V-Dem Codebook V6

Coppedge, Michael; Gerring, John; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan; Altman, David; Andersson, Frida; Bernhard, Michaël; Fish, M. Steven; Glynn, Adam; Hicken, Allen; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; McMann, Kelly M.; Mechkova, Valeriya; Miri, Farhad; Paxton, Pamela; Pemstein, Daniel; Sigman, Rachel; Staton, Jeffrey K.; Seim, Brigitte

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2951018

Cited by 152 publications

(146 citation statements)

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“…Using V-Dem data from 173 countries from 1900 to the present (Coppedge et al 2016a, b), the empirical results support the main theoretical predictions.…”

Section: * Valeriya Mechkovasupporting

confidence: 70%

The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

2018

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Accountability is one of the cornerstones of good governance. Establishing accountable governments is a top priority on the international development agenda. Yet, scholars and democracy practitioners know little about how accountability mechanisms develop and thus can be supported by international and national actors. The present study tackles the questions of how, and in what sequence accountability sub-types develop. We consider not only vertical (elections and political parties) and horizontal accountability (legislature, judiciary, and other oversight bodies) but also diagonal accountability (civil society and media) in both their de-jure and the de-facto dimensions. By utilizing novel sequencing methods, we study their sequential relationships in 173 countries from 1900 to the present with data from the new V-Dem dataset. Considering the long-term dimensions of institution building, this study indicates that most aspects of de-facto vertical accountability precede other forms of accountability. Effective institutions of horizontal accountability-such as vigorous parliaments and independent high courts-evolve rather late in the sequence and build on progress in many other areas.Keywords Accountability . Sequencing . Democratization . Government oversight . De-facto power Political accountability is both one of the cornerstones of good governance and a key topic in academia. This power of the people to hold political leaders to account is fundamental to representative democracy, hence a key feature of most definitions of democracy (e.g., Dahl 1971Dahl , 1989Schmitter and Karl 1991). It is also a top priority on St Comp Int Dev (2019) 54:40-70 https://doi.org/10.1007 Authors contributed equally and are listed in reverse alphabetical order. * Valeriya MechkovaValeriya.mechkova@gu.se 1 V-Dem Institute, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden the international development agenda, e.g., as a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN Resolution: A/Res/70/1). Yet, we know little about how and in what sequence different aspects of accountability evolve. The extant literature provides some suggestions on the sequence of democratization-thus how accountability starts to evolve. Dahl (1971) famously argued that it is conducive if competition among elites evolves before the expansion of participation, and there is some empirical support for this (Wilson 2015, p. 234). And while there are contributions on how one aspect of accountability may strengthen other aspects (e.g., Keane 2009), this study is the first of its kind by investigating if there are generalizable sequences in the evolution of accountability across 35 highly specific institutions with data covering 176 countries and 113 years.Taking Dahl's (1971) famous axiom as a point of departure, we argue that governments are more likely to allow for de-facto accountability if the costs of supplying accountability decrease and the costs of suppressing the demand for accountability increase. Distinguishing between i...

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“…Using V-Dem data from 173 countries from 1900 to the present (Coppedge et al 2016a, b), the empirical results support the main theoretical predictions.…”

Section: * Valeriya Mechkovasupporting

confidence: 70%

The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

2018

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“…6 Version 7.1 covers 178 countries from 1900 to 2016 (Coppedge et al, 2017a(Coppedge et al, , 2017b(Coppedge et al, , 2017cPemstein et al, 2017). Figure 1 portrays the stepwise decision rules.…”

Section: Operationalization With V-dem Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) De-facto multiparty elections as indicated by a score above 2 on the V-Dem indicator for multiparty elections (v2elmulpar_osp); (2) free and fair elections where mistakes and irregularities did not affect the outcome, as indicated by a score above 2 on the respective V-Dem indicator (v2elfrfair_osp); 7 and (3) following Lindberg (2016, p. 90), a score larger than 0.5 on the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index (EDI, v2x_polyarchy) which explicitly measures Dahl's institutional de-facto guarantees, based on 41 indicators (Coppedge et al, 2016(Coppedge et al, , 2017a. 8 The index runs from 0 (not democratic) to 1 (fully democratic).…”

Section: Operationalization With V-dem Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first case, we take the multiparty variable for executive elections (v2elmulpar_osp_ex), in the second case for legislative elections (v2elmulpar_osp_leg). (see Coppedge et al, 2017a …”

Section: Conflict Of Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is key to being able to make a meaningful distinction between electoral democracies and electoral autocracies. Such data is provided by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, which covers 177 countries from 1900 to 2016 (Coppedge et al, 2017a(Coppedge et al, , 2017b. While V-Dem primarily provides interval measures, many important research questions require crisp regime measures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes

Lührmann

Tannenberg

Lindberg

2018

PaG

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297

140

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Classifying political regimes has never been more difficult. Most contemporary regimes hold de-jure multiparty elections with universal suffrage. In some countries, elections ensure that political rulers are-at least somewhat-accountable to the electorate whereas in others they are a mere window dressing exercise for authoritarian politics. Hence, regime types need to be distinguished based on the de-facto implementation of democratic institutions and processes. Using V-Dem data, we propose with Regimes of the World (RoW) such an operationalization of four important regime types-closed and electoral autocracies; electoral and liberal democracies-with vast coverage (almost all countries from 1900 to 2016). We also contribute a solution to a fundamental weakness of extant typologies: The unknown extent of misclassification due to uncertainty from measurement error. V-Dem's measures of uncertainty (Bayesian highest posterior densities) allow us to be the first to provide a regime typology that distinguishes cases classified with a high degree of certainty from those with "upper" and "lower" bounds in each category. Finally, a comparison of disagreements with extant datasets (7%-12% of the country-years), demonstrates that the RoW classification is more conservative, classifying regimes with electoral manipulation and infringements of the political freedoms more frequently as electoral autocracies, suggesting that it better captures the opaqueness of contemporary autocracies.

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Democratic Quality and Legitimacy in the TRU Countries

Berg‐Schlosser

Hoffmann‐Lange

2018

Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century

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V-Dem Codebook V6

Cited by 152 publications

References 0 publications

The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes

Democratic Quality and Legitimacy in the TRU Countries

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