| 1. |
- 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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| 2. |
- Angiolillo, Fabio, 1994, et al.
(författare)
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State of the world 2023: democracy winning and losing at the ballot : State of the world 2023
- 2024
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Ingår i: Democratization. - 1351-0347.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents trends in democracy, autocracy, and regime transformation using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset version 14. We offer five main findings. First, the average level of democracy as measured by the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) continues to decline and has reached the 1985-level when looking at the population-weighted averages. Second, 42 countries are in ongoing episodes of autocratization, and 18 countries are in ongoing episodes of democratization in 2023. Third, we are the first to show that out of the 42 autocratizing countries, 19 are “Bell-turn” autocratizers, while nine out of the 18 democratizers are “U-turns.” Fourth, we unpack the familiar analysis of the three waves of autocratization and democratization by dividing these into the newly discovered stand-alone episodes of autocratization versus Bell-turn episodes, as well as stand-alone episodes of democratization versus U-turn episodes. This analysis suggests that regime volatility has increased in recent years, as a larger share of both autocratization and democratization are made up of Bell-turns and U-turns, respectively. Fifth, out of the 60 countries holding national elections this year, 31 countries are in some degree of decline in democracy, while only three are improving on democracy.
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| 3. |
- Arrington, N. A.N.C.Y., et al.
(författare)
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Constitutional Reform and the Gender Diversification of Peak Courts
- 2021
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Ingår i: American Political Science Review. - 0003-0554 .- 1537-5943. ; 115:3, s. 851-868
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Do the processes states use to select judges for peak courts influence gender diversity? Scholars have debated whether concentrating appointment power in a single individual or diffusing appointment power across many individuals best promotes gender diversification. Others have claimed that the precise structure of the process matters less than fundamental changes in the process. We clarify these theoretical mechanisms, derive testable implications concerning the appointment of the first woman to a state's highest court, and then develop a matched-pair research design within a Rosenbaum permutation approach to observational studies. Using a global sample beginning in 1970, we find that constitutional change to the judicial selection process decreases the time until the appointment of the first woman justice. These results reflect claims that point to institutional disruptions as critical drivers of gender diversity on important political posts.
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| 4. |
- Arrington, Nancy, et al.
(författare)
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Gender Diversity on High Courts
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Increasing the diversity of political institutions is believed to improve the quality of political discourse and, subsequently, the quality of political outcomes. Moreover, the presence of diverse officials in positions of power signals the openness and fairness of political institutions. These benets of diversity should be particularly acute in the judiciary, where judges are tasked with the symbolically and substantively powerful duty of interpreting and defending constitutional values. Extant scholarship suggests that well-designed appointment process can promote diversity without explicitly gendered goals, much less quotas. If correct, these proposals raise the possibility of promoting greater diversity without having to resolve politically charged debates about quotas. Yet, scholars disagree about the effects of particular design choices. Worse, estimating causal effects of institutions in observational data is particularly difficult. We develop a research design linked to the empirical implications of existing theoretical arguments to evaluate the effect of institutional change on the gender diversity of peak courts cross-nationally. Speciffically, we consider the effect of an increase (or a decrease) in the number of actors involved in the appointment process. We find mixed results for any existing claim about the role of appointment institutions play in increasing diversity. Yet we also find that any institutional change seems to cause an increase in the gender diversity of peak courts.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
- Bernhard, M, et al.
(författare)
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Institutional Subsystems and the Survival of Democracy: Do Political and Civil Society Matter?
- 2015
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How do two central institutional subsystems of democracy – party systems and civil society –affect the persistence of democratic regimes?Despite the ability of each of these institutions to provide sources of countervailing power that make politicians accountable and thus responsive, distributionist accounts of democratic breakdown provide few insights on how such institutions may encourage parties to reach accommodation. We argue that these institutions provide credible threats against anti-system activities that would otherwise threaten the democratic compromise. We test our argument with newly available data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project by analyzing all episodes of democratic breakdown from 1900 -2001. Using a split population event history estimator, we find evidence that these institutions not only forestall the timing of breakdowns among transitional democracies but also that a strong party system is critical to setting democratic regimes on the path of consolidation.
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| 8. |
- Bernhard, M., et al.
(författare)
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Institutionalising electoral uncertainty and authoritarian regime survival
- 2020
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Ingår i: European Journal of Political Research. - : Wiley. - 0304-4130 .- 1475-6765. ; 59:2, s. 465-487
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Authoritarian incumbents routinely use democratic emulation as a strategy to extend their tenure in power. Yet, there is also evidence that multiparty competition makes electoral authoritarianism more vulnerable to failure. Proceeding from the assumption that the outcomes of authoritarian electoral openings are inherently uncertain, it is argued in this article that the institutionalisation of elections determines whether electoral authoritarianism promotes stability or vulnerability. By 'institutionalisation', it is meant the ability of authoritarian regimes to reduce uncertainty over outcomes as they regularly hold multiparty elections. Using discrete-time event-history models for competing risks, the effects of sequences of multiparty elections on patterns of regime survival and failure in 262 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010 are assessed, conditioned on their degree of competitiveness. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of electoral uncertainty enhances authoritarian regime survival. However, for competitive electoral authoritarian regimes this entails substantial risk. The first three elections substantially increase the probability of democratisation, with the danger subsequently diminishing. This suggests that convoking multiparty competition is a risky game with potentially high rewards for autocrats who manage to institutionalise elections. Yet, only a small number of authoritarian regimes survive as competitive beyond the first few elections, suggesting that truly competitive authoritarianism is hard to institutionalise. The study thus finds that the question of whether elections are dangerous or stabilising for authoritarianism is dependent on differences between the ability of competitive and hegemonic forms of electoral authoritarianism to reduce electoral uncertainty.
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| 9. |
- Bernhard, M., et al.
(författare)
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Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research
- 2017
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Ingår i: Perspectives on Politics. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1537-5927 .- 1541-0986. ; 15:2, s. 342-360
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We show how the V-Dem data opens new possibilities for studying civil society in comparative politics. We explain how V-Dem was able to extract embedded expert knowledge to create a novel set of civil society indicators for 173 countries from 1900 to the present. This data overcomes shortcomings in the basis on which inference has been made about civil society in the past by avoiding problems of sample bias that make generalization difficult or tentative. We begin with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics. We then turn to the shortcomings of the existing data and discusses how the V-Dem data can overcome them. We introduce the new data, highlighting two new indicesthe core civil society index (CCSI) and the civil society participation index (CSPI)and explain how the individual indicators and the indices were created. We then demonstrate how the CCSI uses embedded expert knowledge to capture the development of civil society on the national level in Venezuela, Ghana, and Russia. We close by using the new indices to examine the dispute over whether post-communist civil society is weak. Time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2,999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012 fails to find that post-communist civil society is substantially different from other regions, but that there are major differences between the post-Soviet subsample and other post-communist countries both in relation to other regions and each other.
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| 10. |
- Bernhard, M., et al.
(författare)
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Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection
- 2020
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Ingår i: Studies in Comparative International Development. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0039-3606 .- 1936-6167. ; 55, s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The third wave of democratization has given way to a reverse wave of autocratization. A critical question is what can be done to prevent democratic breakdowns and make democracy endure. A large body of historical-narrative and small-N comparative scholarship has suggested that an active mobilized civil society and institutionalized political parties can be mobilized to protect democracy from authoritarian takeovers. We provide the first rigorous set of empirical analyses to test this argument using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project for the period from 1900 to 2010. We find that both exert a robust, independent, and substantial effect on the survival of democracies. These findings have important policy implications for the international community.
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