Measures of democracy are regularly employed in the statistical analysis of economic, political, and social policy. This paper reviews the measures" setup, strength, and weaknesses across the three most prominent democracy datasets: PolityIV, Freedom House, and Varieties of Democracy. The measures developed by the Varieties of Democracy project outperform Polity2 and Freedom House Index with respect to the underlying definition and measurement scale, as well as the theoretical justification of the aggregation procedure. The three indices display a high level of agreement for those observations included in all three datasets. The most substantial differences between the indices lie in the indices’ coverage, i.e. in their non-missing observations (in Polity2 coding, for example, years during which a country is occupied by foreign powers constitute missing values), the availability of disaggregate data and the above mentioned key areas. This paper clarifies when to proceed with caution, but for the most part advocates the use of Varieties of Democracy in the statistical analysis of democracy.

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The Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy (JPIPE) will publish cutting edge work at the intersection of these two interrelated fields of study: Political institutions (systems of politics and government or structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective-action and coordination problems in society) and Political economy (interdisciplinary studies drawing upon economics, political science, and law to explain how political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system interact and influence each other).Concentrations in political institutions include: (1) studies of particular institutions, like legislatures, executives, judiciaries, interest groups, parties, and bureaucracies; (2) cross-institutional studies, which examine how multiple institutions interact; and (3) studies of system-level institutions and their effects, like constitutionalism, federalism, presidentialism, and parliamentarism. Concentrations in political economy include: (1) comparative political economy, which focuses on the role of governmental institutions and/or power relationships in resource allocation for each type of economic system, (2) international political economy, which analyzes the economic impact of international relations and legal regimes, and (3) formal models of political processes, wherein voters, representatives, and bureaucrats are assumed to behave in rational (self-interested) ways.

This article introduces a novel conceptualization of democratic resilience -a two-stage process where democracies avoid democratic declines altogether or avert democratic breakdown given that such autocratization is ongoing. Drawing on the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, we find that democracies have had a high level of resilience to onset of autocratization since 1900. Nevertheless, democratic resilience has become substantially weaker since the end of the Cold War. Fifty-nine episodes of sustained and substantial declines in democratic practices have occurred since 1993, leading to the unprecedented breakdown of 36 democratic regimes. Ominously, we find that once autocratization begins, only one in five democracies manage to avert breakdown. We also analyse which factors are associated with each stage of democratic resilience. The results suggest that democracies are more resilient when strong judicial constraints on the executive are present and democratic institutions were strong in the past. Conversely and adding nuance to the literature, economic development is only associated with resilience to onset of autocratization, not to resilience against breakdown once autocratization has begun.

Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of economic crises and over the perceived failure of the elites, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our paper answers the question of how populist governments handle the pandemic. We answer this question by introducing a theoretical framework according to which (1) populist governments enact less far-reaching policy measures to counter the pandemic,(2) lower the effort of citizens to counter the pandemic, and are ultimately (3) hit worse by the pandemic. We test the propositions in a sample of 42 countries with weekly data from 2020.Employing econometric models, we find empirical support for our propositions and ultimately conclude that excess mortality exceeds the excess mortality of conventional countries by 10 percentage points (i.e., 100%). Our findings have important implications for the assessment of populist government performance in general as well as counter-pandemic measures in particular by providing evidence that opportunistic and inadequate policy responses as well as spreading misinformation and downplaying the pandemic are strongly related to increases in COVID-19 mortality.