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Begin New Search Topic Democracy Publishing Institution Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)

1. Democracy Facing Global Challenges: V-DEM ANNUAL DEMOCRACY REPORT 2019

Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
This year’s Democracy Report shows that the trend of a third wave autocratization – the decline of democratic regime traits – continues and now affects 24 countries. When we weight levels of democracy by population size – because democracy is rule by the people and it matters how many of them are concerned – it emerges that almost one third of the world’s population live in countries undergoing autocratization. Yet democracy still prevails in a majority of countries in the world (99 countries, 55 percent). This section analyses the state of democracy in the world in 2018 and developments since 1972, with an emphasis on the last 10 years. Our analysis builds on the 2019 release of the V-Dem dataset.
Topic:
Authoritarianism, Developing World, Democracy, and Populism
Political Geography:
United States, Turkey, Ukraine, India, and Brazil

2. Party Institutionalization and Welfare State Development

Author:
Magnus Rasmussen and Carl Henrik Knutsen
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
We propose that the extent to which political parties are institutionalized shapes welfare state development. Institutionalized parties allow politicians to overcome coordination problems, avoid capture by special interests, and form stable linkages with broad social groups. These features both enable and incentivize politicians to pursue generous and universal welfare policies. Employing recent measures of party institutionalization and welfare law features, we test implications from our argument on data covering 169 countries and extending back to 1900. Even when accounting for country- and year-fixed effects and institutional features such as electoral system, regime type and state capacity, we find robust evidence that party institutionalization leads to more extensive, universal, and generous welfare arrangements. The relationship is more pronounced in democracies, but exists also in autocracies. When disaggregating party institutionalization and evaluating mechanisms, the linkages that institutionalized parties form with social groups constitute one important, but not the only relevant, factor.
Topic:
Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Suicide by Competition? Authoritarian Institutional Adaptation and Regime Fragility

Author:
Michael Bernhard, Amanda B Edgell, and Staffan I. Lindberg
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
While it is clear that contemporary authoritarian incumbents use democratic emulation as a strategy in the hopes of stabilizing and extending their tenure in power, this does not mean it is always effective. Indeed, an extant literature presents strong evidence that the opening of the pursuit of power to electoral competition can make authoritarianism vulnerable. Unless it is mediated by other factors, democratic emulation by authoritarian incumbents cannot simultaneously both stabilize their rule and make it more vulnerable to democratic transitions. These two literatures leave us with a set of contradictory generalizations. Some scholars argue that reiterated multiparty competitive elections present a gradual path from authoritarianism to democracy. Can they at the same time be a source of authoritarian stability? In this paper we seek to resolve this paradox by employing a unique combination of event history modeling to assess how experiences with multiparty elections influence patterns of authoritarian survival and transition in 108 countries from 1946-2010. Our results suggest that while authoritarian regimes face increasing odds of failure during the first three iterated multiparty and competitive election cycles, subsequent iterated cycles are far less dangerous to their survival. Given that few authoritarian regimes survive past three elections, these findings should be seen as more supportive of the democratization by elections thesis than democratic emulation as a way to enhance authoritarian survival.
Topic:
Authoritarianism and Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. “Gimme Shelter”: The Role of Democracy and Institutional Quality in Disaster Preparedness

Author:
Tove Ahlbom and Marina Povitkina
Publication Date:
09-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
Natural disasters cause suffering for millions of people around the globe every year and as climate change unfolds the likelihood of natural catastrophes is increasing. While weather shocks, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods are beyond our control, a governments’ capacity to protect populations largely determines the degree of human suffering in disasters. Democracies, with freedom of speech, broad public participation and representation, are believed to protect their populations better than non-democratic regimes. However, democratic institutions are insufficient for securing protection from disasters in contexts of corruption, poor planning and public administration incompetence. We argue that the effect of democracy on the extent of human suffering in disasters is contingent on the ability of governments to implement their tasks or the quality of implementing institutions. We test this interaction hypothesis using time series cross-sectional data from the Varieties of Democracy project, the Quality of Government dataset and data from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The results show that more democracy is associated with fewer people being affected by natural disasters only in settings where institutional quality is high. When institutional quality is low, more people seem to suffer in democracies than in authoritarian states.
Topic:
Disaster Relief, Authoritarianism, and Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Democracy, Democratization, and Civil War

Author:
Suthan Krishnarajan, Jørgen Møller, Lasse Lykke Rørbæk, and Svend-Erik Skaaning
Publication Date:
08-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
An influential body of scholarship has associated both democracy and democratization with civil war. Important findings include the so-called inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy-levels and civil war onset and that propensity for democratic openings to spark internal violence. However, most of these findings have been challenged, particularly by scholars pointing to problems with the aggregate nature of the analyses and the data sources used. Against this background, we enlist new, fine-grained data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. We discuss how the new data can be used to disaggregate regime variables in order to better understand the causal dynamics that link the regime form and regime change to civil war onset, if any. Guided by these considerations, we use the new data to reassess the ‘inverted U-curve’. Our analysis shows that this relationship is driven by ‘liberal’ aspects of democracy such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech rather than by the ‘electoral core’ of democracy. The relationship between clean elections and civil war onset is approximately linearly decreasing, and at the indicator level of the clean elections attribute we find several different patterns.
Topic:
Civil War, Democratization, and Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data

Author:
Patrik Lindenfors, Joshua Krusell, and Staffan I. Lindberg
Publication Date:
08-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
This paper presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. The approach involves repeated pairwise investigations of states in a set of variables and identifying what states in the variables that occur before states in all other variables. We illustrate the proposed method by analyzing a set of variables from version 6 of the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2015a, b). With a large set of indicators measured over many years, the method makes it possible to explore long, complex sequences across many variables in quantitative datasets. This affords an opportunity, for example, to disentangle the sequential requisites of failing and successful sequences in democratization. For policy purposes this is instrumental: Which components of democracy are most exogenous and least endogenous and therefore the ideal targets for democracy promotion at different stages?
Topic:
Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. Neopatrimonialism and Democracy: An Empirical Investigation of Africa's Political Regimes

Author:
Rachel Sigman and Staffan I. Lindberg
Publication Date:
11-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
One of the most common adjectives used to describe democracy in sub-Saharan Africa is "neopatrimonial". Characterized by strong executives, pervasive clientelism and use of state resources for political legitimation (Bratton and van de Walle 1997), neopatrimonial democracy has been (controversially) associated with a range of (mostly undesirable) social, political and economic outcomes. This paper offers an empirical assessment of neopatrimonialism in Africa's political regimes. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, African regimes vary both quantitatively and qualitatively in their embodiment of neopatrimonial rule. Moreover, we find no clear evidence indicating that neopatrimonialism necessarily impedes the advancement or survival of democracy
Topic:
Democracy
Political Geography:
Global Focus