| 1. |
- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
- 2024
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Ingår i: PS-POLITICAL SCIENCE & POLITICS. - 1049-0965 .- 1537-5935.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that "objective" measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M's specific data and conclusions.
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| 2. |
- Angiolillo, Fabio, 1994, et al.
(författare)
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Democratic-Autocratic Party Systems: A New Index
- 2023
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Party systems can be split along a democratic-authoritarian dimension in which some parties commit to democracy while others are decidedly more authoritarian. This democracy-autocracy party system (DAPS) dimension differs from other common scales that primarily capture policy differences rather than regime preferences. To apprehend this dimension of political division, we introduce a new empirical framework. Building on existing data on parties’ ideology, we provide a new measurement that defines to what extent a party system is more democratic or authoritarian. This measurement allows us to track the development of the democratic-authoritarian dimension across time between 1970-2019 and space, covering 174 countries for 3,151 election-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and discriminant validity tests to confirm the reliability of our measurement, along with an empirical application of DAPS’s influence on autocratization and democratization.
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| 3. |
- Bartels, L. M., et al.
(författare)
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The Forum: Global Challenges to Democracy? Perspectives on Democratic Backsliding
- 2023
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Ingår i: International Studies Review. - 1521-9488. ; 25:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is a widespread perception that we are witnessing a period of democratic decline, manifesting itself in varieties of democratic backsliding such as the manipulation of elections, marginalization and repression of regime opponents and minorities, or more incremental executive aggrandizement. Yet others are more optimistic and have argued that democracy is in fact resilient, or that we are observing coinciding trends of democratic decline but also expansion. This forum highlights key issues in the debate on democracy's decline, which center on conceptual and measurement issues, agreement on the phenomenon but not its nature or severity, the importance of international factors, the emphasis we should put on political elites versus citizens, and the consequences of backsliding for global politics. Staffan I. Lindberg provides an empirical perspective on the scope and severity of democracy's decline, and argues that polarization and misinformation are important drivers for this current wave of autocratization. Susan D. Hyde highlights the detrimental consequences of reduced support for democracy by the international community, which has affected civil society organizations-important arbiters of democracy-especially severely. Challenging some of these conclusions, Irfan Nooruddin claims that any gains for democracy after the end of the Cold War were short-lived, failing to sustain democracy because of an overemphasis on elections and a disregard for structural factors. Finally, Larry M. Bartels argues that we need to look to political elites and not citizens if we want to protect democracy in the United States and elsewhere, which has important implications for how we study democracy and its challenges.
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| 4. |
- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
- 2023
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper addresses three interrelated questions. First, how strong is the evidence that democracy has declined globally over the last decade? Second, how should we best measure (change in) democracy? Third, given that much of the recent evidencefor global backsliding comes from measurement projects that rely on expert ratings, is there evidence that experts have become harsher judges of democratic quality in recent years? We begin our analysis with a discussion of how to conceptualize democracy and democratic backsliding, stressing that for contested concepts such as democracy, no one operationalization is likely to reign supreme. We then dissect the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” measures, examining how measurement error can affect even seemingly objective indicators, and highlight how subjectivity pervades all measurement enterprises. Next, focusing on V–Dem’s methodology, we show—through both theoretical considerations and empirical tests—that it is highly unlikely that time-varying expert biases drive recent declines in estimates of the state of global democracy. Finally we evaluate Little and Meng’s (2023) recent attempt to assess the prevailing case for global backsliding using “objective” measures. We demonstrate multiple issues that make their measurement strategy ill-suited to studying trends in global democracy.
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| 5. |
- Maerz, S. F., et al.
(författare)
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Episodes of regime transformation
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - 0022-3433.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article provides a new conceptualization of regime transformation that allows scholars to address democratization and autocratization as related but obverse processes. We introduce a dataset that captures 680 episodes of regime transformation (ERT) from 1900 to 2019 and offers novel insights into regime change over the past 120 years. The ERT has three main advantages over other approaches. First, it avoids problematic assumptions of unit homogeneity and constant as well as symmetric effects. Second, it integrates key insights from qualitative studies by treating regime change as a gradual and uncertain process. Third, the ERT is based on a unified framework for studying regime transformation in either direction. The dataset differentiates between four broad types of regime transformation: liberalization in autocracies, democratic deepening in democracies, and autocratization in both democracies and autocracies (democratic and autocratic regression). It further distinguishes ten patterns with distinct outcomes, including standard depictions of regime change (i.e. democratic transition or breakdown). A minority (32%) of ERTs produce a regime transition, with the majority of episodes either ending before a transition takes place or not having the potential for such a transition (i.e. further democratization in democratic regimes or further autocratization in autocratic regimes). We also provide comparisons to other datasets, illustrative case studies to demonstrate face validity, and a discussion about how the ERT framework can be applied in peace research.
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| 6. |
- Medzihorsky, Juraj, et al.
(författare)
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Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties
- 2023
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Ingår i: Party Politics. - 1354-0688.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The recent increase of democratic declines around the world - "the third wave of autocratization" - has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz's litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power.
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| 7. |
- Morrison, Kelly, et al.
(författare)
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Chains in Episodes of Democratization
- 2023
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In what sequence do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the processes and causes of institutional change that make up regime transitions. However, there has been limited research to evaluate the institutional sequence of democratization in a systematic, quantitative framework. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology, Analysis of Chains (AOC), which is adapted from evolutionary biology and partial orders in mathematics. The article uses AOC to catalog chains of institutional change across 36 indicators of democracy in episodes of liberalization from 1900 to 2021. Our findings are the first to use a quantitative approach to systematically describe long sequences of democratization across many countries and over a long time series. This innovative analysis provides an important finding: we show that elections are the most common element of democracy to develop first during democratization. However, we find little correlation between the early development of elections and successful transition to democracy. These results make a pivotal contribution to ongoing debates about the process of regime transition as well as efforts to promote democracy around the world.
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| 8. |
- Papada, Evie, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization
- 2023
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We are pleased to present the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute’s seventh annual Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization. Readers of the report will recognize some of the ongoing challenges democracies face but also observe new cases where agents have reclaimed democracy and stopped negative trends.
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| 9. |
- Sato, Yuko, et al.
(författare)
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Disinformation and Episodes of Regime Transformation
- 2023
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Disinformation has transformed into a global issue and while it is seen as a growing concern to democracy today, autocrats have long used it as a part of their propaganda repertoire. Yet, no study has tested the effect of disinformation on regime breakdown and stability beyond country-specific studies. Drawing on novel measures from the Digital Society Project (DSP) estimating the levels of disinformation disseminated by governments across 179 countries between 2000-2022 and from the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, we provide the first global comparative study of disinformation and survival of democratic and authoritarian regimes, respectively. The results show that in authoritarian regimes, disinformation helps rulers to stay in power as regimes with higher levels of disinformation are less likely to experience democratization episodes. In democracies, on the other hand, disinformation increases the probability of autocratization onsets. As such, this study is the first to provide comparative evidence on the negative effects of disinformation on democracy as well as on the prospects of democratization.
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| 10. |
- Wiebrecht, Felix, 1994, et al.
(författare)
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State of the world 2022: defiance in the face of autocratization
- 2023
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Ingår i: Democratization. - 1351-0347 .- 1743-890X. ; 30:5, s. 769-793
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents the state of democracy in the world in 2022 using the most recent Varieties of Democracy dataset (V13). There are four main findings. First, the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen is down to 1986-levels and 72% of the world’s population live in autocracies. Second, the third wave of autocratization reaches a new height with 42 countries autocratizing. By contrast, only 14 countries are democratizing. Third, between 1992 and 2022, autocracies increased their share of the global economy and now account for 46% of world GDP when measured by purchasing power parity. Fourth, defying the global wave of autocratization, eight countries not only stopped but also reversed autocratization in the last 10 years, which we define as democratic U-turns. We find five elements that seem important across the identified cases: executive constraints, mass mobilization, alternation in power, unified opposition coalescing with civil society, and international democracy support. We analyze different combinations of these factors and discuss how they could be critical in stopping and reversing contemporary autocratization. This first analysis suggests that in-depth, comparative case studies of these eight cases and their counterfactuals would be an important area of future research.
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