Browsing by Author "Tannenberg, Marcus"

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On the Road to Better Governance. The “Middle Class Particularism” and Quality of Government
(2014-07-04) Tannenberg, Marcus; Göteborgs universitet/Statsvetenskapliga institutionen; University of Gothenburg/Department of Political Science
This thesis merges two large bodies of literature – that concerned with the effect of regime type on institutional quality, and research on the middle classes’ effects on economy and society at large. With the purpose of providing an answer to: How the size of the middle class affects Quality of Government, and if the size of middle class is a determinant for democracy’s impact on Quality of Government? I provide a theoretical framework that outlines a “middle class particularism” in terms of their demand of Quality of Government, which differentiates the middle class from both the rich and the poor. I argue that their demand – driven by low future discount rates, expectations on the state, their mitigating role between the upper and lower class, and by their values – interacts differently with the supply side in democracies and autocracies, because of the regime type’s different institutional natures. In this first large-N study on the relationship between the middle class and Quality of Government, I employ a novel operationalization of the middle class – that capture those who can afford to purchase a car, a significantly expensive non-essential item, from which an estimation of the elite is deducted. The results indicate that the size of the middle class is a strong predictor of Quality of Government in democratic countries, but not so in autocracies. Additionally the empirical findings show only weak support for an interaction effect, between the level of democracy and the size of the middle class, on Quality of Government.
On the Road to Better Governance: The "Middle Class Particularism" and Quality of Government
(2014-09) Tannenberg, Marcus; QoG Institute
This paper merges two large bodies of literature – that concerned with the effects of regime type on institutional quality, and research on the middle classes’ effects on the economy and society at large – with the purpose of providing an answer to: How the size of the middle class affects Quality of Government, and if the size of middle class is a determinant for democracy’s impact on Quality of Government? I provide a theoretical framework that outlines a “middle class particularism” in terms of their demand of Quality of Government, which differentiates the middle class from both the rich and the poor. I argue that their demand – driven by low future discount rates, expectations on the state, their mitigating role between the upper and lower class, and by their values – interacts differently with the supply side in democracies and autocracies, because of the regime type’s different institutional natures. In this first large-N study on the relationship between the middle class and Quality of Government, I employ a novel operationalization of the middle class – that capture those who can afford to purchase a car, a significantly expensive non-essential item, from which an estimation of the elite is deducted. The results indicate that the size of the middle class is a strong predictor of Quality of Government in democratic countries, but not so in autocracies. Additionally the empirical findings show only weak support for an interaction effect, between the level of democracy and the size of the middle class, on Quality of Government.
Regime Legitimation Strategies (RLS) 1900 to 2018
(2019) Tannenberg, Marcus; Bernhard, Michael; Gerschewski, Johannes; Lührmann, Anna; von Soest, Christian; V-Dem Institute
In this paper we introduce new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies for 179 countries in the world from 1900 up until 2018 that are comparable across time and space. Country experts have rated the extent to which the government promotes or references its performance, the person of the leader, rational-legality, and ideology in order to justify the regime in place. With regards to ideology, the experts are further asked to categorize the ideology of the regime as nationalist, communist/socialist, conservative/restorative, religious, and/or separatist. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and validate the data against expectations on claims from case studies as well as with existing regime type classifications. We show that experts do understand and can be employed to code legitimation claims. Not only do we document historical shifts in legitimation claims, but the measures also pick up recent trends, such as, an increased emphasis of the leader in countries such as Russia, Turkey, Cambodia over the last decades, and more recently also in India and the Philippines; as well as recent increases in legitimation claims based on both conservative and nationalist ideologies the European countries Serbia, Hungary and Poland, which also have experienced autocratization in recent years.
Regimes In the World (RIW): A Robust Regime Type Measure based on V-Dem
(2017) Lührmann, Anna; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Tannenberg, Marcus; V-Dem Institute
Classifying political regimes has never been as difficult as in this day and age. Most regimes in the world now hold de-jure multiparty elections with universal suffrage. Yet, in some countries these elections ensure that political rulers are – at least somewhat – accountable to the electorate whereas in others they are a mere window dressing exercise for authoritarian politics. Hence, regime types need to be distinguished based on the de-facto implementation of democratic rules. To this end, researchers increasingly turn to expert-coded data sets such as the new Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. Using V-Dem data, we propose an operationalization of four important regime types – closed and electoral autocracies; electoral and liberal democracies – with vast coverage (almost all countries form 1900 to 2016) and precision. Our new Regimes in the World (RIW) measure includes uncertainty estimates to identify countries in the grey zone between regime types and account for inter-coder disagreement. In cases of disagreement with other datasets (7-12% of the cases), we classify regimes with severe electoral manipulation and infringements of the political freedoms more frequently as electoral autocracies than other datasets, which suggests that our measure captures the opaqueness of contemporary autocracies better.
Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: Response bias in measures of popular support in China
(2018) Robinson, Darrel; Tannenberg, Marcus; V-Dem Institute
The study of popular support for authoritarian regimes, and the comparative study of political attitudes, has long relied on the assumption that survey respondents provide truthful answers on surveys. However, when measuring regime support in closed political systems there is a distinct risk that individuals are less than forthright due to fear that their opinions may be made known to the public or the authorities. In order to test this assumption, we conducted a novel web-based survey in China in which we included four list experiments of commonly used items in the comparative literature on regime support. We find systematic bias for all four measures as a result of selfcensorship; substantially more individuals state that they support the regime with direct questioning than do when presented with our anonymous, indirect list experiments. The level of self-censorship, which ranges from 16 to 22 percentage points, is considerably higher than previously thought. Selfcensorship is further most prevalent among the wealthy, urban, female and younger respondents. These findings indicate that prior studies that have found high levels of support for the Chinese regime using these particular measures likely overestimate the true level of support. Further, crossnational studies which compare popular support across regime type may be systematically biased if responses are not subject to the same level of falsification across regime types.
The Autocratic Trust Bias: Politically Sensitive Survey Items and Self-censorship
(2017) Tannenberg, Marcus; V-Dem Institute
Because of the perceived risk of repression some survey questions are likely sensitive in more autocratic countries while less so in more democratic countries. Yet, survey data on potentially sensitive topics are frequently used in comparative research despite concerns about comparability. In a novel approach to test the comparability of politically sensitive questions I employ a multilevel-analysis with more than 80 000 respondents in 36 African countries to test for systematic bias when the survey respondents believe (fear) that the government has commissioned the survey, as opposed to an independent research institute. The findings indicate that fear of the government induces a substantial and significant bias on questions regarding the citizen-state relationship in more autocratic countries, but not in more democratic countries. This has practical implications for the comparative use of survey data.
Towards Legitimacy as Congruence: Regimes' Menus of Legitimation and Citizens’ Appetites
(2022-05-23) Tannenberg, Marcus
Legitimacy is one of the most crucial concepts in political science. It concerns how authority can be exercised in ways that those subjected to it willingly accept, something that all rulers desire. It is also one of the most contested concepts in the field, largely due to the difficulty of measurement. In this dissertation, I lay the foundations for a novel understanding of legitimacy, as the congruence between rulers' legitimation claims – their menus of legitimation – and the values and preferences – the appetites – of their citizens. In four separate research papers, I show the importance and utility of this approach. I provide empirical evidence that existing measures of legitimacy and its neighboring concepts, such as trust and popular support, suffer from a substantial autocratic bias. Self- censorship in autocratic countries results in inflated regime-friendly evaluations com- pared to in democracies. I conceptualize and develop measures of the most typical legitimation claims that rulers provide as justifications for why they are entitled to rule. I then match this expert coded data with global public opinion data to create measures of congruence between menus and appetites across five dimensions. Legitimacy as congruence provides a relational and multidimensional understanding of legitimacy, aligning the concept and its measurement. I show the value of this new measure in predicting outcomes for which the literature has strong theoretical expectations. I conclude that existing approaches to measuring legitimacy are flawed for the comparison across regime types, and that conceptualizing and operationalizing legitimacy as congruence provide an avenue to move the field forward.