Browsing by Author "Teorell, Jan"

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A Quality of Government Peace? Bringing the State Back Into the Study of Inter-State Armed Conflict
(2010-09) Råby, Nils; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Domestically, democracy or democratization has not proved as successful in bringing about preferred economic and social consequences as has “good governance” and quality of government. Within the field of international relations, by contrast, one of the strongest empirical regularities still remains that democracies do not wage war against each other. In this paper we show however that the impact of quality of government, most notably corruption, on the risk of interstate conflict by large amounts trumps the influence of democracy. These results draw on dyadic Militarized Interstate Disputes data in 1984-2000, and hold even under control for the capitalist peace, incomplete democratization, realist claims and geographic constraints. We argue that the causal mechanism underlying this finding is that quality of government reduces information asymmetry among potentially warring parties, improves their ability to communicate resolve, and to credibly commit to keeping to their promises.
Bureaucracy, Politics and Corruption
(2009-08) Dahlström, Carl; Lapuente, Victor; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Most comparative studies on corruption are geared towards the analysis of factors dealing with the selection and the incentives of actors taking policy decisions in a state. With few exceptions, such as Rauch & Evans (2000), the selection and incentives of actors within the state apparatus in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. In turn, the studies that take bureaucratic features into account do not control for political institutions. This paper aims at bridging the gap between these two institutionalist approaches by analyzing an original dataset from a survey answered by 520 experts from 52 countries. There are two main empirical findings. First, some bureaucratic factors, and especially meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for the impact of most standard political variables such as years of democracy, the number of veto players or the type of electoral system. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant features in the bureaucratic institutionalist literature, such as public employees’ competitive salaries, career stability or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.
Corruption as an Institution: Rethinking the Nature and Origins of the Grabbing Hand
(2007-11) Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
The predominant view of corruption within political science and economics today is the principal-agent model. Corruption is modeled as criminal behavior on behalf of some agents entrusted to act on the behalf of some principals. According to this view the criminal behaviour of corruption could be made to disappear by fixing the incentive structure or the institutional setting. The purpose of this paper is to question this way of conceptualizing endemic corruption. By modelling corruption as an institution in itself, rather than as some form of illicit behaviour, both the causes and consequences of corruption appear in a different light. Most importantly, whereas the principal-agent model stresses a vertical dimension of conflict produced by and reproducing corruption, that between rulers and ruled or electors and elected, an institutional view of corruption instead stresses horizontal conflicts between different sectors of society which may benefit or loose from corruption. An application of this perspective is sketched in which corruption is seen as a regressive tax, which opens up for applying a set of theoretical models of distributional conflict to the study of corruption in relation to economic inequality and democracy.
Democracy and Corruption: A Global Time-Series Analysis with V-Dem Data
(2017) McMann, Kelly M.; Seim, Brigitte; Teorell, Jan; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, numerous scholars have found empirically that corruption decreases at high levels of democracy but actually increases at low levels. A key weaknesses of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship, however, is that they do not disaggregate the complex concept of democracy. By contrast, this working paper disaggregates democracy theoretically and empirically. Our theoretical framework shows how components of democracy affect costs and benefits of engaging in corruption and, therefore, the level of corruption overall. Whereas other studies examine only how democratic accountability imposes costs on those engaging in corruption and thus illuminate only the downward curve of the relationship, we also examine the transaction costs and political support benefits of corruption and therefore can explain the initial uptick in corruption at low levels of democracy. Using measures of democratic components from Varieties of Democracy, we examine 173 countries from 1900 to 2012 and find that freedoms of expression and association exhibit the inverted curvilinear relationship with corruption, and that judicial constraints have a negative linear relationship. Moreover, the introduction of elections and the quality of elections act jointly, but each in a linear fashion. The mere introduction of elections increases corruption, thus accounting for the upward sloping segment of the inverted curve. Once the quality of elections begins to improve, corruption decreases, resulting in the downward-sloping segment of the curve.
Dimensions of bureaucracy II: A cross-national dataset on the structure and behaviour of public administration
(2011-07) Dahlström, Carl; Lapuente, Victor; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Dimensions of Bureaucracy: A Cross-National Dataset on the Structure and Behavior of Public Administration
(2010-06) Dahlström, Carl; Lapuente, Victor; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Scholars have emphasized the importance of having a “Weberian bureaucracy” for the socio-economic development of a country, but few attempts have been made to measure public administrations according to their degree of Weberianism. This paper presents the study and questionnaire design of a web survey covering 58 countries, which embodies the largest cross-national dataset on the structure of public administrations up to date. It also provides the main findings from the dataset: The features often associated with a Weberian bureaucracy can neither theoretically nor empirically be collapsed into a single dimension (Weberian versus a patronage-based administration). Instead two distinct dimensions are identified, in the paper referred to as professionalism (i.e. up to which extent bureaucracies are “professional” vis-à-vis “politicized”) and closedness (i.e. up to which extent bureaucracies are more “closed” or public-like vis-à-vis “open” or private-like). Finally, the paper validates these dimensions with information from other available data sources, and demonstrates that the results have not been produced by respondent perception bias.
Does Type of Authoritarianism Affect the Prospects for Democracy? Exogenous Shocks and Contingent Democratization
(2006) Teorell, Jan; Hadenius, Axel; QoG Institute
In this paper we test the often asserted view that the prospects for democratization differ among different types of authoritarian regimes. To what extent do exogenous shocks— economic crisis, popular protest and democratic diffusion—impact on democratization differently among monarchies, one-party, military, and limited multi-party regimes? Drawing on cross-sectional time-series evidence from a global sample of countries in 1972-2002, we find that in particular limited multiparty, and to some extent military regimes, are more likely than one-party regimes to democratize in response to popular protest and economic performance.
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.
Elections as Levers of Democracy: A Global Inquiry
(2008-08) Teorell, Jan; Hadenius, Axel; QoG Institute
In this paper we purport to test the proposition that elections have a democratizing effect, drawing on cross-sectional time-series data at best covering a global sample of 193 countries from 1919 to 2004. Two versions of this proposition are tested: one with respect to current effects, another with respect to cumulative effects. The first maintains that the holding of an election would yield democratizing gains more or less immediately, either in the time period following shortly after the election or in the non-electoral spheres of society. The second version instead holds that the historical experience with a prolonged series of elections in the end would yield a democratizing effect. In our tests, we find support for both proposals⎯at least for certain ways of measuring the effects in question. Current effects manifest themselves primarily in the immediate aftermath of multiparty elections. We can also observe improvements in the no-electoral realm (with respect to civil liberties), but this effect is marred with uncertainty regarding the validity of the data at hand. As for the cumulative proposal, we conclude that the number of multiparty—or, even more strongly, free and fair—elections, which a country has experienced, has democratic influence, primarily on the non-electoral sphere of democracy. At the same time, the effect is not very strong and the relative influence of every new election is declining.
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.
Electoral Systems: Assessing the Cross-Sectional Time-Series Data Sources
(2009-05) Teorell, Jan; Lindstedt, Catharina; QoG Institute
In this paper we compare and assess four freely available cross-sectional time-series data sets in terms of their information on the ballot structure, district structure and formula of the electoral system in use for lower house and, if relevant, upper house and presidential elections. The four datasets evaluated are Golder (2005), the Database of Political Institutions (Beck et al. 2001; Keefer 2005), Persson and Tabellini (2003) and Johnson and Wallack (2006). We find that the choice of data source matters for conclusions drawn on the consequences of electoral systems for both party systems and corruption, but that no data source can be given prominence over the other on methodological grounds. Students of electoral systems must thus, in the future, make their results sensitive to the choice of data source.
Getting to Sweden: Malfeasance and Bureaucratic Reforms, 1720-1850
(2012-12) Teorell, Jan; Rothstein, Bo; QoG Institute
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.
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.
Quality of Government, Political Power and the Welfare State
(2010-03) Rothstein, Bo; Samanni, Marcus; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Why have different industrialized capitalist market economies developed such varying systems for social protection and social insurance? The hitherto most successful theory for explaining this is the Power Resource Theory (PRT), according to which the generosity of the welfare state is a function of working class mobilization. In this paper we argue however that there is an undertheorized link in the micro-foundations for PRT, namely why wage earners trying to handle the type of social risks and inequalities that are endemic for a market economy would turn to the state for the solution Our complementary approach, the Quality of Government (QoG) Theory, stresses the importance of trustworthy, reliable, impartial and reasonably uncorrupted government institutions as a precondition for citizens' willingness to support policies for social insurance and redistribution. Drawing on time-series crosssectional data on 18 OECD countries in 1984-2000, we find (a) that QoG positively affects the size and generosity of the welfare state, and (b) that the effect of working class mobilization on welfare state generosity is increasing in the level of QoG.
Reassessing the Democratic Peace: A Novel Test Based on the Varieties of Democracy Data
(2018) Hegre, Håvard; Bernhard, Michael; Teorell, Jan; V-Dem Institute
The democratic peace is one of the most robust findings in international relations. Yet it suffers from two important limitations. First, even those who fully embrace the democratic peace have difficulty precisely identifying which facet of democracy drives the result. Second, the vast majority of studies have relied on a single measure of democracy - the Polity index. This paper reassesses interstate conflict on several new measures of democracy and their disaggregated components from the Varieties of Democracy project in a global sample of 173 countries from 1900-2010 (www.v-dem.net). We theorize three distinct mechanisms of constraint that may explain why some countries do not engage in military conflict with each other: formal vertical (e.g. elections), informal vertical (e.g. civil society activism), and horizontal accountability (e.g. interbranch constraint on the executive). We find that the formal vertical channels of accountability provided by elections are not as crucial as horizontal constraint and the informal vertical accountability provided by a strong civil society.
Strategies of Validation: Assessing the Varieties of Democracy Corruption Data
(2016) McMann, Kelly; Pemstein, Daniel; Seim, Brigitte; Teorell, Jan; Lindberg, Staffan I.; V-Dem Institute
Social scientists face the challenge of determining whether their data are valid, yet they lack prac- tical guidance about how to do so. Existing publications on data validation provide mostly abstract information for creating one’s own dataset or establishing that an existing one is adequate. Fur- ther, they tend to pit validation techniques against each other, rather than explain how to combine multiple approaches. By contrast, this paper provides a practical guide to data validation in which tools are used in a complementary fashion to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a dataset and thus reveal how it can most effectively be used. We advocate for three approaches, each incorporat- ing multiple tools: 1) assessing content validity through an examination of the resonance, domain, differentiation, fecundity, and consistency of the measure; 2) evaluating data generation validity through an investigation of dataset management structure, data sources, coding procedures, aggre- gation methods, and geographic and temporal coverage; and 3) assessing convergent validity using case studies and empirical comparisons among coders and among measures. We apply our method to corruption measures from a new dataset, Varieties of Democracy. We show that the data are generally valid and we emphasize that a particular strength of the dataset is its capacity for analysis across countries and over time. These corruption measures represent a significant contribution to the field because, although research questions have focused on geographic differences and temporal trends, other corruption datasets have not been designed for this type of analysis.
The Failure of Anti-Corruption Policies: A Theoretical Mischaracterization of the Problem
(2010-06) Persson, Anna; Rothstein, Bo; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
With an increased awareness of the detrimental effects of corruption on development, strategies to fight it are now a top priority in policy circles around the world. Since Africa is home to most of the thoroughly corrupt countries in the world, it is no coincidence that the African continent has been the major target of this movement. To date, however, few successes have resulted from the investment. In fact, in some countries corruption even seems to have become more entrenched in step with the efforts to curb it. The aim of this paper is to advance an explanation to why this is the case. Drawing upon the cases of Kenya and Uganda – two arguably typical African countries when it comes to the problem of corruption and anti-corruption reforms – we argue that contemporary anti-corruption reforms in Africa have largely failed because they are based on a mischaracterization of the problem of corruption in contexts with systematic corruption. More specifically, our analysis reveals that while contemporary anti-corruption reforms are based on a conceptualization of corruption as a principal-agent problem, in the African context corruption rather seems to resemble a collective action problem, making the short-term costs of fighting corruption outweigh the benefits. Consequently, even if most individuals morally disapprove of corruption and are fully aware of the negative consequences for the society at large, very few actors show a sustained willingness to fight it. This, in turn, leads to a breakdown of any anti-corruption reform that builds on the principal-agent framework.
The Impact of Quality of Government as Impartiality: Theory and Evidence
(2009-11) Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
In this paper I argue that Rothstein and Teorell’s (2008) concept of impartiality helps to integrate four conspicuously disparate strands in the literature on consequences of government institutions: the literatures on corruption and social capital, growth and economic development, bureaucratic quality and civil war, and on subjective wellbeing and happiness. Second, I present some original data on the impartiality of government institutions in 52 countries across the globe, based on a web-based expert poll with public administration scholars. I then perform cross-country tests of the predictions of the theoretical model, showing that impartial institutions affect institutional trust, economic growth, and individual-level happiness. Although less robustly so, impartiality is also related to stocks of social capital and the absence of civil war. With few exceptions, the relationships between impartiality and societal outcome variables are on par with those of the Worldwide Governance Indicators.