Browsing by Author "Bernhard, Michael"

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Democratization in Conflict Studies: How Conceptualization Affects Operationalization and Testing Outcomes
(2016) Bernhard, Michael; Orsun, Omer; Bayer, Redat; V-Dem Institute
Using the debate over democratization and conflict, we demonstrate how the connec- tion between conceptualization and operationalization can play a decisive role in the testing of falsifiable hypotheses. We discuss seven different operationalizations of regime change based on three different conceptualizations of democracy. Although we find high correlations between different measures of democracy, when they are used to capture regime change the correlations drop precipitously. In multivariate estimations of the effect of regime change on a range of conflict variables, we generate widely disparate results, providing no consistent support that democratization affects conflict. We thus demonstrate that decisions about conceptualization and subsequent operationalization have decisive impact on the inference we produce. In con- trast, our controls for the effect of institutionalized democracy consistently show a negative re- lationship between joint democracy and conflict. Finally, autocratic regime change seems to be more robustly correlated with a range of conflict behaviors than heretofore recognized in this literature.
Electoral Volatility and Regime Survival in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes
(2022-02) Kim, Wooseok; Bernhard, Michael; Hicken, Allen; V-Dem Institute
Party system institutionalization is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non-democratic systems has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate whether the concept has meaningful and perhaps unique implications for the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that electoral volatility—the most common measure of party system institutionalization in democracies—conveys useful information in competitive authoritarian contexts by signaling the ability of the ruling party to manage the opposition, but note that it needs to be refined to be applicable to such contexts. To this end, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility, and further divide opposition party volatility into Type-A and Type-B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party’s seat share are accompanied by opposition party Type-B volatility. This paper demonstrates that the concept of party system institutionalization can be useful for making sense of regime dynamics even in non-democratic contexts.
Experts, Coders, and Crowds: An analysis of substitutability
(2017) Marquardt, Kyle L.; Pemstein, Daniel; Sanhueza Petrarca, Constanza; Seim, Brigitte; Wilson, Steven Lloyd; Bernhard, Michael; Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
Recent work suggests that crowd workers can replace experts and trained coders in common coding tasks. However, while many political science applications require coders to both and relevant information and provide judgment, current studies focus on a limited domain in which experts provide text for crowd workers to code. To address potential over-generalization, we introduce a typology of data producing actors - experts, coders, and crowds - and hypothesize factors which affect crowd-expert substitutability. We use this typology to guide a comparison of data from crowdsourced and expert surveys. Our results provide sharp scope conditions for the substitutability of crowd workers: when coding tasks require contextual and conceptual knowledge, crowds produce substantively dierent data from coders and experts. We also find that crowd workers can cost more than experts in the context of cross-national panels, and that one purported advantage of crowdsourcing - replicability - is undercut by an insucient number of crowd workers.
Institutional Subsystems and the Survival of Democracy: Do Political and Civil Society Matter?
(2015) Bernhard, Michael; Hicken, Allen; Reenock, Christopher; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
How do two central institutional subsystems of democracy – party systems and civil society – affect the persistence of democratic regimes? Despite the ability of each of these institutions to provide sources of countervailing power that make politicians accountable and thus responsive, distributionist accounts of democratic breakdown provide few insights on how such institutions may encourage parties to reach accommodation. We argue that these institutions provide credible threats against anti-system activities that would otherwise threaten the democratic compromise. We test our argument with newly available data from the Varieties of Democracy (VDEM) project by analyzing all episodes of democratic breakdown from 1900-2001. Using a split population event history estimator, we find evidence that these institutions not only forestall the timing of breakdowns among transitional democracies but also that a strong party system is critical to setting democratic regimes on the path of consolidation.
Mass Mobilization and Regime Change. Evidence From a New Measure of Mobilization for Democracy and Autocracy From 1900 to 2020
(2022-01) Hellmeier, Sebastian; Bernhard, Michael; V-Dem Institute
Mass mobilization is an important driver of political change. While some citizens organize collective action in favor of more democratic institutions, others take to the streets to support authoritarian leaders or non-democratic forms of governance. In this paper, we introduce latent measures of pro-democratic and pro-autocratic mass mobilization using expert assessments for 170 polities from 1900-2020. The data allows us to trace patterns in mass mobilization over time, across regions and regime types. We use the new data to systematically analyze the relationship between both types of mobilization and regime change. While we confirm the findings of the large literature on contentious democratic politics, our analysis of autocratic mobilization allows us to help understand the controversy in the literature on “bad” civil society. Our empirical analysis shows that mass mobilization in favor of autocracy negatively affects democracy and reduces the likelihood of democratization. Our results suggest that the extant literature’s focus on mobilization generally was perhaps too blunt, and disaggregating the goals of the actors involved in contentious politics helps to understand how protest affects regime change in a more nuanced fashion.
Party Strength and Economic Growth
(2015-09) Bernhard, Michael; Bizzarro, Fernando; Coppedge, Michael; Gerring, John; Hicken, Allen; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
This study argues that strong parties play a critical role in fostering economic development. The theory explores how parties broaden the constituencies to which policy makers respond and help politicians to solve coordination problems. These features ensure that politicians engage in better economic management, provide productivity enhancing public services, and help ensure political (and thus policy) stability. This, in turn, should enhance economic growth. Drawing on a novel measure of party strength from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, we test this hypothesis on data from more than 150 countries, with time series extending from 1900 to 2012. We identify a sizeable and highly significant effect, and one that is robust to a variety of specifications, estimators, and samples. The effect operates in both democracies and autocracies and is fairly stable across various regions of the world and across time periods. We also provide suggestive evidence about causal mechanisms, focusing on measures of economic management, public goods, and political stability. This paper contributes to two large literatures, respectively focusing on features of political parties and on the institutional determinants of growth. While previous studies have highlighted the role of parties in improving the quality of governance such claims are usually limited in context – to democratic or authoritarian settings – and generally do not pertain to distal outcomes such as per capita GDP growth. Studies of economic development, while focused explicitly on growth, generally identify other long-run causal factors at work, e.g., geography, property rights, political constraints, colonial origins, inequality, social capital, or human capital.
Reassessing the Democratic Peace: A Novel Test Based on the Varieties of Democracy Data
(2018) Hegre, Håvard; Bernhard, Michael; Teorell, Jan; V-Dem Institute
The democratic peace is one of the most robust findings in international relations. Yet it suffers from two important limitations. First, even those who fully embrace the democratic peace have difficulty precisely identifying which facet of democracy drives the result. Second, the vast majority of studies have relied on a single measure of democracy - the Polity index. This paper reassesses interstate conflict on several new measures of democracy and their disaggregated components from the Varieties of Democracy project in a global sample of 173 countries from 1900-2010 (www.v-dem.net). We theorize three distinct mechanisms of constraint that may explain why some countries do not engage in military conflict with each other: formal vertical (e.g. elections), informal vertical (e.g. civil society activism), and horizontal accountability (e.g. interbranch constraint on the executive). We find that the formal vertical channels of accountability provided by elections are not as crucial as horizontal constraint and the informal vertical accountability provided by a strong civil society.
Regime Legitimation Strategies (RLS) 1900 to 2018
(2019) Tannenberg, Marcus; Bernhard, Michael; Gerschewski, Johannes; Lührmann, Anna; von Soest, Christian; V-Dem Institute
In this paper we introduce new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies for 179 countries in the world from 1900 up until 2018 that are comparable across time and space. Country experts have rated the extent to which the government promotes or references its performance, the person of the leader, rational-legality, and ideology in order to justify the regime in place. With regards to ideology, the experts are further asked to categorize the ideology of the regime as nationalist, communist/socialist, conservative/restorative, religious, and/or separatist. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and validate the data against expectations on claims from case studies as well as with existing regime type classifications. We show that experts do understand and can be employed to code legitimation claims. Not only do we document historical shifts in legitimation claims, but the measures also pick up recent trends, such as, an increased emphasis of the leader in countries such as Russia, Turkey, Cambodia over the last decades, and more recently also in India and the Philippines; as well as recent increases in legitimation claims based on both conservative and nationalist ideologies the European countries Serbia, Hungary and Poland, which also have experienced autocratization in recent years.
Suicide by Competition? Authoritarian Institutional Adaptation and Regime Fragility
(2016) Bernhard, Michael; Edgell, Amanda B.; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
While it is clear that contemporary authoritarian incumbents use democratic emulation as a strategy in the hopes of stabilizing and extending their tenure in power, this does not mean it is always effective. Indeed, an extant literature presents strong evidence that the opening of the pursuit of power to electoral competition can make authoritarianism vulnerable. Unless it is mediated by other factors, democratic emulation by authoritarian incumbents cannot simultaneously both stabilize their rule and make it more vulnerable to democratic transitions. These two literatures leave us with a set of contradictory generalizations. Some scholars argue that reiterated multiparty competitive elections present a gradual path from authoritarianism to democracy. Can they at the same time be a source of authoritarian stability? In this paper we seek to resolve this paradox by employing a unique combination of event history modeling to assess how experiences with multiparty elections influence patterns of authoritarian survival and transition in 108 countries from 1946-2010. Our results suggest that while authoritarian regimes face increasing odds of failure during the first three iterated multiparty and competitive election cycles, subsequent iterated cycles are far less dangerous to their survival. Given that few authoritarian regimes survive past three elections, these findings should be seen as more supportive of the democratization by elections thesis than democratic emulation as a way to enhance authoritarian survival.
When and Where do Elections Matter? A Global Test of the Democratization by Elections Hypothesis, 1900-2012
(2015) Edgell, Amanda; Mechkova, Valeriya; Bernhard, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
To date studies assessing the democratizing effects of elections have produced mixed results. While findings suggest that successive uninterrupted election cycles in a global sample (Teorell and Hadenius 2009) and within sub-Saharan Africa (Lindberg 2006, 2009) have a robust positive impact on democratization, tests in other regions have been less encouraging. In particular, negative empirical findings in Latin America (McCoy and Hartlyn 2009) and Postcommunist Europe (Kaya and Bernhard 2013) call into question whether the democratizing effect of elections is isolated to the sub-Saharan region. In addition, the hypothesis has been subject to conceptual criticism (Lust-Okar 2009). This paper poses a comprehensive and global set of tests on the democratizing effect of elections, assessing the scope of the argument both geographically and temporally. We test whether elections have a democratizing effect in specific regions, in specific time periods, and globally. In particular we assess whether the effects are largely confined to Africa, during the third wave, or if this is a more general phenomenon. We find consistent support that the reiteration of contested multiparty elections leads to the improvement of rule of law and the quality of civil rights protections.