Now showing items 121-140 of 437

    • Strengthening the Rubber Stamp: Comparing Legislative Powers across Regimes 

      Wilson, Matthew Charles; Woldense, Josef (2018)
      In research on authoritarian institutions, legislatures are portrayed as capable of resolving dilemmas between the leader and opposition members. Nevertheless, repeated interactions between a leader and their ruling coalition ...
    • Global Democracy for Europeans: A Demographic Story 

      Gerring, John; Apfeld, Brendan (2018)
      Insofar as democracy is a product of long-term diffusion, scholars generally focus on colonialism (especially English) or religion (especially Protestant). Here, we focus on a third pathway from Europe – Europeans. We show ...
    • Autocracy and Variation in Economic Development Outcomes 

      Knutsen, Carl Henrik (2018)
      I discuss and analyze the vast variation in development outcomes among autocracies, focusing on economic growth. I highlight plausible explanations of this variation pertaining to features of the leader, institutions, or ...
    • Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description 

      Lindberg, Staffan I.; Lindenfors, Patrik; Lührmann, Anna; Maxwell, Laura; Medzihorsky, Juraj; Morgan, Richard; Wilson, Matthew C. (2018)
      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 ...
    • Rethinking Consensus vs. Majoritarian Democracy 

      Coppedge, Michael (2018)
      Arend Lijphart's distinction between two dimensions of consensus and majoritarian democracy has been an influential concept. However, several scholars have reported that the distinction does not travel well to other regions ...
    • Peace Above the Glass Ceiling: The Historial Relationship Between Female Political Empowerment and Civil Conflict 

      Dahlum, Sirianne; Wig, Tore (2018)
      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 ...
    • Why Populism? How Parties Shape the Electoral Fortune of Populists 

      Self, Darin; Hicken, Allen (2018)
      Much of the literature on populism restricts itself to specific regional contexts. Due to this approach, theories of populism have difficulty explaining cross-regional similarities or differences (such as the prevalence ...
    • Democracy for All? 

      Lührmann, Anna; Dahlum, Sirianne; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Maxwell, Laura; Mechkova, Valeriya; Olin, Moa; Pillai, Shreeya; Sanhueza Petrarca, Constanza; Sigman, Rachel; Stepanova, Natalia (2018)
    • Democracy at Dusk? 

      Lührmann, Anna; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Mechkova, Valeriya; Olin, Moa; Piccinelli Casagrande, Francesco; Sanhueza Petrarca, Constanza; Saxer, Laura (2017)
    • Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception 

      Lührmann, Anna; Lindberg, Staffan I. (2018)
      Less than thirty years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy’s eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary ...
    • Electoral Contestation: A Comprehensive Polity-Level Analysis 

      Gerring, John; Hicken, Allen; Weitzel, Daniel; Cojocaru, Lee (2018)
      The study of electoral contestation generally focuses on districts or regions rather than polities. We present a new dataset that measures electoral contestation through historical records of elections in sovereign and ...
    • Stairways to Denmark: Does the Sequence of State-building and Democratization Matter for Economic Development? 

      Gjerlow, Haakon; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Wig, Tore; Wilson, Matthew Charles (2018)
      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 ...
    • Can Courts be Bulwarks of Democracy? 

      Staton, Jeffrey K.; Reenock, Christopher; Holsinger, Jordan; Lindberg, Staffan (2018)
      Independent judges are thought to promote democratic regime survival by allowing perceived violations of rules limiting arbitrary power to be challenged non-violently in a fair setting, governed by transparent rules. Yet, ...
    • Harbors and Democracy 

      Gerring, John; Wig, Tore; Forø Tollefsen, Andreas; Apfeld, Brendan (2018)
      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: ...
    • Patterns of Regime Breakdown since the French Revolution 

      Djuve, Vilde Lunnan; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Wig, Tore (2018)
      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 ...
    • How to Make Causal Inferences with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data under Selection on Observables 

      Blackwell, Matthew; Glynn, Adam (2018)
      Repeated measurements of the same countries, people, or groups over time are vital to many fields of political science. These measurements, sometimes called time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data, allow researchers to ...
    • What Makes Experts Reliable? 

      Marquardt, Kyle L.; Pemstein, Daniel; Seim, Brigitte; Wang, Yi-ting (2018)
      Many datasets use experts to code latent quantities of interest. However, scholars have not explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. ...
    • Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: Response bias in measures of popular support in China 

      Robinson, Darrel; Tannenberg, Marcus (2018)
      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 ...
    • Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century 

      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 (2018)
      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 ...
    • Reassessing the Democratic Peace: A Novel Test Based on the Varieties of Democracy Data 

      Hegre, Håvard; Bernhard, Michael; Teorell, Jan (2018)
      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 ...