Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. We make the UDS and associated parameter estimates freely available online and provide a detailed tutorial that demonstrates how to best use the UDS in applied work.
Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher office in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group-leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs' roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999EP ( -2004 using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes. * We thank Brian Gaines, Jude Hays, Robert Pahre, Kevin Quinn, Tom Rudolph, and Guy Whitten for helpful assistance. We also acknowledge the funding support of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois.1 Politicians are ambitious. Some legislators wish to remain in their current positions for multiple terms, others aspire to other offices, and still others expect to serve in politics for only a short time (Schlesinger 1966). Those career ambitions shape behavior. A legislator's expectations about future office affect the choices she makes while serving in her current position (Hibbing 1986). Demonstrating empirical support for the importance of political ambition, however, is not straightforward. While research has focused on behavior across legislatures with a variety of career ladders (see e.g. Black 1972, Rhode 1979, Epstein, Brady, Kawato & O'Halloran 1997, Samuels 2003, those studies center on a single country, limiting the possible variation in career-oriented behavior. Since only a small number of other positions are likely to arouse the ambitions of serving legislators, it is difficult to disentangle how the characteristics of the legislature, its members, and the opportunity structure interact to influence legislative behavior. 1We take advantage of a unique institutional laboratory to investigate how ambition affects vote choice: the European Parliament (EP). The EP houses politicians from all member states of the European Union (EU), each with a different set of national political institutions, party systems, and political opportunity structures. Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths (Stolz 2001, Scarrow 1997. Some MEPs prefer to advance within the EP itself, gaining seniority and access to key leadership positions.Other MEPs view their time in the EP as a valuable stepping-stone to higher office in their home state. We argue that these different career ambitions condition legislative behavior within the EP. Those MEPs seeking to remain in the EP further their careers by pleasing EP group leaders and will work to expand the authority of Europe's supranational institutions relative to member-state governments. MEPs expecting to retu...
In many systems, legislators find themselves accountable to multiple principals. This article seeks to further answer how legislators decide between their principals and what factors condition legislators to choose one over the other. We argue that electoral uncertainty, operationalized as electoral volatility, pushes legislators towards the principal that has the greatest influence over their re-election. Using European Parliament electoral results and roll-call data from the second to the sixth European Parliaments , we show that increases in electoral volatility decreased European group cohesion and pushed legislators to side more with the positions of their national parties over their European group when the two disagreed.
This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover, it jointly evaluates how incumbency and gender affect nomination. This study uses European Parliament elections to compare a plethora of parties, operating under numerous institutions, in the context of a single legislature. It finds that gender differences in candidate selection are largely explained by incumbency bias, although party ideology and female labor force participation help explain which parties prioritize the placement of novice women.
The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less.
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