| 1. |
- Edgell, Amanda B, et al.
(författare)
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Achieving Transparency, Reproducibility, and Readability with Hard-Coded Data: A Review
- 2023
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many important questions in political science require the use of "hard-coded" data or information that has been systematically ordered and quantified by a human being from qualitative sources. This working paper discusses challenges and recent innovations in collecting and documenting hard-coded data. We review five datasets produced within the last ten years and also reflect on our experiences working on the Pandemic Backsliding Project, a quarterly dataset tracking state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that scholars can deliberately produce and publish theoretically grounded human-coded data in an accessible format that promotes transparency, reproducibility, and readability. We highlight several ways scholars are already doing this, such as through narratives, source lists, and coding justifications that enhance the quality of their hard-coded datasets. We also make suggestions for how technological innovation through interactive web-based platforms can improve the documentation of hard-coding decisions in the future.
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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- Mechkova, Valeriya, 1989, et al.
(författare)
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Substantive Representation, Women’s Health, and Regime Type
- 2023
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Ingår i: Comparative Political Studies. - 0010-4140 .- 1552-3829.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A large body of literature investigates whether increasing the number of women in legislative office translates into policies that benefit women in society. This research builds upon theories about descriptive and substantive representation. However, these theories may not travel well to authoritarian contexts, where we see some of the largest gains in women legislators in recent years. This article unpacks the link between women’s descriptive representation, healthcare spending, and health outcomes by regime type. Using a sample of 169 countries from 2000 to 2018, we find that the percentage of women legislators is associated with increased healthcare spending across all regimes. However, women’s health outcomes do not improve with women’s descriptive representation in closed autocracies. Meanwhile, the results for democracies and electoral autocracies are similar, suggesting that even limited vertical accountability through semi-competitive elections may facilitate substantive representation of women.
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| 4. |
- Wilson, Matthew C., et al.
(författare)
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Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization
- 2023
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Ingår i: Political Science Research and Methods. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2049-8470 .- 2049-8489. ; 11:3, s. 501-520
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic "waves". We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
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