Browsing by Author "Gerring, John"

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A General Theory of Power Concentration: Demographic Influences on Political Organization
(2016) Gerring, John; Jaeger, Jillian; Maguire, Matthew; V-Dem Institute
Why is the exercise of political power highly concentrated in some polities and widely dispersed in others? We argue that one persistent causal factor is demographic. Populous polities are characterized by more concentrated structures of authority. To explain this relationship we invoke two mechanisms: efficiency and trust. The theory is demonstrated with a wide variety of empirical measures and in two settings: (1) cross-country analyses including most sovereign states and extending back to the 19th century and (2) within-country analyses focused on states, counties, and localities in the United States.
Do Political Finance Laws Reduce Corruption?
(2018) Hummel, Calla; Gerring, John; Burt, Thomas; V-Dem Institute
Most countries regulate political finance and many offer public subsidies to political parties or candidates. Proponents of political finance regulations claim that public money reduces corruption in politics, while opponents worry that public subsidies have no impact on corruption and in some cases may add to it. Despite national-level debates and billions of taxpayer dollars, few studies test this relationship. We argue that political finance subsidies reduce corruption by reducing the influence of private money in politics and increasing legal and media sanctions for corrupt behavior. We evaluate the argument with an original dataset measuring political subsidies from 154 countries from 1900-2012, as well as disaggregated corruption measures from the Varieties of Democracy project. We also conduct a case study of political finance regulations in Paraguay. Our findings suggest that political finance subsidies reduce corruption, and particularly embezzlement, even in countries where regulations are unevenly implemented.
Economic Development and Democracy: An Electoral Connection
(2015) Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Gerring, John; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan; Maguire, Matthew; Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
This study takes a new tack on the question of modernization and democracy, focused on the outcome of theoretical interest. We argue that economic development affects the electoral component of democracy but has minimal impact on other components of this diffuse concept. This is so because development (a) alters the power and incentives of top leaders and (b) elections provide a focal point for collective action. The theory is tested with two new datasets – Varieties of Democracy and Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy – that allow us to disaggregate the concept of democracy into meso- and micro-level indicators. Results of these tests corroborate the theory: only election-centered indices are correlated with economic development. This may help to account for apparent inconsistencies across extant studies and may also shed light on the mechanisms at work in a much-studied relationship.
Electoral Contestation: A Comprehensive Polity-Level Analysis
(2018) Gerring, John; Hicken, Allen; Weitzel, Daniel; Cojocaru, Lee; V-Dem Institute
The study of electoral contestation generally focuses on districts or regions rather than polities. We present a new dataset that measures electoral contestation through historical records of elections in sovereign and semi-sovereign polities throughout the world from 1789 to the present. We also offer a new index of contestation intended to capture multiple dimensions of this complex concept. Our second objective is to explain variation across polities and through time in electoral contestation. We argue that the degree of contestation in a polity is affected by demography, with larger polities fostering greater electoral contestation. This hypothesis is tested with a series of cross-national regression tests that employ a variety of specifications and estimators – crosssectional, fixed-effect, and instrumental variable. We find a robust association between population and contestation extending throughout the modern era.
Electoral Democracy and Human Development
(2015) Gerring, John; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Skanning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan; Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Maguire, Matthew; V-Dem Institute
This study attempts to reconcile competing positions in the debate over whether democracy improves human development by showing that some aspects of democracy – but not others – affect human development. Specifically, we argue that the “electoral” aspect of democracy improves human development while aspects related to citizen empowerment do not (or scarcely so). Likewise, composite indices of democracy bear only a weak relationship to human development, especially if they do not take the mutual dependence between electoral components into account in their aggregation procedures. We argue, finally, that public policies serve as a key causal mechanism in this relationship. Electoral competition incentivizes politicians to provide public goods and services, and these, in turn, save lives. This set of hypotheses is tested in a more rigorous fashion than has hitherto been possible. First, we enlist a new dataset compiled by the CLIO Infra project that measures mortality – infant mortality, child mortality, and life expectancy – for most sovereign countries over the course of the twentieth century. Second, we draw on a new political institutions dataset – Varieties of Democracy (V- Dem) – that provides highly differentiated measures of democracy, measured annually for most sovereign countries from 1900 to the present. Third, we apply a diverse set of empirical tests including fixed effects, lagged dependent variables, first-difference, system GMM, and instrumental variables. Considered together, these tests mitigate concerns about causal identification.
Global Democracy for Europeans: A Demographic Story
(2018) Gerring, John; Apfeld, Brendan; V-Dem Institute
Insofar as democracy is a product of long-term diffusion, scholars generally focus on colonialism (especially English) or religion (especially Protestant). Here, we focus on a third pathway from Europe – Europeans. We show that there is a persistent relationship between the share of Europeans in a society and its regime type. We conjecture that this is because Europeans viewed democracy as a basic right – for themselves. It was a club that produced club goods (excludable goods such as property rights and civil liberties). Hence, where Europeans were in the majority they were democrats. Where they were the minority they were indifferent or hostile, or they embraced a restricted form of democracy that excluded non-Europeans. And where Europeans were entirely absent there was no one – at least initially – to carry the democratic torch. To test this argument we assemble an original dataset measuring the diffusion of Europeans across the world from 1600 to the present. This is employed to predict democracy in a series of analyses that focus on various indicators of democracy and a variety of samples, specifications, time-periods, and estimators, including fixed effects and instrumental variables. The evidence offers strong support for the thesis.
Harbors and Democracy
(2018) Gerring, John; Wig, Tore; Forø Tollefsen, Andreas; Apfeld, Brendan; V-Dem Institute
Although geography is widely viewed as an important factor in long-term development, little attention has been paid to its role in democratization. This study focuses on the possible impact of a feature of littoral geography: natural harbors with access to the sea. By virtue of enhancing connections to the wider world, we argue that harbors foster (a) development, (b) mobility, (c) naval-based defense forces, and (d) diffusion. Through these pathways, operative over secular-historical time, areas blessed by natural harbors are more likely to develop democratic forms of government. This argument is tested with a unique database measuring distance to natural harbors throughout the world. We show that there is a robust negative association between this measure and democracy in country and grid-cell analyses, and in instrumental variable models where harbor distance is instrumented by ocean distance.
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century
(2018) Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Teorell, Jan; Cornell, Agnes; Gerring, John; Gjerløw, Haakon; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Wig, Tore; Ziblatt, Daniel; Marquardt, Kyle L.; Pemstein, Dan; Seim, Brigitte; V-Dem Institute
The Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset (Historical V-Dem) is a new dataset containing about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally – including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators are also included in the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers the period from 1900 to the present – and together these two datasets cover the bulk of “modern history”. Historical V-Dem also includes several new indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19th century polities. We describe the data, the process of coding, and the different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure inter-temporal- and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we provide a descriptive account of patterns of democratization in the “long 19th century.” Finally, we perform an empirical investigation of how inter-state war relates to subsequent democratization.
Local Democracy and Economic Growth
(2016) Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Gerring, John; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
Theoretical work on the institutional sources of economic growth regards decentralization and democracy in a positive light. Despite this, empirical work shows that neither fiscal decentralization nor national democracy is a robust predictor of per capita GDP growth. We argue that these theories have failed to bear fruit because they ignore the linchpin of decentralization and democracy, namely local democracy. Democracy at a local level enhances economic growth by enabling decentralized policy selection and incentivizing local politicians to select policies that benefit economic development, including the provision of local public goods. We test for the relationship using a novel measure of local democracy with global coverage and time series extending from 1900 to the present. We find robust evidence that local democracy nurtures growth. This relationship holds up when accounting for country- and year-fixed effects, when controlling for democracy at the national level, and when we treat our measure of local democracy as an endogenous regressor. Additional tests reveal that the relationship is clearer in contexts where our argument suggests that it should operate more strongly, namely (national- level) democracies and in periods and regions where local-level institutions have a more pronounced role in policy-making.
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.
Regimes and Industrialization
(2020-04) Gerring, John; Gjerløw, Haakon; Henrik Knutsen, Carl; V-Dem Institute
A large literature addresses the impact of regimes on domestic policies and outcomes, e.g., education, health, inequality, redistribution, public spending, wages, infrastructure, volatility, productivity, and economic growth. We add to this literature by focusing on how regime type relates to another vital outcome, namely industrialization. We argue that autocratic leaders are more likely to adopt an economic model of development centered on heavy industry because of three factors that distinguish democratic and autocratic regimes: different social bases, different security concerns, and different policy tools. Accordingly, autocracies have stronger incentives and better capabilities to pursue a rapid and comprehensive course of industrialization. We test the hypothesis that autocracy enhances industrialization by using different measures of industrialization in a dataset spanning 200 years and most countries of the world. After a comprehensive series of tests, we conclude that industrialization stands out as one of the few areas where autocracies may enjoy a significant advantage over democracies.
V-Dem Comparisons and Contrasts with Other Measurement Projects
(2017) Coppedge, Michael; Gerring, John; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan; V-Dem Institute
For policymakers, activists, academics, and citizens around the world the conceptualization and measurement of democracy matters. The needs of democracy promoters and social scientists are convergent. We all need better ways to measure democracy. In the first section of this document we critically review the field of democracy indices. It is important to emphasize that problems identified with extant indices are not easily solved, and some of the issues we raise vis-à-vis other projects might also be raised in the context of the V-Dem project. Measuring an abstract and contested concept such as democracy is hard and some problems of conceptualization and measurement may never be solved definitively. In the second section we discuss in general terms how the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project differs from extant indices and how the novel approach taken by V-Dem might assist the work of activists, professionals, and scholars.