Browsing by Author "Lindenfors, Patrik"

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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.
Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach with Adapted Evolutionary Models
(2015) Lindenfors, Patrik; Jansson, Fredrik; Wang, Yi-ting; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
This paper presents a new approach for studying sequences across combinations of binary and ordinal variables. The approach involves three novel methodologies (frequency analysis, graphical mapping of changes between “events”, and dependency analysis), as well as an established adaptation based on Bayesian dynamical systems. The frequency analysis and graphical approach work by counting and mapping changes in two variables and then determining which variable, if any, more often has a higher value than the other during transitions. The general reasoning is that when transitioning from low values to high, if one variable commonly assumes higher values before the other, this variable is interpreted to be generally preceding the other while moving upwards. A similar reasoning is applied for decreasing variable values. These approaches assume that the two variables are correlated and change along a comparable scale. The dependency analysis investigates what values of one variable are prerequisites for values in another. We also include an established Bayesian approach that models changes from one event combination to another. We illustrate the proposed methodological bundle by analyzing changes driving electoral democracy using the new V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2015a, b). Our results indicate that changes in electoral democracy are preceded by changes in freedom of expression and access to alternative sources of information.
No Democratic Transition Without Women’s Rights: A Global Sequence Analysis 1900-2012
(2015-09) Wang, Yi-ting; Lindenfors, Patrik; Sundström, Aksel; Jansson, Fredrik; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? Research has focused on socioeconomic and institutional factors, yet the assumption that political liberalization has to precede democratization has not been systematically examined. We explore the impacts of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. We argue that both men’s and women’s liberal rights are essential conditions for democratization to take place: giving both men and women rights reduce an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression for authoritarian rulers, and enabling the formation of women’s movements – historically important as a spark of protests in initial phases of democratization. We test this argument empirically using data that cover 160 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through sequence analysis we obtain results suggesting that liberal rights for both men and women enhance civil society organizations, and then lead to electoral democracy. The results suggest that influential modernization writings – stressing the role of economic development in democratization processes – may partly have been misinformed in their blindness for gender. The reported pattern may be at least part of the explanation of the ‘Arab spring’ failures.
On Revolutions
(2018) Leroi, Armand M.; Lambert, Ben; Mauch, Matthias; Papadopoulou, Marina; Ananiadou, Sophia; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Lindenfors, Patrik; V-Dem Institute
Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as "revolutions" and, though they have identied many of them, they have rarely supported their claims with statistical evidence. Here we present a method to identify revolutions based on a measure of the multivariate rate of change called Foote Novelty. We dene revolutions as those periods of time when the value of this measure, F, can, by a non-parametric test, be shown to be signicantly greater than the background rate. Our method also identies conservative periods when the rate of change is unusually low. Importantly, our method permits searching for revolutions over any time scale that the data permit. We apply it to several quantitative data sets that capture long-term political, social and cultural changes and, in some of them, identify revolutions, both well known and not. Our method is a general one that can be applied to any phenomenon captured by multivariate time series data of sufficient quality.
Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data
(2016) Lindenfors, Patrik; Krusell, Joshua; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
This paper presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. The approach involves repeated pairwise investigations of states in a set of variables and identifying what states in the variables that occur before states in all other variables. We illustrate the proposed method by analyzing a set of variables from version 6 of the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2015a, b). With a large set of indicators measured over many years, the method makes it possible to explore long, complex sequences across many variables in quantitative datasets. This affords an opportunity, for example, to disentangle the sequential requisites of failing and successful sequences in democratization. For policy purposes this is instrumental: Which components of democracy are most exogenous and least endogenous and therefore the ideal targets for democracy promotion at different stages?
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.
Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description
(2018) Lindberg, Staffan I.; Lindenfors, Patrik; Lührmann, Anna; Maxwell, Laura; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Morgan, Richard; Wilson, Matthew C.; V-Dem Institute
What explains successful democratization? Answering this requires that researchers identify not only countries that successfully transitioned to democracy, but also those that began to liberalize—that initiated institutional reforms that move it towards democracy—but failed to transition. In this paper, we propose a solution that allows researchers more fully to capture the liberalization period and then classify these episodic events according to their outcome: successful, failed, or censored episodes of democratization. We identify the appropriate procedures and data necessary for operationalization of such episodes and present the first ever dataset of the full universe of democratization episodes 1900-2017, compare them to existing measures and assess construct validity. We also demonstrate the value of this approach showing how we can substantially improve upon what we know about democratization, including their relationship to development, state capacity, underlying temporal features, and the relationship between patterns of liberalization and whether a country successfully transitions to democracy.