Browsing by Author "Wig, Tore"

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Cui Bono? Business Elites and Interstate Conflict
(2020-08) Wig, Tore; Dahlum, Sirianne; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Magnus, Bergli Rasmussen; V-Dem Institute
We address how regime supporters affect war-making by re-opening a classic debate on business elites and their influence on states' conflict behavior. Imperialist theories contend that business elites encourage executives to undertake military expeditions to "open up" foreign markets, while "capitalist peace" arguments emphasize that business elites have economic incentives to work for peace. We synthesize these arguments and propose that countries become more belligerent, in general, when business elites enter regime support coalitions, but not towards other business-supported regimes. We use recently compiled data on social groups in regime support coalitions, covering 200 polities across 1789-2018, to test implications of our argument. We find that business-supported regimes are more likely to initiate armed conflict, but not against other countries with business-elite supported regimes. We also find support for additional implications, for instance pertaining to how the belligerence of business-supported regimes depends on existing trade relationships.
Harbors and Democracy
(2018) Gerring, John; Wig, Tore; Forø Tollefsen, Andreas; Apfeld, Brendan; V-Dem Institute
Although geography is widely viewed as an important factor in long-term development, little attention has been paid to its role in democratization. This study focuses on the possible impact of a feature of littoral geography: natural harbors with access to the sea. By virtue of enhancing connections to the wider world, we argue that harbors foster (a) development, (b) mobility, (c) naval-based defense forces, and (d) diffusion. Through these pathways, operative over secular-historical time, areas blessed by natural harbors are more likely to develop democratic forms of government. This argument is tested with a unique database measuring distance to natural harbors throughout the world. We show that there is a robust negative association between this measure and democracy in country and grid-cell analyses, and in instrumental variable models where harbor distance is instrumented by ocean distance.
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.
Patterns of Regime Breakdown since the French Revolution
(2018) Djuve, Vilde Lunnan; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Wig, Tore; V-Dem Institute
We present a new dataset comprising more than 1900 regimes in 197 polities over the time period 1789-2016. We use this dataset to describe dierent historical patterns of regime duration globally, leveraging ne-grained measures on when regimes started and ended and a nuanced scheme of dierent modes of regime breakdown. To mention a few patterns, we display how the frequency of regime breakdown, and particular modes of breakdown, have followed cyclical rather than linear patterns across modern history and that the most common modes, overall, are coups d'etat and incumbent-guided transformations of regimes. Further, we evaluate whether selected economic and political-institutional features are systematically associated with breakdown. We nd robust evidence that low income levels, slow or negative economic growth, and having intermediate levels of democracy predict higher chances of regime breakdown, although these factors are more clearly related to regime breakdown during some periods of modern history than others. When disaggregating dierent models of breakdown, we nd notable dierences for these predictors, with low income levels, for example, being strongly related to regime breakdowns due to popular uprisings, whereas intermediate levels of democracy clearly predict regime breakdowns due to coups and incumbent-guided regime transitions.
Peace Above the Glass Ceiling: The Historial Relationship Between Female Political Empowerment and Civil Conflict
(2018) Dahlum, Sirianne; Wig, Tore; V-Dem Institute
This paper investigates whether female political empowerment is conducive to civil peace, drawing on global data on female political empowerment over a 200 year period, from the Varieties of Democracy database. We augment previous research by expanding the temporal scope, looking at a novel inventory of female empowerment measures, attending to reverse-causality and omitted variable issues, and separating between relevant causal mechanisms. We find a strong link between female political empowerment and civil peace, which is particularly pronounced in the 20th century. When studying mechanisms, we find that this relationship is driven both by women's political participation and the culture that conduces it. To draw causal inferences, we estimate instrumental variable models and perform causal sensitivity tests. This is the strongest evidence to date that there is a robust link between female political empowerment and civil peace, stemming from both institutional and cultural mechanisms.
Stairways to Denmark: Does the Sequence of State-building and Democratization Matter for Economic Development?
(2018) Gjerlow, Haakon; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Wig, Tore; Wilson, Matthew Charles; V-Dem Institute
Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. We discuss the assumptions that this prominent "stateness-first" argument rests upon and how extant studies fail to correctly specify the counter-factual conditions required to test the argument. In extension, we subject the argument to three sets of tests focused on economic development as the outcome, leveraging new measures of democracy and state institutional features for almost 180 polities with time series extending back to 1789. First, we run standard panel regressions with interactions between state capacity and democracy. Second, we employ coarsened exact matching, specifying and testing different relevant counter-factuals embedded in the stateness-first argument. Finally, we employ sequencing methods to identify historically common sequences of institutional change, and use these sequences as growth predictors. We do not find any evidence supporting the stateness-first argument in either of these tests.