Users’ Working Papers
The V-Dem Institute encourages users of V-Dem data to submit a version of their papers as Users’ Working Papers to be published in our website.
Why?
- The V-Dem Institute has a wide network of readers and followers, both through website and social media. Sharing your paper with us can help to exchange your findings with other scholars and practitioners through our network and increase your readership.
- It also gives recognition to the people who have invested years into creating the dataset.
Please submit your paper by email to contact@v-dem.net.
Template for the Users' Working Papers is available here Working Paper Template.docx (115.1 KB).
Disclaimer
V-Dem does not do quality control and therefore does not endorse the content of the Users' Working Papers, which is the responsibility of the authors only.
| User WP # | Title | Author(s) | Citation | Abstract | |
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UWP #60 | IDEAL - Democracy Index in Latin América: Theory, Method and Demonstration | Igor dos Santos Rodrigues | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 60. May 2025. |
This article outlines the creation of a Democracy Index for 19 Latin American countries from 1900 to 2022, offering a comprehensive assessment of democratic trends over a century. By meticulously examining historical records, political systems, and socio-economic indicators, the index captures the complexities of democratic governance. It considers key factors like electoral processes, civil liberties, political participation, and government accountability. Employing diverse data sources and robust statistical methods, the index serves as a valuable tool for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to analyze the evolution of democracy in Latin America. It enables comparative studies and provides insights into democratic consolidation, backsliding, and resilience. The findings underscore the multifaceted nature of democratic development, highlighting both progress and challenges in the region's pursuit of democratic ideals. Ultimately, the Democracy Index enhances understanding of the historical and contemporary realities of democracy in Latin America, informing efforts to strengthen democratic institutions and practices. |
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UWP #59 | The Legacy of Stateness: Using Stateness Stock to Predict Current Fragility | Andrea Vaccaro and Rachel M. Gisselquist | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 59. August 2024. A previous version of the paper was published in the WIDER Working Paper Series: https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/statebuilding-fragile-countries.
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Supporting state capacity is a priority for the international community, yet the record of internationally supported statebuilding to date has been mixed at best. A key question for continuing research concerns the factors influencing more versus less successful interventions. We show that the quality of past ‘stateness’ is crucial in understanding contemporary state fragility and statebuilding. Extending beyond previous work, we introduce the concept of past stateness, consider theoretically its relationship to contemporary fragility, and explore this relationship empirically, drawing on cross-national data and newly developed indicators. In line with our expectations, descriptive and inferential analysis shows that lack of experience of two core features of stateness—monopoly of violence and existence of a professional bureaucracy—in the past century predicts chronic fragility today. This association is mainly driven by monopoly of violence rather than existence of a professional bureaucracy. Our analysis sheds new light on the underlying heterogeneity among states today labelled as ‘fragile’. From a policy perspective, a key implication is that, in designing interventions, the most relevant experiences are likely to be from other countries with similar stateness legacies, rather than from ‘fragile states’ more generally. Our analysis does not imply that statebuilding is impossible in contexts with weak stateness legacies, but it does underscore the challenges of this and the importance of setting expectations appropriately. |
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UWP #58 | Party Institutionalization and Party Strength: A New Global Dataset | Darin Sanders Self, Shari Franke, and Grant Mitchell | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 58. August 2024. |
Party institutionalization and party organizational strength are two distinct concepts and both are widely used in Comparative Politics. Despite the centrality of these concepts in the literature, we lack measures of party institutionalization and/or strength that 1) accurately measures the concepts, 2) is measured at the party level, 3) is geographically expansive, and 4) covers a substantial scope of time. In this paper we introduce the Party Institutionalization and Party Strength (PIPS) dataset. Using data at the individual-party level from parties across the globe since 1970, we construct several new measures of party institutionalization and strength to facilitate comparative analysis. Our measures include system-level averages of party institutionalization and strength, in addition to individual party scores of institutionalization and organizational strength. We also construct measures which distinguish between incumbent and opposition parties. Lastly, we construct measures of institutionalization and strength contingent on whether the party exists in a democratic or authoritarian regime. |
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UWP #57 | Talking Post-Truth: Elite Rhetoric on Democracy in Pakistan | Anam Kuraishi | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 57. March 2024. |
Post-truth is increasingly linked to the decline of democracy. In this article, contrary to popular belief, I propose post-truth as a discourse strategy. Post-truth can have an important role during democratization. I introduce a new interpretive methodological approach to analyse textual data for post-truth narratives which I apply to 1209 newspaper articles from three leading Pakistani newspapers during national elections between 2007-2018. I identify posttruth narratives on democracy and find that post-truth narratives highlight the democratisation attempts in the country. Post-truth narratives act as mobilising strategies as opposed to being associated with the decline of democracy. This paper presents the re-evaluation of post-truth as a discourse and argues that its role during elections can be a powerful mobilizing strategy. |
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UWP #56 | Effects of the Representation System on the Distribution of Votes and Seats in Latin America (1990-2019) | Ricardo de la Peña | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 56. October 2023. |
One of the main consequences of the legal rules that govern electoral systems is that they establish the conditions for the conversion of votes into seats. Based on various public sources of information, this essay constructs indicators on the effects of the rules adopted in the electoral systems of Latin America in the period 1990-2019 in terms of the fragmentation of votes and seats. The evidence analyzed shows that there is no defined and constant pattern that reflects that the adoption of a proportional representation system results in a different fragmentation than that which occurs when a mixed system is available. The lower fragmentation of the vote than of seats does not turn out to be a product of the presence of partisan alliances. The fragmentation of voting in mixed systems has increased systematically, a situation that does not occur in the case of proportional systems. |
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UWP #55 | Is Populism Truly Advanced in the World? | Ricardo de la Peña | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 55. October 2023. Published in Spanish as “¿De verdad el populismo está avanzando en el mundo?", in: Revista Mexicana de Estudios Electorales, 29:129-179. México: Sociedad Mexicana de Estudios Electorales, January-June 2023. |
It is fashionable to affirm that populism is advancing in the world. Examples of governments assuming positions that can be qualified in this way are abundant. But it seems pertinent to really dimension the existence and magnitude of this phenomenon and not only attend to a casuistic vision, largely focused on the Western world. That is why this paper will seek to measure the growth during the 21st century in terms of votes and seats in the lower national assemblies and the participation in the governments of the world of parties, differentiated according to their populist orientation. Today there are reliable sources of information to do this type of exercise. In particular, we will use the data compiled by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to compare the electoral presence and success and the ability to lead or be part of the government coalitions of the parties according to their adherence to populist logics. To do this, after an introduction related to the same concept of populism, the source of information to be used in this text and the indices that will be used for analysis will be characterized. Subsequently, the results of the measurement of the behavior of these indices in the world in the period 2000-2019 and their relationship with the achievements of the parties in terms of votes, seats and participation in government coalitions will be presented in a synthetic way. Finally, the meaning of the data compiled, displayed and analyzed will be discussed. The analyzed data allow us to advance in the finding of a relationship between populist discourse and the adoption of a position contrary to elitism and that the position to the right in the political-ideological spectrum tends to make an organization less likely to adopt a populist rhetoric. However, there would be a long way to go to achieve a full explanation of the phenomenon of populism in this century and it is not insignificant progress in achieving electoral support and integration into governments that has been detected during the last decade. This forces us to think of new paths and alternative sources for understanding the phenomenon that occupies the center of attention in this essay. |
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UWP #54 | Beyond Democratic Backsliding: Executive Aggrandizement and its Outcomes | Melis G. Laebens | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 54. September 2023. |
Executive power grabs and resulting democratic backsliding have become a major concern for scholars and the public alike. Although a growing number of cases are studied under these headings, we do not have globally applicable measurement criteria for observing executive aggrandizement, i.e. attempts by democratically elected incumbents to concentrate power. Our conceptual net tends to be either too wide, lumping together all forms of democratic regression, or too narrow, limiting our attention to particular mechanisms through which incumbents subvert democratic institutions. This article conceptualizes executive aggrandizement as an attempt by a democratically elected executive leader to weaken both electoral (vertical) and horizontal accountability without altogether suspending democratic institutions. Using selected V-Dem indicators and secondary sources, I identify 26 cases of executive aggrandizement in democracies worldwide from 1989 to 2019. Descriptive analysis shows considerable variation in the consequences of executive aggrandizement for the democratic regime and for the incumbents who engaged in it. Only a minority of these cases resulted in democratic breakdown due to incumbent takeover, while a majority ended with the incumbent being forced out of office either via democratic institutional procedures or otherwise. This article lays the ground for explaining the causes and outcomes of executive aggrandizement. |
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UWP #53 | Mega-events and human right violations: Empirical evidence from the long-term perspective | Gaygysyz Ashyrov and Denis Ivanov | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 53. July 2023. A modified version of this paper is published as: Ashyrov, G. & Ivanov, D. (2023). Mega-events and human rights violations: Empirical evidence from the long-term perspective. Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 00, 1–22. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjpe.12362 |
Recent shifts in locations of the organization of mega events (Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Expo etc.) towards emerging countries (such as Russia, China, South Africa) led to the soaring objections among human right activists and investigative journalists with to the concerns over human right violations. We aim to understand the linkage between two phenomena, by empirically testing the impact of sports mega events on human rights violations in over 120 countries. By applying panel data techniques on a rich dataset going back to 1900, we find no evidence for the negative effect of sports mega events on human rights violations. On the contrary, organization of such events (the year of the nomination as well as the actual event) produces a positive effect, which remains statistically significant after several different specifications. In addition, we find a spill-over effect on improving human rights’ situation onto consecutive years after the country hosted the mega-event. Moreover, even when controlling for the economic (GDP per capita), political (political participation), security (internal conflict), energy dependency (oil production) factors, mega events as well as the election years (including consecutive years – mostly 2-3 years after) are strong determinants of improving the human rights situation across the world, since 1900. |
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UWP #52 | Classifying Clientelism of Political Parties: Cross-National, Party-Level Explorations | Masaaki Higashijima and Hidekuni Washida | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 52. July 2023. |
Recent research on clientelism has focused on varieties of clientelism while suggesting that clientelistic exchanges differ in terms of the strength of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms whereby politicians deliver benefits to voters in exchange for political support. By using newly collectedV-Party data (1970-2019, 1,844 political parties from 165 countries), we identify two prominent types of clientelism that recent studies have suggested, relational clientelism and single-shot clientelism. While comparing our results with those based on other existing data sets, we suggest that it is important to unpack clientelistic linkages at the party level to grasp fine-grained differences in clientelism across parties within states. We then use our indicators to explore the relationship between democracy, development, and clientelism. Our analysis finds that relational clientelism persists even in rich and advanced democracies while the effect of democracy on single-shot clientelism has a curvilinear relationship with economic development. |
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UWP #51 | Is democracy an effective tool for reducing poverty, child mortality and child deprivation in low-income countries? | Björn Halleröd and Hans Ekbrand | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 51. May 2023. |
Is democracy related to lower poverty rates and better living conditions for children in developing countries? Multiple sources have confirmed that living conditions in low- and middle-income countries have improved significantly during the past decade. This development coincides with a period of economic growth and, until recently, a trend towards increasing democratization of many of the world’s political systems. In the present paper, we use data from 51 low- and lower-middle income countries covering the period 1995-2019 to analyse: poverty ($1.90/day), child mortality as well as the degree to which children are malnourished, deprived of immunization, and lack education. The central aim is to test whether democracy contributes to the decrease in poverty and improvement of children’s living conditions. We also test whether the impact of democratization is conditional on political ideology, GDP, and corruption, i.e., whether democratization only is beneficial if combined with policies influenced by socialistic ideology, economic growth, or low corruption. Using data on living conditions from the World Bank, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), V-Dem project on democratization, and Global Leader Ideology database, we draw the following conclusions: Democratization does contribute to the decrease in poverty, child mortality, malnutrition and lack of immunization among children. However, the impact of democracy is conditioned on previous experience of leftist governments; democracy only improves living conditions in countries with a history of leftist governments. Least beneficial are leftist autocracies. We also conclude that democracy counterbalances the detrimental effects of corruption on children’s school attendance. |
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UWP #50 | Elite Divisions, Party Origins, and Political Liberalization in Autocracies | Adrian del Río, Masaaki Higashijima | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 50. October 2022. |
Internal elite divisions in autocracies are an important step toward political liberalization and democratic transitions. Yet, we know little about when and how such divisions contribute to initiating democratic reforms. We argue that whether elite divisions lead to political liberalization depends on authoritarian parties’ origins. Dictators with parties emerging from violent conflicts can effectively prevent elite divisions from pushing for democratic reforms through organized violence and eliminating alternative power centers. Dealing with endogeneity threats by employing the panel data matching estimator, cross-national statistical analyses demonstrate that internal elite divisions open up the prospect of political liberalization. However, such effects diminish when ruling parties were built during violent struggles such as through revolutions, independence movements, and insurgencies. Our findings also suggest that in the face of internal divisions dictators armed with such parties do not provide concessions to the opposition and are more likely to react with blatant repression and tighten political control, contributing to deterring the threats of internal divisions. |
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UWP #49 | Does democracy really improve environmental quality? Empirical contribution to the environmental politics debate | Alex O. Acheampong, Eric Evans Osei Opoku, Janet Dzator | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 49. October 2022. A modified version of this paper is published as Acheampong, A.O., Opoku, E.E.O., and Dzator, J., 2022. Does democracy really improve environmental quality? Empirical contribution to the environmental politics debate. Energy Economics, 109, p.105942. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2022.105942 |
The theoretical debate on democracy—environment remains contentious in the environmental politics literature. The existing empirical studies have attempted to explore the effect of democracy on environmental degradation. However, there are limitations in these studies regarding how democracy is measured. Also, the prior empirical studies have been silent on how democracy moderates the effect of economic growth and energy consumption on the environment. In this study, we employed dynamic and static econometric techniques to explore the effect of democracy on the environment using comprehensive data for 46 sub-Saharan African countries (SSA). As institutionalised democracy is a multi-faceted concept, we follow the political science literature to use high-level democracy indices such as electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian democracy to examine their respective effect on environmental degradation. Using the dynamic system-GMM and Lewbel two-stage least squares technique to control endogeneity, our empirical results indicate that the high-level democracy indicators drive CO2 emissions in SSA. We also observed that the high-level democracy indicators moderate GDP per capita to reduce CO2 emissions in SSA. The regional analysis reveals that the high-level democracy indicators spur CO2 emissions in West Africa while reducing CO2 emissions in Southern and Central-Eastern Africa. Further, the high-level democracy indicators moderate GDP per capita to reduce CO2 emissions in West Africa while increasing CO2 emissions in Southern and Central-Eastern Africa. The findings also indicate that the high-level democracy indicators moderate energy consumption to increase CO2 emissions in West Africa and Central-Eastern Africa, not SSA and Southern Africa. These results are robust to using ecological footprint as a broader measure of environmental degradation. The policy implications of these findings for SSA and the sub-regions are discussed. |
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UWP #48 | Should Populists Stand Out? Assessing the Analytical Advantages of Populism for Democratic Backsliding Studies | Ana Laura Ferrari | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 48. July 2022. |
Scholars interested in democratic backsliding often highlight the presence of populism and call attention to populist cases. However, populism attracts controversy to research due to a lack of conceptual clarity. Against this backdrop, this paper questions whether populism brings more gains than disadvantages to democratic backsliding studies. To assess possible gains, I discuss two conceptual functions that could possibly offer analytical advantages to this research agenda, supporting scholars in explaining backsliding processes. First, I evaluate whether populism could address the influence of authoritarian preferences on backsliding processes. I argue that, although populism can be considered an anti-pluralist ideology that conveys political actors’ authoritarian-leaning inclinations, the concept embraces only a subset of authoritarian preferences’ manifestations. Therefore, this conceptual function brings a distortion to research that nullifies possible gains. Second, I investigate whether populism could distinguish a pattern of institutional change in backsliding processes. Through a case-comparison study between a populist (Hungary, 2010-2015) and a non-populist (Bulgaria, 2016-2019) episodes of democratic backsliding, I find that populism does not differentiate the strategies chief executives take to undermine democracy or the democratic dimensions under attack. Therefore, I conclude that populism does not offer analytical advantages but adds greater disadvantages to democratic backsliding studies. |
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UWP #47 | On the State of Democracy in the World before and after the Great Recession | Ricardo de la Peña | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 47. July 2022. Published in Spanish as "Sobre el estado de la democracia antes y después de la Gran Recesión", in: Los dilemas de la democracia en México en el contexto de América Latina, 13-31. México: Sociedad Mexicana de Estudios Electorales, 2022. |
Much has been said about the impact of the Great Recession (2008-2009) on the conditions and foundations of democracy, especially in the Western world. But has it really been like this? Today we have various options to approach the comparative study of the state of democracy in the world through wide-ranging cross-sectional and longitudinal sections. Perhaps one of the most successful is that of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), whose approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy is to provide a data set that attempts to reflect the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of government that includes, but it goes beyond the simple presence of elections. For this reason, the V-Dem project collects data to measure different principles of democracy, one of which is the electoral one. In principle, the main finding of this documentary effort leads its authors to affirm that “autocratization”, a word with which they call the decrease in democratic features, has accelerated in the world, particularly when the existing state at the time of The Great Recession will occur with the present situation in 2019. This has to be reflected in the state of the principles in the electoral question. Detailing the scope and characteristics of this loss of democratic features in general and its manifestation in the electoral sphere throughout this century and between two ten-year cuts (2000-2009 and 2010-2019) is the task that we propose to carry out in this paper. . This, knowing that 2020 will represent a new watershed in the conditions for the development of democracy and elections in the world, given the experience of the Great Confinement, with a practice and hopefully temporary suspension of electoral exercises in the world and a return uncertain at the polls in which the repercussions of this event will gradually be seen in the spirit of the electoral bodies of the world. |
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UWP #46 | The Effects of Electoral Bodies Autonomy in the Elections Cleanliness: the Latin America Case | Ricardo de la Peña | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 46. July 2022. |
Democratic systems have regular elections, which supposes the existence of one or more organisms in each nation in charge of organizing the elections. Electoral governance is supposed to have an impact on the quality of the processes and democracy itself. Formally, the integration and composition of the electoral bodies generate differences due to the number of management bodies, the duration of their mandates, the way in which their members are selected, their level of professionalization and links with parties and the government, their condition of autonomy and financial sufficiency, their capacity for legislative initiative and the level of involvement of the political parties in their decisions for the organization of the elections. In practice, it is essential to review and verify the effective existence, meaning and magnitude of the impact of electoral bodies and their autonomy regarding issues related to the quality of processes and democracy in Latin American nations. For this, it is necessary to resort to one of the most complete sources of information to conceptualize and measure democracy in the countries of the world through the compilation of a multidimensional and disaggregated set of data that aims to reflect the complexity of the phenomenon: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which provides indices on democracy and electoral cleanliness and indicators on the autonomy and sufficiency of electoral bodies by country and year, which can be crossed with indicators for each election on electoral participation, vote buying and other irregularities, government intimidation and other forms of violence, as well as acceptance of defeat, in addition to an estimator of cleanliness and perceived freedom in each process. The exploitation of these data and the analysis of the relationship between the indicators by election and the annual estimators for the region will be the task that we will address in this paper. |
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UWP #45 | The Political Repercussions of a Pandemic | Ricardo de la Peña | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 45. July 2022. Published in Spanish as "Las repercusiones políticas de una pandemia", in: Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Vol. 66, 242:143-165. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021. |
In this essay, data are recovered that account for the impact of the pandemic on the conditions of democracy in the world. The source of information is the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which for this year incorporates, in addition to its monitoring of the situation of democracy in more than two hundred countries, a compilation of state responses to the pandemic and its impact on the validity of democratic standards. In this regard, it is observed that throughout the last decade there has been a decline in democracy, and although the effects of the pandemic are still limited, it is to be feared that in the long term its consequences will be worse than those perceived today. And given that there is an evident relationship between the autocratic character of the regimes and the propensity to violate democratic standards with exaggerated or non-consensual measures to combat the pandemic, is expected a deepening of the distance between countries where democracy prevails and those in which are autocratic forms of exercise of power. |
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UWP #44 | Building party grassroots: electoral systems, party organisations and social linkages from a cross-national perspective | Luís Gustavo B. Locatelli | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 44. October 2021. |
The objective is to explore the connection between the proportional electoral system (PR) and party organisations as key institutional determinants for party-group linkages from cross-party, national, and temporal perspectives. Developing a nuanced framework, we propose an integrated model to address two questions: 1) Do candidate-centred electoral systems impact the development of party-society linkages? 2) If the electoral system has any impact, does it occur directly or mediated by party organisations? Using V-Party (2020) and V-Dem (2020) databases, we selected and analysed 617 parties in 48 countries covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and the most extensive proportional democracies in Europe (Western and Eastern Europe) and Americas between 1989 and 2019 -- Large-N cross-national comparative analysis (Janda 1980). Based on panel models, we found that the candidate-centred electoral system is negatively related to developing strong ties between parties and groups, but only in party organisations with low party strength, intraparty cohesion, financial linkages with non-party groups. When the decision-making process concentrates power in the hands of powerful party elites, they can solve coordination problems and mitigate intraparty conflicts and personalisation consequences. Thereby, intraparty politics vary empirically, answering their contextual challenges (electoral rules) strategically, with solid consequences for party-group linkages.<br/> |
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UWP #43 | Pandemic Backsliding – A Closer Look at Canada | Stephen C. Woodworth | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 43. October 2021. |
The author reviews the V-Dem data employed in assessing the impact in Canada of pandemic responses on democratic institutions, and proposes additional information which, if incorporated, would result in reclassification of Canada from “low risk” to “medium risk” of pandemic backsliding. Alternatively, a finer-grained examination is recommended.<br/> |
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UWP #42 | Exceptional Politics: Why Regimes Declare States of Emergency | Jose A. Aleman, Dong Wook Lee, Dwayne Woods | This paper has been removed upon the authors' request. For any questions, please directly contact the authors. |
The political world is full of heterogeneity. The relationship between regime type and the enactment of a state of emergency is indicative of such heterogeneity. Almost all political regimes have enacted states of emergency at some point but presumably for different reasons. Exploring such heterogeneity requires conceptual and empirical models that incorporate micro-level strategic decisions, institutional factors, as well as spatial and temporal non-linearities. The effect of regimes in determining the timing and purpose of states of emergency is examined in this article. We distinguish between the onset of a state of emergency and its continuation. This yields the novel finding that executive constraints primarily affect the second phenomenon but not the first. We also observe that because they experience more internal conflict, multiparty dictatorships more frequently declare emergencies. However, personalism – or the quest by an incumbent to make power less collegial and more concentrated – interacts significantly with multiparty autocracies to delay the onset of (and decrease the incidence of) emergency governance.<br/> |
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UWP #41 | Learning to Vote in Democratic and Authoritarian Elections | Anja Neundorf, Ksenia Northmore-Ball | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 41. May 2021. |
High levels of turnout are key to legitimacy in new democracies, ultimately con-tributing to their consolidation. However, little is known about the determinants of long-term electoral participation and the legacies of authoritarian elections. To investigate these legacies, we rely on socialization and institutional theories of turnout, which have not been tested in authoritarian settings. To test our ex-pectations, we rely on newly harmonized public opinion data covering over 106 countries from 1975 to 2015, estimating generational differences in turnout. We show that the opportunity to participate in elections in the formative years posi-tively affects later-life turnout. This finding is further confirmed using a design-based difference-in-difference approach, utilizing female suffrage in Greece as an identification strategy. However, the impact of these early opportunities on long-term habitual voting is conditional on the level of contestation of the elec-tions experienced. Low levels of electoral competition, typical in authoritarian elections, can create jaded voters.<br/> |
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UWP #40 | Assessing the Costs and Benefits of COVID-19 Containment Strategies in Africa | Ruth D. Carlitz | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 40. February 2021. |
This paper explores the extent of variation in African countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as-sessing the relative success of di˙erent strategies in containing the spread of disease as well as the costs con-tainment strategies have entailed. I begin by examining the range of responses taken by di˙erent African governments, looking at the consequences for population mobility and spread of infection during the ÿrst seven months of the pandemic (March-September 2020). Using anonymized mobile phone data, I show that mobility reductions were signiÿcantly greater in countries where the government enacted more stringent measures. Statistical regression analysis indicates that such mobility reductions are signiÿcantly and negatively associated with COVID-19 growth rates two weeks later. However, the success of lock-down policies in containing the spread of disease came at a signiÿcant cost in many countries, including severe economic contraction, disruptions to essential services, and curtailing of human rights. That said, such costs do not appear to be a necessary result of enacting stringent measures. Cross-country analysis reveals a number of cases where governments acted swiftly and seriously to contain the spread of disease but did not su˙er major economic or governance consequences. Highlighting the experiences of such countries is important for drawing lessons about best practices for continued management of COVID-19 and future outbreaks.<br/> |
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UWP #39 | The Impact of Chinese Aid on Democratization: Empirical Evidence from Southeast Asia | Lee Chen-Yu | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 39. February 2021. |
It has been argued that the “unconditional” nature of Chinese development aid causes deleterious effects on institutional quality in recipient countries. This article focuses on Southeast Asia to investigate the political impact of Chinese developmental aid. I argue that the effect of Chinese aid is conditional on regime types of recipient countries. Specifically, Chinese aid should intensify repression in closed autocracies but reinforce electoral manipulation in electoral autocracies. Moreover, I propose a nonlinear effect of Chinese aid in electoral autocracies as overdependence on Chinese aid could instigate anti-China sentiment, which arouses civil mobilization against the government and increases the likelihood of democratization. My identification strategy exploits time variation of Chinese steel production and cross-sectional variation of the probability to receive aid from China to construct instruments of Chinese aid reception. Overall, I find weak evidence of a Chinese “political aid curse” in Southeast Asia.<br/> |
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UWP #38 | The Grim Reaper: Extrajudicial Violence and Autocratic Rule | José A. Alemán | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 38. February 2021. |
What makes some authoritarian regimes more willing to employ extrajudicial violence, as opposed to relying on more conventional forms of repression? A voluminous literature exists on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of state repression. To date, however, scholars have not systematically explained one variety of repression, extrajudicial violence. I distinguish between generic repression (limits on the civil and political rights of citizens), and state terrorism – when the regime intimidates its political opponents using extrajudicial violence. I examine the relationship between the two in a conditional mixed process modelling framework for 121 countries (1946-2010). My analysis reveals that communist dictatorships repress the freedoms of expression, travel, and association, but military dictatorships engage in extrajudicial violence. The study contributes to the literature by providing an institutional account of why power is used and for what ends differently in these two regime types, and by modelling different types of repression simultaneously.<br/> |
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UWP #37 | This paper has been removed upon the author’s request. For any questions, please contact the author directly. | This paper has been removed upon the author’s request. For any questions, please contact the author directly. | ||
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UWP #36 | State of the World: Democracy’s Impact on Social and Economic Development | Jason Luo | University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 36. October 2020. |
There is an undisputed correlation between a country’s form of government and its social and economic growth. Unfortunately, government is difficult to measure categorically (e.g. simply Democracy vs Autocracy), and the relationship of causality between these factors is complex. Using multi-dimensional political and social-economic data, along with statistics and machine learning, this study analyzes the democracy and development of 48 countries around the world over the past 40 years. Highly democratic countries were strongly correlated with robust and forward-thinking economies. Countries with weaker democracies were less predictable in terms of social-economic outlook. A stable autocracy like China can sustain high growth into 2030 while a country trending towards democracy can stagnate. The highest rates of social-economic growth were most likely to occur during periods of political stability rather than democratization. Democracies may have higher social-economic ceilings, but stability has a greater impact on growth.<br/><br/> |
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