "trade wars" and "wars of words".
If you use my more expansive definition and if you subdivide war into "violent war" and "nonviolent war" I think what you find is that democracies never engage in violent war with one another (I agree with that point), but they engage in nonviolent war with each other more often than non-democracies do.
And I think that this supports Dean's point rather than impeaching it. Democracies engage in cold war with each other, but never hot war. There can be and have been cold wars with non-democracies, but between democracies it's the preferred way to go about it.
But don't ask me to explain why, because I can't.
I note only again: the Democratic Peace Theory isn't my pet theory or belief. It is the single best-supported and most widely accepted theory in the field of Political Science. It is not mush-headed feel-good crap, and it is not the "Bush line" or anything like that. It's a scientific theory, a very rigorous and quite well-supported one. I repeat once again: read this paper. If you understand everything in it, then you have a firm understanding of Democratic Peace Theory.
So again: 1) Within this theory, "War" equals battle confrontations in which at least 1,000 individuals are killed in battle. 2) "Democracy" equals a nation in which 50% or more of the populace can vote, in which there are competitive elections with at least two independent political parties, in which both the executive and legislative branches have been put into office by such elections, and in which there has been at least one peaceful transfer of power between independent political parties.
Got it? Those are the terms. In that case the equation is simple: Democracies never make war on each other.
The United States was not a democracy at the time of its great civil war. Neither the US nor the UK were democracies at the time of the Revolutionary War. Spain was not a democracy at the time of the Spanish-American war. And so on and so forth.
In furtherance of understanding the theory, a liberal democracy is one in which not only the four conditions described above hold, but in which free press, free speech, and universal or near-universal franchise is granted. In that equation:
1) No liberal democracy has ever gone to war with any other democracy (liberal or nonliberal)
2) No liberal democracy has ever experienced a famine.
3) No liberal democracy has ever experienced a civil war (again see the definition of "war" given above), and
4) No liberal democracy has ever committed mass murder against its own people.
All of those hold true. None of them are debatable. We have a huge dataset from which to draw and there are no exceptions to be found anywhere in the historic record at all, anywhere.
Given the number of wars which have been fought in history, and the number killed in those wars, and the opportunities democracies have had to go to war with each other, the odds of this all being simply coincidental are literally astronomical; Rummel's calculations put it at 8.017E-36--odds of getting hit by a meteor are probably higher.
Once you understand this theory, and the extraordinary amount of data that underlies it, you start to understand its significance--and conversations about trade wars and whatnot become interesting, but take place on an entirely different plane. I'll merely note that at one time a "trade war" literally involved shooting at people, wars in which thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands might die or be enslaved (and by "enslaved" I don't mean "wage slave" or "not making a fair wage," I mean enslaved, motherfucker).
Democracies often go to war, and are extremely good at it. In their interactions with each other, however, they restrict themselves to non-lethal forms of conflict most of the time.
You say here:
There can be and have been cold wars with non-democracies, but between democracies it's the preferred way to go about it....But don't ask me to explain why, because I can't.
I again recommend this paper. You should have no trouble digesting it.
But to give you a short response: there are several theories as to why this is, but it mostly boils down to the fact that elected leaders who lose wars lose their jobs, and further, Game Theory would support the contention that the average citizen--and remember, the "average citizen" is either a voter or at least a close friend and relative of a voter in any democracy--stands to lose the most in a war and generally won't support it without strong reason.
In essence, Stephen, the traditional liberal worldview is simply pervasive: people don't much like war and don't generally favor it. If they did, the entire globe would be a cinder by now.
Note that within this theory there are several percolating effects which you can see; democracies have a harder time with longer and more protracted wars than do autocracies, for example.
There is a project called “POLITY” (Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Principal Investigators Monty G. Marshall, Project Director Ted Robert Gurr, Founding Director). POLITY is on it’s 4th iteration and ranks the worlds nations, year by year according a bunch of different variables to determine what sort of government they have. This one of the most rigorous and widely used datasets available. It uses different definitions than Prof. Ray...
It ranks nations on a pair of 10 point scales, one for democracy, one for autocracy. These categories are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they tend to be. The US has never ranked above a 3 on the autocracy scale (1800-1809), and never below a 7 on the Democracy scale (same time period). Even during this time, we rated as a Democracy, though it was a near thing...
From 1854-1865, we rated as 8,0 [Demo, Auto]. According to Political Scientists, we ranked as a Democracy during the US Civil war...
However I'd be interested to know if you have a link to the Marshall and Jaggers material.