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- Buckley, Noah, et al.
(author)
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Endogenous Popularity: How Perceptions of Support Affect the Popularity of Authoritarian Regimes
- 2022
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Autocracies with popular leaders tend to survive longer. A growing body of scholarship therefore focuses on the factors that influence authoritarian popularity. However, it is possible that the perception of popularity itself breeds popularity in nondemocratic regimes, impacting incumbent approval. Here we use framing experiments embedded in four recent surveys in Russia to examine the extent to which information about the support an authoritarian leader enjoys influences the level of support respondents report for him. We find that negative information about the Russian president's popularity decreases support for him, while positive information has no effect. Additional analyses, which rely on a novel combination of framing and list experiments, provide evidence that these changes are not due to preference falsification. This study has implications for research on the origins of incumbent approval and dramatic defection cascades in nondemocratic regimes.
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- Chapman, H. S., et al.
(author)
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Xenophobia on the Rise? Temporal and Regional Trends in Xenophobic Attitudes in Russia
- 2018
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In: Comparative Politics. - 0010-4159. ; 50:3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this article we consider the trajectory of xenophobia in Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Using survey data from 1996, 2004, and 2012, we examine Russians' negative attitudes toward seven outgroups over time. We also statistically analyze the degree to which correlates of xenophobia have changed between 1996 and 2012. We find that Muscovites have become more xenophobic toward many groups over time relative to residents of other regions. This change is particularly striking in comparison to 1996, when Muscovites were generally less xenophobic than residents of other regions. Finally, we find that a strong lack of confidence in Russian President Putin is associated with higher levels of xenophobia across time, complicating the perceived link between the Russian government and xenophobic sentiment.
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- Frye, Timothy, et al.
(author)
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Is Putin’s popularity real?
- 2017
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In: Post-Soviet Affairs. - 1060-586X. ; 33:1, s. 1-15
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is within 10 percentage points of that implied by direct questioning. We find little evidence that these estimates are positively biased due to the presence of floor effects. In contrast, our analysis of placebo experiments suggests that there may be a small negative bias due to artificial deflation. We conclude that Putin’s approval ratings largely reflect the attitudes of Russian citizens.
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- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(author)
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Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
- 2023
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)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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- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(author)
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Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century
- 2018
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- 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.
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7. |
- Knutsen, C. H., et al.
(author)
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Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century
- 2019
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In: Journal of Peace Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 56:3, s. 440-451
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains 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 come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers 1900 to the present - 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, coding process, and different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure intertemporal and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we describe patterns of democratization in the 'long 19th century'. Finally, we investigate how interstate war relates to subsequent democratization.
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8. |
- Lührmann, Anna, et al.
(author)
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Constraining Governments: New indices of vertical, horizontal and diagonal accountability
- 2017
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Accountability - constraints on the government’s use of political power - is one of the cornerstones of good governance. However, conceptual stretching and a lack of reliable measures have limited cross-national research and comparisons regarding the role of both accountability writ large and its different sub-types. To address this research gap, we use the V-Dem dataset and Bayesian statistical models to develop new ways to conceptualize and measure accountability and its core dimensions. We provide indices capturing the extent to which governments are accountable to citizens (vertical accountability), other state institutions (horizontal accountability) and the media and civil society (diagonal accountability), as well as an aggregate index that incorporates the three sub-types. These indices cover virtually all countries from 1900 to today. We demonstrate the validity of our new measures by analyzing trends from key countries, as well as by demonstrating that the measures are positively related to development outcomes such as health and education.
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- Marquardt, Kyle L., 1983, et al.
(author)
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Estimating Latent Traits from Expert Surveys: An Analysis of Sensitivity to Data Generating Process
- 2018
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Models for converting expert-coded data to point estimates of latent concepts assume different data-generating processes. In this paper, we simulate ecologically-valid data according to different assumptions, and examine the degree to which common methods for aggregating expert-coded data can recover true values and construct appropriate coverage intervals from these data. We find that hierarchical latent variable models and the bootstrapped mean perform similarly when variation in reliability and scale perception is low; latent variable techniques outperform the mean when variation is high. Hierarchical A-M and IRT models generally perform similarly, though IRT models are often more likely to include true values within their coverage intervals. The median and non-hierarchical latent variable modeling techniques perform poorly under most assumed data generating processes.
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10. |
- Marquardt, Kyle L., 1983, et al.
(author)
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Experts, Coders, and Crowds:An analysis of substitutability
- 2017
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Recent work suggests that crowd workers can replace experts and trained coders in common coding tasks. However, while many political science applications require coders to both and relevant information and provide judgment, current studies focus on a limited domain in which experts provide text for crowd workers to code. To address potential over-generalization, we introduce a typology of data producing actors - experts, coders, and crowds - and hypothesize factors which affect crowd-expert substitutability. We use this typology to guide a comparison of data from crowdsourced and expert surveys. Our results provide sharp scope conditions for the substitutability of crowd workers: when coding tasks require contextual and conceptual knowledge, crowds produce substantively dierent data from coders and experts. We also find that crowd workers can cost more than experts in the context of cross-national panels, and that one purported advantage of crowdsourcing - replicability - is undercut by an insucient number of crowd workers.
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