Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

Teorell, Jan; Coppedge, Michael; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik

doi:10.1007/s12116-018-9268-z

“…The EDI captures to what extend regimes achieve the core institutional requirements in Dahl's (1971Dahl's ( , 1998 famous conceptualization of electoral democracy as 'polyarchy' (Teorell et al 2018). …”

Section: Operationalization and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Lührmann

¹

,

Lindberg

²

2018

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. The headquarters -the V-Dem Institute -is based at the University of Gothenburg with 17 staff. The project includes a worldwide team with six Principal Investigators, 14 Project Managers, 30 Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 3,000 Country Experts. The V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: University of Gothenburg * For helpful comments, we thank Scott Gates, Kyle Marquardt, Jan Teorell, and participants of the APSA General Conference (8/2017), the V-Dem Research conference (5/2018) the post-doctoral working group at the University of Gothenburg and the HU/Princeton workshop on constitutionalism, dissent and resistance (6/2018), where earlier versions of this paper were discussed. In particular, we are grateful to Rick Morgen who helped to better operationalize our idea of autocratization episodes. We also benefited immensely from Philipp Tönjes' skillful research assistance. This research was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; ERC Consolidator Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. 2 AbstractLess than thirty years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy's eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this paper provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this paper shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the "end of history" in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the "end of democracy" now.3

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“…Finally, following Knutsen et al (2019a), we use data from V-Dem. More specifically, we employ V-Dem's core electoral democracy measure, Polyarchy, which extends from 1789-2018 Teorell et al (2019). Polyarchy is constructed to capture the democracy concept of Dahl (1971), and the theoretical range is 0-1 (0.01-0.95 in the data).…”

Section: Application Ii: Income and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing and Assessing Temporal Heterogeneity: Introducing a Change Point Framework, with Applications on the Study of Democratization

Hermansen

¹

,

Knutsen

²

,

Nygård

³

2019

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. The headquarters -the V-Dem Institute -is based at the University of Gothenburg with 17 staff. The project includes a worldwide team with six Principal Investigators, 14 Project Managers, 30 Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 3,000 Country Experts. The V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: V-Dem InstituteAbstract Various theories in political science point to temporal heterogeneity in relationships of interest. Yet, empirical research typically ignores such heterogeneity or employs fairly crude measures to evaluate it. Advances in models for change point detection offer opportunities to study temporal heterogeneity more carefully. We customize a recent such method for political science purposes, for instance so that it accommodates panel data, and provide an accompanying R-package. We evaluate the methodology, and how it behaves when different assumptions about the number and abrupt nature of change points are violated, by using simulated data. Importantly, the methodology allows us to evaluate changes to different quantities of interest. It also allows us to provide comprehensive and nuanced estimates concerning uncertainty in the timing and size of changes. We illustrate the utility of the change point methodology on two types of regression models (Probit and OLS) in two empirical applications. We first reinvestigate the proposition by Albertus (2017) that labor-dependent agriculture had a more pronounced negative effect on democratic outcomes before the 'third wave of democratization'. Next, we utilize data extending from the French revolution to the present, from V-Dem, to examine the time-variant nature of the income-democracy relationship.

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“…(from Fariss et al, 2017) and ln population (same source). Further, we control for degree of democracy by including the Polyarchy index (Teorell et al, 2019) from V-Dem (Coppedge et al 2017a), and its squared term. We include both the linear and squared term in order to model the inverted u-curve relationship between level of democracy and regime breakdown found in previous studies (e.g., Gates et al, 2006;Goldstone et al, 2010;Knutsen and Nygård, 2015).…”

Section: Benchmark Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Crisis and Regime Transitions from Within

Knutsen

¹

,

Djuve

²

2019

SSRN Journal

0

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We study how economic crises affect the likelihood of regime change brought about, in part or fully, by actors in the incumbent regime. While historically common, such processes remain far less studied than regime transitions forced by non-incumbent actors, such as coups or revolutions. We argue that economic crises may incentivize leaders to change the regime "from within" due to two different mechanisms, which we detail and illustrate with two cases. First, crises create "windows of opportunity" for leaders to change the regime in a direction they inherently prefer. Democratically elected leaders who use crises to conduct self-coups is one example. Second, economic crises sometimes allow for opposition actors to mobilize and threaten the regime with breakdown. In such circumstances, incumbents may prefer to change the regime from within to appease opponents in anticipation of even worse outcomes. We leverage new data on the timing and mode of regime change for more than 2000 regimes from about 200 countries, across 1789-2018, and find support for the hypothesis that economic crises induce transitions from within. However, when we distinguish incumbent-guided liberalization episodes from other guided transitions, including self-coups, we only find that economic crises systematically relate to the latter.

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Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

Cited by 170 publications

References 55 publications

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

Characterizing and Assessing Temporal Heterogeneity: Introducing a Change Point Framework, with Applications on the Study of Democratization

Economic Crisis and Regime Transitions from Within

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