Browsing by Author "Medzihorsky, Juraj"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

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.
The V–Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data
(2022-03) Pemstein, Daniel; Marquardt, Kyle L.; Tzelgov, Eitan; Wang, Yi-ting; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Krusell, Joshua; Miri, Farhad; Römer, Johannes von; V-Dem Institute
The Varieties of Democracy (V–Dem) project relies on country experts who code a host of ordinal variables, providing subjective ratings of latent—that is, not directly observable—regime characteristics over time. Sets of around five experts rate each case (country-year observation), and each of these raters works independently. Since raters may diverge in their coding because of either differences of opinion or mistakes, we require systematic tools with which to model these patterns of disagreement. These tools allow us to aggregate ratings into point estimates of latent concepts and quantify our uncertainty around these point estimates. In this paper we describe item response theory models that can that account and adjust for differential item functioning (i.e. differences in how experts apply ordinal scales to cases) and variation in rater reliability (i.e. random error). We also discuss key challenges specific to applying item response theory to expert-coded cross-national panel data, explain the approaches that we use to address these challenges, highlight potential problems with our current framework, and describe long-term plans for improving our models and estimates. Finally, we provide an overview of the different forms in which we present model output.
The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data
(2020-03) Pemstein, Daniel; Marquardt, Kyle L.; Tzelgov, Eitan; Wang, Yi-ting; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Krusell, Joshua; Miri, Farhad; von Römer, Johannes; V-Dem Institute
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project relies on country experts who code a host of ordinal variables, providing subjective ratings of latent- that is, not directly observable- regime characteristics over time. Sets of around five experts rate each case (country-year observation), and each of these raters works independently. Since raters may diverge in their coding because of either differences of opinion or mistakes, we require systematic tools with which to model these patterns of disagreement. These tools allow us to aggregate ratings into point estimates of latent concepts and quantify our uncertainty around these point estimates. In this paper we describe item response theory models that can that account and adjust for differential item functioning (i.e. differences in how experts apply ordinal scales to cases) and variation in rater reliability (i.e. random error). We also discuss key challenges specific to applying item response theory to expert-coded cross-national panel data, explain the approaches that we use to address these challenges, highlight potential problems with our current framework, and describe long-term plans for improving our models and estimates. Finally, we provide an overview of the different forms in which we present model output.
Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties
(2021-03) Lührmann, Anna; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – “the third wave of autocratization” – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars agree that these days the main threat to democracy arises from democratically elected rulers, who gradually erode democratic norms once in power. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elec- tions? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) argue that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocrats before they reach office. Such anti-pluralist traits include de- monizing rhetoric, the encouragement of political violence, disrespect for minority rights, and lacking commitment to the democratic process. Comparative political science researchers have not systematically collected and tested these potential early-warning indicators. This paper makes use of a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument.