| 1. |
- Bizzarro, Fernando, et al.
(författare)
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Party Strength and Economic Growth
- 2015
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- While a large literature suggests an important role for political parties in economic development, this is the first attempt to lay out a comprehensive theory and a reasonably comprehensive empirical test of the proposition. We argue that strong parties broaden the constituencies to which policy makers respond and help politicians solve coordination problems. These features help ensure better economic management, public services, and political stability. And this, in turn, enhances economic growth. Drawing on a novel measure of party strength from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, we test this theory on data drawn from more than 150 countries, observed annually from 1900–2012. We identify a sizeable effect which is robust to various specifications, estimators, and samples. The effect operates in both democracies and autocracies and is fairly stable across regions and time periods. We also find provisional evidence in favor of causal mechanisms pertaining to public services and political stability.
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| 2. |
- Bizzarro, Fernando, et al.
(författare)
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Party Strength and Economic Growth
- 2018
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Ingår i: World Politics. - 0043-8871 .- 1086-3338. ; 70:2, s. 275-320
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © Trustees of Princeton University 2018. While a large literature suggests an important role for political parties in development, this article is the first attempt to layout and test a comprehensive theory connecting parties to economic growth. The authors argue that strong parties broaden the constituencies to which policymakers respond and help politicians solve coordination problems. These features help to ensure better economic management, public services, and political stability. And this, in turn, enhances economic growth. Drawing on a novel measure of party strength from the Varieties of Democracy data set, the authors test this theory on data drawn from more than 150 countries observed annually from 1901-2010. They identify a sizeable effect that is robust to various specifications, estimators, and samples. The effect operates in both democracies and autocracies, and is fairly stable across regions and time periods.
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| 3. |
- Coppedge, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem)
- 2019
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Ingår i: BMS Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/ Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique. - : SAGE Publications. - 0759-1063 .- 2070-2779. ; 143, s. 107-133
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evaluative question; inter-coder reliability tests incorporated into a custom designed Bayesian item-response theory measurement model; provision of confidence bounds for all point estimates associated with expert-coded questions as well as for all indices; multiple indices reflecting varying theories of democracy; fully transparent aggregation procedures; and that all data are made freely available, including original coder-level judgments (exclusive of any personal identifying information).
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| 4. |
- Coppedge, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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V-Dem Comparisons and Contrasts with Other Measurement Projects
- 2017
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For policymakers, activists, academics, and citizens around the world the conceptualization and measurement of democracy matters. The needs of democracy promoters and social scientists are convergent. We all need better ways to measure democracy. In the first section of this document we critically review the field of democracy indices. It is important to emphasize that problems identified with extant indices are not easily solved, and some of the issues we raise vis-à-vis other projects might also be raised in the context of the V-Dem project. Measuring an abstract and contested concept such as democracy is hard and some problems of conceptualization and measurement may never be solved definitively. In the second section we discuss in general terms how the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project differs from extant indices and how the novel approach taken by V-Dem might assist the work of activists, professionals, and scholars.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Gerring, John, et al.
(författare)
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Demography and Democracy: A Global, District-level Analysis of Electoral Contestation
- 2015
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Ingår i: American Political Science Review. - 1537-5943. ; 109:3, s. 574-591
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- According to the classical perspective, polity size and democracy are inversely related. In this article, we argue that there is an important exception that manifests itself at the district level in settings where multiparty competition is allowed. Specifically, we find that larger districts encourage greater contestation. This results from a little-noticed mechanical effect as well as from several features of constituencies that are affected by size and have direct repercussions for contestation. To demonstrate this thesis we assembled a unique dataset, the Multi-level Election Archive (MLEA), which unites electoral contests across a variety of districts (national, regional, and local) and elective offices from the eighteenth century to the present, including a total of 88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 contests. With this evidence we were able to conduct a broad array of statistical tests, some global and others focused on particular countries or election types, all of which support our general argument.
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| 7. |
- Gerring, John, et al.
(författare)
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Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type
- 2021
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Ingår i: Comparative Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0010-4140 .- 1552-3829. ; 54:3-4, s. 585-622
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection when communication costs decline, lowering barriers to citizen coordination. This explains its dominance in the pre-modern world and its subsequent demise. To test this theory, we produce an original dataset that codes monarchies and republics in Europe (back to 1100) and the world (back to 1700). With this dataset, we test a number of observable implications of the theory—centering on territory size, political stability, tenure in office, conflict, and the role of mass communications in the modern era.
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| 8. |
- 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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| 9. |
- 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. ; 57:2
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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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| 10. |
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