Varieties Of Democracy Project Research Articles

Do Political Finance Reforms Reduce Corruption?

AbstractReformers claim that public subsidies and regulation of political finance reduce corruption in politics, while observers worry that they have no impact on corruption, or even increase it. Despite national-level debates and billions of dollars spent, few studies have tested this relationship. The authors argue that political finance reform mitigates corruption by reducing private money's importance in politics and increasing the sanctions for corrupt behavior. Elite interviews from Paraguay's political finance reform illustrate the argument and elaborate the theoretical mechanisms. The study evaluates the argument using an original dataset measuring political subsidies from 175 countries from 1900–2015, as well as disaggregated corruption measures from the Varieties of Democracy project. The findings support the thesis that political finance reform reduces corruption, even in countries where such reforms are unevenly implemented.

Does Aid Promote Electoral Integrity?

ABSTRACTSince the late 1990s, aid spending for elections has witnessed a dramatic increase. Yet, we lack a comprehensive evaluation of aid effectiveness in this particular programme area. Here, we investigate the impact of aid on electoral integrity using panel data on purpose-disaggregated aid disbursements and a multi-dimensional index of electoral quality from the Varieties of Democracy project. Based on 502 elections in 126 aid-receiving countries during 2002–2015, we estimate a statistically significant effect of election-support ODA on the integrity of elections. The estimated effect is, however, economically small and not very persistent. In the long run, a permanent increase in aid spending by one million US$ leads to an improvement in electoral quality of 1.4 per cent of a standard deviation on the integrity index. We also find that different dimensions of electoral integrity are variably responsive to donor interventions. Additionally, aid spending for elections is subject to diminishing marginal returns, and is less effective at higher levels of development. These findings underline the difficulty of promoting democratic change in countries with adverse structural conditions. Still, donors may improve the cost-effectiveness of electoral assistance programmes by targeting specific countries and prioritising certain types of intervention.

Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)

In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice:severity, urgency, andvolatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.

The relationships between democratic experience, adult health, and cause-specific mortality in 170 countries between 1980 and 2016: an observational analysis

SummaryBackgroundPrevious analyses of democracy and population health have focused on broad measures, such as life expectancy at birth and child and infant mortality, and have shown some contradictory results. We used a panel of data spanning 170 countries to assess the association between democracy and cause-specific mortality and explore the pathways connecting democratic rule to health gains.MethodsWe extracted cause-specific mortality and HIV-free life expectancy estimates from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 and information on regime type from the Varieties of Democracy project. These data cover 170 countries and 46 years. From the Financing Global Health database, we extracted gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, also covering 46 years, and Development Assistance for Health estimates starting from 1990 and domestic health spending estimates starting from 1995. We used a diverse set of empirical methods—synthetic control, within-country variance decomposition, structural equation models, and fixed-effects regression—which together provide a robust analysis of the association between democratisation and population health.FindingsHIV-free life expectancy at age 15 years improved significantly during the study period (1970–2015) in countries after they transitioned to democracy, on average by 3% after 10 years. Democratic experience explains 22·27% of the variance in mortality within a country from cardiovascular diseases, 16·53% for tuberculosis, and 17·78% for transport injuries, and a smaller percentage for other diseases included in the study. For cardiovascular diseases, transport injuries, cancers, cirrhosis, and other non-communicable diseases, democratic experience explains more of the variation in mortality than GDP. Over the past 20 years, the average country's increase in democratic experience had direct and indirect effects on reducing mortality from cardiovascular disease (−9·64%, 95% CI −6·38 to −12·90), other non-communicable diseases (−9·14%, −4·26 to −14·02), and tuberculosis (−8·93%, −2·08 to −15·77). Increases in a country's democratic experience were not correlated with GDP per capita between 1995 and 2015 (ρ=–0·1036; p=0·1826), but were correlated with declines in mortality from cardiovascular disease (ρ=–0·3873; p<0·0001) and increases in government health spending (ρ=0·4002; p<0·0001). Removal of free and fair elections from the democratic experience variable resulted in loss of association with age-standardised mortality from non-communicable diseases and injuries.InterpretationWhen enforced by free and fair elections, democracies are more likely than autocracies to lead to health gains for causes of mortality (eg, cardiovascular diseases and transport injuries) that have not been heavily targeted by foreign aid and require health-care delivery infrastructure. International health agencies and donors might increasingly need to consider the implications of regime type in their efforts to maximise health gains, particularly in the context of ageing populations and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases.FundingBloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it?

ABSTRACTLess than 30 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 article 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 article 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.

Contested or established? A comparison of legislative powers across regimes

ABSTRACTIn research on authoritarian institutions, legislatures are portrayed as capable of resolving dilemmas between the leader and opposition members. Nevertheless, repeated interactions between a leader and their ruling coalition can lead to both contested dictatorships, in which institutions constrain the leader, and established dictatorships, in which the leader exercises near-complete control. To date, however, no one has examined the patterns by which powers vary across legislatures in different settings and over time. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on legislative powers between 1900 and 2017, we conceptualize changes in the powers afforded to the national congress to characterize the development of regimes in either direction. The study expounds on the content of legislatures across regimes and the ways in which they change, encouraging scholars to further consider the relationship between regime dynamics and legislative institutionalization.

Is Islam Compatible with Free-Market Capitalism? An Empirical Analysis, 1970–2010

AbstractAre majority-Muslim countries laggards when it comes to developing liberal economic institutions? Using an Index of Economic Freedom and its component parts, this study finds that Muslim-dominant countries (&amp;gt;50% of the population) are positively associated with free-market capitalism. Protestant dominance is also positively correlated, but the association stems from just two components of the index, mainly “legal security and property rights protection.” Surprisingly, Protestant countries correlate negatively with “small government” and “freedom to trade,” two critical components of free-market capitalism. Muslim dominance shows positive correlations with all areas except for “legal security and property rights.” The results are consistent when assessing similar variables measuring property rights and government ownership of the economy collected by the Varieties of Democracy Project. Capitalistic policies and institutions, it seems, may travel across religions more easily than culturalists claim.

Democracy for All: Conceptualizing and Measuring Egalitarian Democracy

Although equality figures prominently in many foundational theories of democracy, liberal and electoral conceptions of democracy have dominated empirical political science research on topics like political regimes, democratization and democratic survival. This paper develops the concept of egalitarian democracy as a regime that provides de facto protection of rights and freedoms equally across the population, distributes resources in a way that enables meaningful political participation for all citizens and fosters an environment in which all individuals and social groups can influence political and governing processes. Using new indicators from the Varieties of Democracy project, the paper develops and presents measures of these important concepts, demonstrates their relationship to existing measures, and illustrates their utility for advancing the study of democracy in ways that more fully embrace the richness of democratic theory.

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens’ Perspective

In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy (electoral, liberal, and direct democracy). Second, based on the World Values Survey 2005–2007, an instrument measuring these different dimensions of the subjective quality of democracy is suggested. Third, distributions for different models of democracy are presented for some European and non-European liberal democracies. They reveal significant differences regarding the subjective quality of democracies. Fourth, the subjective quality of democracy of these countries is compared with the objective quality of democracy based on three indices (electoral democracy, liberal democracy and direct popular vote) developed by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Finally, further research questions are discussed.

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

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, the 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 nondemocratic 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 the Centre 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.

Correlation of Democracy Indicators and Markets Returns

We perform various experiments correlating past changes of social indicators about a country with future stock market returns for that country. The 169 social indicators we use, which go back as far as the year 1900, are available from the Varieties of Democracy Project. We use two sets of data for country-wide stock market returns: data compiled by Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton covers 17 countries going back to 1900, and data from the MSCI data analytics and index service covering 45 countries going back as far as 1970. We consider five and ten year time windows. This gives us four different “studies”: MSCI 10 year, DMS 10 year, MSCI 5 year, and DMS 5 year. We find the striking result that good changes of the social indicators have a positive mean (averaged over studies) total correlation (correlation of change vectors indexed by country-year pairs) with future stock market returns in 157 out of 158 cases in which the indicator measures something good or bad for society. We obtain a result almost as strong when the correlation is aggregated differently using the separate country and year groupings. We perform statistical hypothesis testing to show that, even though the social indicators are not all independent, these result are exceedingly unlikely to be the result of random (white noise) stock market returns. We also perform “positive linear regression” of stock market return on all 158 indicators, which means that the sign of the regression coefficient for an indicator is constrained to be positive or negative according to whether a positive change of the indicator is good or bad. The fraction of data explained by positive regression is shown to be extremely statistically significant. We calculate a confidence interval for the percentage of data genuinely explained by regression, not just by fitting to noise. The lower end of the confidence window for the four studies is 11%, 14%, 6%, and 9%. We include a long appendix on the statistical theory of correlation and (unconstrained) regression. This provides background to the novel applications of hypothesis testing and confidence interval calculation in the body of the paper.

How Much Democratic Backsliding?

Democracy is facing challenges across the world, yet suggestions of a global crisis are not warranted. Based on data from the largest democracy database ever compiled, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), we find that the number of democracies worldwide declined slightly from 100 in 2011 to 97 today, and 16 countries transitioned to democracy over the last ten years, including Tunisia, Nepal, and Nigeria. However, there is a fair degree of volatility. In 2013 alone, five countries transitioned to democracy but nine went the other way. Worrisome trends include gradual erosion of freedom of expression and association in several countries, among them Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and Brazil.

'Gimme Shelter': The Role of Democracy and Institutional Quality in Disaster Preparedness

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.

Beyond First Elections: The Importance of Consistency in the Timing of Recurrent Elections

Is the regularity of elections a requisite for political stability? Scholars have empirically examined a number of features regarding elections in new democracies, including frequency, alternation, and orderliness, but little work has considered the potential impacts of consistency in the intervals in which they occur. Notwithstanding, predominant conceptualizations of democracy require that governments hold elections at regular intervals. This study examines the extent to which the regularity of the intervals in which elections occur affects political stability. Using newly released data from the Varieties of Democracy project, we estimate a model predicting internal armed conflict based on the pattern of previous elections. We argue that consistent election intervals send a valuable signal of actors’ commitment to regularly hold elections, in part by providing a focal point for coordinated actions in the future. By better specifying the multiple ways in which elections are time-dependent, the analysis contributes to a more robust consideration of the means by which elections promote power-sharing under tenuous circumstances.

Varieties of Democratic Diffusion: Colonial Networks

Numerous studies have reported that countries tend to become more similar to their immediate geographic neighbors with respect to democracy. We show that a similar process of mutual adjustment can be found within very different international networks: geographically dispersed colonial empires, especially those that were founded early and lasted a century or more. The causal mechanisms for the diffusion of democracy are notoriously vague, but the existence of diffusion within colonial networks helps narrow the possibilities. Where these relationships are significant, the net tendency is overwhelmingly convergence: colonies have tended to democratize more quickly than similar countries that were never colonies, and some colonizers have tended to democratize more slowly than similar countries that never had colonies. We distinguish between effects that took place during colonial rule and later relations between former colonies and their colonizers. These estimates also confirm, and control for, convergence among immediate neighbors, using an electoral democracy index from the Varieties of Democracy project, which includes historical democracy ratings for colonies.

V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy

In the last few decades, Western governments have spent huge sums of money to promote democracy abroad. We do not know which, if any, of these programs actually work. If we cannot measure democracy in sufficient detail and with the necessary nuance, we cannot mark its progress and setbacks or affect its future course. While distinguishing the most democratic countries from the least democratic ones is fairly easy, it has proven to be much harder to make finer distinctions. Here we present a new effort aimed at measuring democracy, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem).