The postcommunist states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have witnessed levels of electoral volatility higher than both Western Europe and Latin America, levels that have deleterious effects on party consolidation and representative democracy in the region. This article presents a model of postcommunist legislative electoral volatility, testing explanations developed in Western Europe and Latin America and refining them for the different experi ence of the twin transition to both democracy and capitalism. Pooled crosssectional time series regression analysis is conducted on 67 legislative elections in 19 countries, covering the 1991-2006 period. Results demonstrate that, contrary to previous studies in other regions and of the first decade of the postcommunist era, economic determinants of volatility are of minimal salience. Rather, the institutional arrangement of the electoral system is found to be critically important, as is the more thorough "Leninist" or "Soviet" legacy in the states of the former Soviet Union.
Although restricting formal voting rights—voter suppression—is not uncommon in democracies, its incidence and form vary widely. Intuitively, when competing elites believe that the benefits of reducing voting by opponents outweigh the costs of voter suppression, it is more likely to occur. Internal political and state capacity and external actors, however, influence the form that voter suppression takes. When elites competing for office lack the ability to enact laws restricting voting due to limited internal capacity, or external actors are able to limit the ability of governments to use laws to suppress voting, suppression is likely to be ad hoc, decentralized, and potentially violent. As political and state capacity increase and external constraints decrease, voter suppression will shift from decentralized and potentially violent to centralized and mostly non-violent. We illustrate our arguments by analyzing the transition from decentralized, violent voter suppression through the use of lynchings (and associated violence) to the centralized, less violent suppression of black voting in the post-Reconstruction South. We also place the most recent wave of U.S. state voter suppression laws into broader context using our theoretical framework.
This article investigates the role of political competition in explaining de facto judicial independence in non‐democratic regimes. It argues that the electoral, political insurance explanation popular in the study of courts in democracies also offers explanatory power in the autocratic context, despite popular wisdom otherwise: due to the relatively greater risks of losing power in non‐democracies, electoral competition is highly salient when present. This is examined via hierarchical and fixed effects models that show competition strongly associated with increased levels of independence. This relationship is robust to alternative model and data specification, and has strong out‐of‐sample predictive accuracy.
This book argues that explaining judicial independence—considered the fundamental question of comparative law and politics—requires a perspective that spans the democracy/autocracy divide. Rather than seeking separate explanations in each regime context, in The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy, Brad Epperly argues that political competition is a salient factor in determining levels of de facto judicial independence across regime type, and indeed of greater import in autocracies. This is because a full “insurance” account of independence requires looking not only at the likelihood those in power might lose elections but also the variable risks associated with such an outcome, risks that are far higher for autocrats. First demonstrating that courts can and do provide insurance to former leaders, he then shows via exhaustive cross-national analyses that competition’s effects are far higher in autocratic regimes, providing the first evidence for the causal nature of the relationship. Epperly argues that these findings differ from existing case study research because in democratic regimes, a lack of political competition means incumbents target the de jure independence of courts. This argument is developed via in-depth case study of the Hungarian Constitutional Court after the country’s 2010 “constitutional revolution,” and then tested globally. Blending formal theory, observational and instrumental variables models, and elite interviews of leading Hungarian legal scholars and judges, Epperly offers a new framework for understanding judicial independence that integrates explanations of both de jure and de facto independence in both democratic and autocratic regimes.
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