Browsing by Author "Skaaning, Svend-Erik"

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Civil Society, Party Institutionalization, and Democratic Breakdown in the Interwar Period
(2016) Cornell, Agnes; Møller, Jørgen; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
The relationship between the strength of civil society and democratic survival in the interwar period has been much debated. Prominent studies have questioned the existence of a positive association, arguing that the relationship is conditioned by the level of party institutionalization. This revisionist perspective has been vindicated by case studies of important European cases, in particular Germany and Italy. But due to a lack of cross-national data, neither the direct effect of civil society nor the alternative perspective has so far been subjected to a comprehensive statistical analysis. In this paper we enlist novel data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project that enable us to carry out such an assessment of all democratic spells in the interwar years. Our survival analysis demonstrates that a vibrant civil society generally contributed to democratic survival in this period and that this effect was not moderated by the level of party institutionalization.
Democracy, Democratization, and Civil War
(2016) Krishnarajan, Suthan; Møller, Jørgen; Lykke Rørbæk, Lasse Lykke; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
An influential body of scholarship has associated both democracy and democratization with civil war. Important findings include the so-called inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy-levels and civil war onset and that propensity for democratic openings to spark internal violence. However, most of these findings have been challenged, particularly by scholars pointing to problems with the aggregate nature of the analyses and the data sources used. Against this background, we enlist new, fine-grained data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. We discuss how the new data can be used to disaggregate regime variables in order to better understand the causal dynamics that link the regime form and regime change to civil war onset, if any. Guided by these considerations, we use the new data to reassess the ‘inverted U-curve’. Our analysis shows that this relationship is driven by ‘liberal’ aspects of democracy such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech rather than by the ‘electoral core’ of democracy. The relationship between clean elections and civil war onset is approximately linearly decreasing, and at the indicator level of the clean elections attribute we find several different patterns.
Dimensions of State Capacity and Modes of Democratic Breakdown
(The Quality of Government Institute (QoG), 2023-10) Delfs Erbo Andersen, David; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Knutsen, Carl Henrik
State weakness is often emphasized as a key determinant of democratic breakdowns. However, previous studies have failed to appreciate how different aspects of state weakness pose different challenges. Against this backdrop, we examine the relationships between two fundamental dimensions of state capacity (coercive capacity and administrative capacity) and different modes of democratic breakdown, i.e., incumbent-driven and nonincumbent driven takeovers. We propose that coercive capacity mainly enables containment of rebels and coup-plotters, which reduces the risk of nonincumbent takeovers. Conversely, we expect that administrative capacity mainly serves to prevent executive aggrandizement, which reduces the risk of incumbent takeovers. Global analyses of democratic breakdowns between 1789 and 2020 support only the second expectation. Coercive capacity, reflected by territorial control and military personnel per capita, usually drops below accepted significance levels for both modes of democratic breakdown. In contrast, indicators of meritocracy, impartial public administration, and predictable enforcement that proxy administrative capacity show a significant, negative relationship with the risk of democratic breakdown, but only for incumbent-driven takeovers.
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.
Going Historical: Measuring Democraticness before the Age of Mass Democracy
(2016) Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Møller, Jørgen; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
Most studies of democratic developments are limited to the period after World War II. However, political regimes varied according to different aspects of democracy long before the establishment of modern liberal mass democracies. We come down strongly in favor of collecting disaggregate and fine-grained historical data on democratic features. Based on a distinction between competition, participation, and constraints, we discuss previous attempts at historical measurement and address the specific challenges that pertain to scoring political regimes in, first, the “long 19th century” and, second, medieval and early modern Europe.
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.
Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index
(2016) Teorell, Jan; Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
This paper presents a new measure of electoral democracy, or "polyarchy", for a global sample of 173 countries from 1900 to the present based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, enabling us to address several deficiencies in extant measures of electoral democracy, such as Freedom House and Polity. The V-Dem data derive from expert polls of more than 2,600 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of “Elected officials”, “Free and fair elections”, “Freedom of expression”, “Associational autonomy” and “Inclusive citizenship” separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl’s (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework, and can both show how well indicators match components as well as how components map the overall index. We also find that characteristics of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators, nor differences between these ratings and existing measures such as FH and Polity, with which they are strongly correlated. Finally, we provide systematic measures of uncertainty (or measurement error) at every level. We showcase the usefulness of the new measure for understanding developments of electoral democracy over time, for comparing countries at a particular time point, and for understanding its relationship to economic modernization through disaggregation.
Measuring High Level Democratic Principles using the V-Dem Data
(2015) Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan; V-Dem Institute
While the definition of extended conceptions of democracy has been widely discussed, the measurement of these constructs has not attracted similar attention. In this paper we present new measures of polyarchy, liberal democracy, deliberative democracy, egalitarian democracy, and participatory democracy that cover most polities in the period 1900 to 2013. These indices are based on data from a large number of indicators collected through the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. A discussion of the theoretical considerations and the concrete formula linked to our aggregation of indicators and components into high level measures is followed by an illustration of how these measures reflect variations in quality of democracy, given the respective ideals, in 2012. In the conclusion we urge scholars to make use of the rich dataset made available by V-Dem.
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.
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.
Varieties of Measurement: A Comparative Assessment of Relatively New Democracy Ratings based on Original Data
(2021-05) Møller, Jørgen; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; V-Dem Institute
A series of new democracy measures have been introduced in recent years, many based on previous measures, but some offering original data. This chapter provides critical discussion of three new measures based on original data collection: the Democracy Index (DI) constructed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) compiled by the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the Political Regimes of the World dataset provided by Boix, Miller, and Rosato (BMR). Our assessment shows that DI and BTI share many features: They have limited temporal coverage, they are based on comprehensive definitions, and they have many expert-coded indicators, which are combined into graded sub-indices and an overall democracy measure. In contrast, BMR is based on a narrow definition of democracy, offers a single, in-house coded, dichotomous variable, and covers most independent countries back to 1800. All three measures suffer from a lack of transparency. Our evaluation concludes with a brief comparison of these datasets with two other new datasets based on original data collection: the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The former provides unmatched coverage of historical polities and annual updates of disaggregate indicators and a series of ordered, crisp regime categories. V-Dem is based on scores from more experts combined with a sophisticated measurement model, and it offers a comprehensive coverage and more indicators on different aspects of democracy than any other dataset. Correlation analyses indicate that it is implausible to consider the examined democracy measures to be interchangeable across the board; in some contexts, they are clearly not.