Democratic transitions and the democratic peace both require treating democracy as a gray-zone continuum.

Evidence

Democracy provides another important example where the gray zone can matter a lot. There exists a huge literature on democratic transitions, which are virtually by definition in the gray zone. It is hard to imagine how one could develop a theory of democratic transitions without a gray zone view of democracy, since every country must pass through it on its way to becoming (or not) a stable democracy. In a different context, democracy plays a large role in the international conflict literature via the democratic peace. Yet there are important cases—Germany and the United Kingdom—where the country was democratic in terms of its domestic politics, but where the king had a very important, if not dominant, role in foreign policy. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the democratic-peace literature’s well-known coding disputes about whether pre-1914 Britain and Wilhelmine Germany count as democracies.
• SEED: An angle on how ‘democratic’ foreign policy gets decided by whoever holds the foreign-policy portfolio — a rearguard of the full-democracy coding.