A concept’s negative pole often has multiple candidates rather than one obvious opposite.

Evidence

One good test is to take the negative pole as the positive and ask about its negative. If we look at the (American) literature on pluralism it is not obvious that the negative pole is corporatism. Similar indications of difficulty surface when the negative pole has various possible labels. For example, the negative pole of democracy might be dictatorship or authoritarianism; historically it was monarchy. Alvarez et al. (1996) have three dimensions for “dictatorship” (1) mobilizing or exclusionary, (2) how many formal centers of power (executive, legislative, parties), (3) framework of law or more arbitrary system. This is clearly not just the opposite of their concept of democracy. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 218

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: an essay on why ‘authoritarianism’ fails as a clean antonym for democracy, using concept-structure analysis to explain the muddle in comparative politics.