Browsing by Author "Boese, Vanessa A."

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Democratic Legacies: Using Democratic Stock to Assess Norms, Growth, and Regime Trajectories
(2020-05) Edgell, Amanda B.; Wilson, Matthew C.; Boese, Vanessa A.; Grahn, Sandra; V-Dem Institute
While social scientists often theorize about the enduring effects of past regime characteristics, conceptual issues and data limitations pose real challenges for assessing these legacies empirically. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock, conceptualized as the accumulated experience of democratic rule within a polity. Using a weighted sum of past values on the Electoral Democracy Index from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, we capture variation in past experiences with democratic institutions and practices in 199 political units from 1789 to 2019. This measure of democratic stock provides additional information on a country's political history that is not captured by its present level of democracy or regime type. To illustrate this, we highlight several cases and revisit prominent theories about democratic norms, economic growth, and democratic decline. These applications encourage scholars to think more about political outcomes as legacies of democracy.
Deterring Dictatorship: Explaining Democratic Resilience since 1900
(V-Dem Institute, 2020-05) Boese, Vanessa A.; Edgell, Amanda B.; Hellmeier, Sebastian; Maerz, Seraphine F.; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
Democracy is under threat globally from democratically elected leaders engaging in erosion of media freedom, civil society, and the rule of law. What distinguishes democracies that prevail against the forces of autocratization? This article breaks new ground by conceptualizing democratic resilience as a two-stage process, whereby democracies first exhibit resilience by avoiding autocratization altogether and second, by avoiding democratic breakdown given that autocratization has occurred. To model this two-stage process, we introduce the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset tracking autocratization since 1900. These data demonstrate the extraordinary nature of the current wave of autocratization: Fifty-nine (61%) episodes of democratic regression in the ERT began after 1992. Since then, autocratization episodes have killed an unprecedented 36 democratic regimes. Using a selection-model, we simultaneously test for factors that make democracies more prone to experience democratic regression and, given this, factors that explain democratic breakdown. Results from the explanatory analysis suggest that constraints on the executive are positively associated with a reduced risk of autocratization. Once autocratization is ongoing, we find that a long history of democratic institutions, durable judicial constraints on the executive, and more democratic neighbours are factors that make democracy more likely to prevail.
Empirical Dimensions of Electoral Democracy
(2020-09) Wilson, Matthew C.; Boese, Vanessa A.; V-Dem Institute
This paper investigates conceptual ambiguities concerning the dimensionality of democracy and what it can tell us about political development. We explore variation in components of the Electoral Democracy Index from the Varieties of Democracy Project and evaluate the strength of their relationships to democratization and democratic stability. Factor analysis of these indicators reveals three latent dimensions that have different impacts on regime change. Regimes with greater levels of civic freedoms are associated with an increased likelihood of democratic transition and stability, whereas regimes in which suffrage was most predominant are among the least democratic. The three dimensions show noteworthy trends over time and space and constitute patterns that support conclusions about \paths to polyarchy" (Dahl 1971). The results challenge the notion that electoral democracy is two-dimensional and promote, instead, civic freedoms, vote quality, and suffrage as three distinct dimensions.
Establishing Pathways to Democracy Using Domination Analysis
(2020) Edgell, Amanda B.; Boese, Vanessa A.; Maerz, Seraphine F.; Lindenfors, Patrik; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
How does the order in which liberalization unfolds a ect the likelihood for a successful democratic transition? Dahl was among the rst to argue that the sequence matters for the outcome when it comes to democratization. This paper builds upon his work and empirically analyzes pathways to democracy employing the newly developed method of domination analysis. We are the rst to demonstrate three key ndings: 1) There is a clear structure in terms of order of how most episodes of liberalization from authoritarian rule develop; 2) Such sequences are di erent in key respects for failed and successful episodes of liberalization; and 3) clean election elements { in the capacity of electoral management bodies { stand out as developing earlier in episodes that successfully lead to democracy.
Institutional Order in Episodes of Autocratization
(V-Dem Working Paper, 2022-10) Sato, Yuko; Lundstedt, Martin; Morrison, Kelly; Boese, Vanessa A.; Lindberg, Staﬀan I.; V-Dem Institute
Are there patterns in the sequences of institutional change when democracies autocratize? If so, are such patterns distinct for democracies that transition to authoritarianism versus those that avert democratic breakdown? The Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset provides a global sample of all 69 autocratization episodes between 1900-2021. Using this data and pair-wise domination analysis, we describe the general order of reforms in 31 variables which make up diﬀerent types of accountability mechanisms constraining the government. Our ﬁndings suggest that institutional decay starts with horizontal accountability, followed by declines in diagonal accountability, and, ﬁnally, vertical accountability. This pattern becomes more appar-ent in countries with low democratic stock and during the third wave of autocratization. This study makes strong contributions to a growing academic literature on patterns of autocrati-zation as well as initiatives among policymakers and practitioners to counteract autocratization.
Populism and COVID-19: How Populist Governments (Mis)Handle the Pandemic
(2021-05) Bayerlein, Michael; Boese, Vanessa A.; Gates, Scott; Kamin, Katrin; Syed Mansoob, Murshed; V-Dem Institute
Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of economic crises and over the perceived failure of the elites, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our paper answers the question of how populist governments handle the pandemic. We answer this question by introducing a theoretical framework according to which (1) populist governments enact less far-reaching policy measures to counter the pandemic, (2) lower the effort of citizens to counter the pandemic, and are ultimately (3) hit worse by the pandemic. We test the propositions in a sample of 42 countries with weekly data from 2020. Employing econometric models, we find empirical support for our propositions and ultimately conclude that excess mortality exceeds the excess mortality of conventional countries by 10 percentage points (i.e., 100%). Our findings have important implications for the assessment of populist government performance in general as well as counter-pandemic measures in particular by providing evidence that opportunistic and inadequate policy responses as well as spreading misinformation and downplaying the pandemic are strongly related to increases in COVID-19 mortality.
Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description
(2020) Wilson, Matthew C.; Morgan, Richard; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Maxwell, Laura; Maerz, Seraphine F.; Lührmann, Anna; Lindenfors, Patrik; Edgell, Amanda B.; Boese, Vanessa A.; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
What explains successful democratization? This paper makes four contributions towards providing more sophisticated answers to this question. Building on the comparative case study and large-N literature, it first presents a new approach to conceptualizing the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, tracing its progression, and classifying episodes by successful vs. different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. Second, it provides the first ever dataset (EPLIB) of the full universe of episodes from 1900 to 2018, and third, it demonstrates the value of this approach, showing that while several established covariates are useful for predicting outcomes, none of them seem to explain the onset of a period of liberalization. Fourth, it illustrates how the identification of episodes makes it possible to study processes quantitatively using sequencing methods to detail the importance of the order of change for liberalization outcomes.
Visualizing Authority Patterns over Space and Time
(2020) Boese, Vanessa A.; Gates, Scott; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Nygård, Håvard Mokleiv; Strand, Håvard; V-Dem Institute
Unidimensional measures of democracy fail to account for the complex and varied nature of political systems. This article disaggregates the concept of democracy and proposes a multidimensional conceptualization to account for this variation in institutional congurations. Three theoretically informed dimensions are featured: participation, electoral contestation, and constraints on the executive. The three dimensions constitute a cube covering all regime types, in which we place countries using V-Dem data from 1789 to 2018. The cube of democracy patterns reveals several interesting observations. We trace historical patterns of democratization and autocratization, and discuss how global and regional developments take dierent paths at dierent times. Our conceptualization makes it clear that political systems with a similar score along a unidimensional scale can in fact be quite distinct. In addition, across the globe over 200 years, certain congurations of political institutions never occur. In other words, incompatible institutional pairs do not exist or are extremely short lived. This multidimensional conceptualization ultimately opens up a new eld of research in which institutional change can be studied in greater detail across countries and over time.
Which Institutions Rule? Unbundling the Democracy-Growth Nexus
(2022-02) Boese, Vanessa A.; Eberhardt, Markus; V-Dem Institute
Over the past two decades studies of the causal impact of ‘institutions’ and ‘democracy’ on economic prosperity have occupied a prominent position in the cross-country growth litera-ture and within economics more broadly. While this body of work establishes a consensus that ‘institutions rule’ (over trade and geography) and that ‘democracy causes growth’, what has been missing in the debate is an attempt to systematically trace some tangible building blocks of these abstract ‘bundles’ driving the positive relationship with economic development. In this paper, we adopt an encompassing concept of ‘liberal democracy’, covering underlying po-litical and economic institutions, which we unbundle using the hierarchical data developed by the Varieties of Democracy project. We sketch how the incentives and opportunities as well as the distribution of political power created and shaped by these underlying institutions, in combination with the extent of the market, endogenously form an ‘economic blueprint for growth’, which is likely to differ across countries. Furthermore, political learning and insti-tutionalisation imply a non-linear growth effect of institutional change within countries over time. We overcome these challenges by adopting a heterogeneous treatment effects estimator which allows for non-parallel trends in the run-up to and endogenous selection into institu-tional change. Our results for each underlying institution are presented as a function of ‘time in treatment’ and conditioned on the evolution of ‘rival’ institutions, enabling us to interpret them as empirical horse-races. We ﬁnd that freedom of expression, clean elections, and leg-islative constraints on the executive are the foremost institutional drivers of economic devel-opment in the long-run. Erosion of these institutions, as witnessed recently in many countries, may jeopardise the perpetual growth effect of becoming a liberal democracy we establish for the post-WWII period.