Varieties Of Democracy Project Research Articles

Multilevel Regime Decoupling: The Territorial Dimension of Autocratization and Contemporary Regime Change

Regimes do not change consistently across territorial levels. There has been progress in understanding national democratic erosions and subnational regimes, but barring a few exceptions, these research strands have not engaged in a thorough dialogue. To bridge this gap, I contend that when democracy advances in one territorial level, but erodes in another, we observe multilevel regime decoupling (MRD). Using global data from the Varieties of Democracy project, I examine the 1990–2022 period, showing that the proportion of decoupled cases increased from 20% in the 1990s, to 43% in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Preliminary regression analyses and a descriptive exploration of Italy, South Africa, India, and the United States indicate the non-deterministic influence of structural factors and the potentially pivotal role of courts in facilitating decoupled change. Considering these findings, renewed data collection efforts and an actor-centred approach are needed to strengthen our understanding of the varieties of (de)coupled regime change that have become common over the last decade. Given that regimes across territorial levels increasingly move in separate directions, future assessments of autocratization and democratic change need to embed territorial considerations in their analysis to remain informative about citizens’ real-world experiences on the ground.

Conspiracy Beliefs and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity: Cross-National Evidence from 29 Countries

Abstract Extant research shows that belief in conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking are negatively related to citizens’ perceptions about the fairness and integrity of elections. However, by exclusively focusing on the United States as only one important empirical case, previous studies have left unanswered crucial questions on the scope, generalizability, and context dependency of their empirical findings. In this research note, I aim to fill this void by providing first empirical evidence on the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions across twenty-nine countries. Using high-quality individual-level data from the European Social Survey enriched with contextual-level data on the quality of elections taken from the Varieties of Democracy Project, the findings from linear mixed-effects regression models reveal that (1) conspiracy beliefs are negatively related to citizens’ evaluations concerning the integrity of national elections; (2) the specific strength of the observed individual-level relationship varies substantially across countries; and (3) the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and individual electoral-integrity perceptions depends on the contextual-level quality and integrity of elections across countries. Specifically, the results indicate that the negative relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions is strongest in contexts in which the actual quality of elections is high, and in which citizens have little reason to (seriously) doubt the integrity of the electoral process. These findings provide an important and hitherto missing cross-national and multilevel perspective on the nexus between individual conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions, highlighting that the “conspiratorial challenge” to electoral legitimacy in contemporary democracies is real and more than an “American affliction.”

Big Little Election Lies: Cynical and Credulous Evaluations of Electoral Fraud

Abstract The ‘Big Lie’ in American politics has sparked intense concern about the erosion of public confidence in the integrity of US elections—raising questions about the legitimacy of the authorities, institutions, and principles of democratic governance. Cynicism generated from misinformation about trustworthy elections has attracted a growing body of individual-level social-psychological research in America and Europe. Another common problem found around the world, however, which has received far less attention, concerns credulous citizens who express considerable faith and confidence in flawed contests. This study theorises that at macro-level, the accuracy of any public judgments about trustworthy elections is likely to be mediated by the information environment in open and closed societies, as well as by the type of regime. To understand these issues, Part I summarises the conceptual and theoretical argument about trust and trustworthiness. Part II describes the sources of evidence. To apply the theory, data on public opinion is drawn from around 85 societies around the globe included in Waves 6 and 7 of the World Values Survey (2010–2022), with measures of electoral trust and subjective perceptions of electoral integrity among ordinary citizens. Institutional electoral performance indices are drawn from the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem 12.0). Part III analyses how far these independent estimates match public judgments of the trustworthiness of elections in each country – and how far such relationships are conditioned by the type of information society as well as by the type of regime. Part IV highlights the key findings and considers their broader implications for understanding the macro-level conditions for trust and trustworthiness.

Is Democracy the Answer to Intractable Climate Change?

Abstract Climate change is the greatest governance challenge humanity has ever faced. Understanding why some governments successfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and others fail is thus imperative. While regime type is often hypothesized to be a source of variation in greenhouse gas emissions, empirical findings about the effects of democracy and autocracy on climate action are contradictory. This research note reconciles these inconsistencies and adopts a quasi-experimental approach to investigate the relationship between democratization and greenhouse gas emissions. A fixed effects model with a synthetic control estimator is used to construct appropriate counterfactuals and evaluate the effect of regime type on emissions with data from the World Bank and Varieties of Democracy Project. The analysis shows that movement toward democracy does not have a significant effect on emissions, suggesting that research on the politics of emissions reduction should focus on factors other than regime type.

Praising the leader: personalist legitimation strategies and the deterioration of executive constraints

ABSTRACT In the face of current democratic backsliding and autocratization processes, research has rediscovered issues of autocratic legitimation. However, the question of whether rulers’ personalist rhetoric to bolster their legitimacy is followed by congruent political action remains underspecified. Using new expert-coded measures for 164 countries from the Varieties of Democracy project, we examine the political rhetoric–action link using using fixed effects models. The results confirm that shifts towards personalist legitimacy claims are no cheap talk but oftentimes important warning signals for a substantial deterioration of democratic quality, manifested in weaker judicial and legislative oversight of the executive branch. However, in contrast to much current concern, we show that liberal democracies seem to largely escape the negative repercussions of government discourses that increasingly stress the uniqueness of the ruler.

“My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies” and the elephant in NATO’s room

ABSTRACT Using President Joe Biden’s opinion article published in The Washington Post ahead of the June 14, 2021 NATO Summit as a point of departure, the present paper examines how NATO members fare in terms of the core constituent elements of liberal democracy such as civil liberties and freedom of expression. To this effect, the paper uses three indices constructed and published by the Varieties of Democracy project. The Liberal democracy, Civil liberties and Freedom of expression indices. The results from club convergence analysis that covers the post-Cold War period, indicate the presence of different convergence clubs among NATO’s member-states and Turkey as the single divergent country. Moreover, given that many NATO countries are also EU members, the paper examines the comparative effect the dual NATO and EU membership had on the democratisation process of East European countries and Turkey. The findings suggest a statistically stronger impact of EU membership vis-à-vis NATO membership.

Intergroup relations and media: The effects of media system quality in explaining immigration attitudes

From an intergroup relations perspective, attitudes toward immigration derive from assessments of immigrants’ ethnic proximity to the host society. However, attitudes are embedded not only in the notion of intergroup relations, they are influenced by the information environment in which public discourse about immigration is shaped. This paper investigates whether the quality of the media system contributes to the emergence of a well-informed public that is more likely to reinforce democratic values and thus have more positive attitudes toward immigration. The European Social Survey data (2002–2018) from 19 European countries are combined with media quality indicators from the Varieties of Democracy project and studied in a cross-national comparative perspective. Results confirm that Europeans prefer immigrants that are ethnically more similar to the majority of the host society, regardless of time or given country. Furthermore, attitudes are more positive in countries with stronger public services. Moreover, a higher quality media system that reflects the level of media freedom, opinion plurality, self-governance, and objectivity, fosters pro-immigration attitudes, especially for immigrants who are ethnically different from the host society.

Democracy Indices and Their State of Development with a Special Focus on the Varieties of Democracy Project

For many years, democracy indices help scientists to classify political regimes all over the world. But does democracy indices measure the quality of democracy in an adequate way? Based on the literature review, an improvement in methodology of democracy indices can be observed since the end of the 20th century as an answer to the previous shortcomings. The author of the article describes development of democracy indices since the very first attempts to measure Robert Dahl’s poliarchy from the 1990s, concepts of Svetoslava Andreeva, the Democracy Barometer project, focusing on the principles of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. The analysis of democracy indices is made from the new institutionalism perspective, along with an attempt to indicate how different indices measure democracy. New ways of democracy indices development in the future have been suggested, including the impact of third countries and ICT technologies In the summary, the main aspects of the V-Dem project methodology have been indicated that distinguish it from other democracy indices. What is more, the V-Dem project has been indicated as a project that measures democracy in the most comprehensive way.

What is democratic backsliding?

What is democratic backsliding?

Environmental commitments in different types of democracies: The role of liberal, social-liberal, and deliberative politics

Since a more substantial recognition of environmental degradation in the 1960s, the scholarly community has looked at democracy with mixed feelings. Some assert that democracy is devastating for the environmental performance, some claim the opposite, while others suggest that certain democratic models are more successful than others in paving the way for sustainability. Both political theorists and empirical scholars add fuel to this debate, and neither has settled the argument yet. In this paper we make use of recently collected data from the Varieties of Democracy project on different conceptions of democracy and address both these literatures. We empirically test whether different features of democracies, i.e., liberal in its thinner understanding, social-liberal, and deliberative, are more or less beneficial for environmental commitments. We investigate which of these features make democracies more prone to produce environmental policy outputs – adopt climate laws, deliver on them, develop stringent environmental policies, and incorporate sustainability into economic policies. We find that democracies with stronger deliberative features adopt more, but not necessarily stricter or more effective, environmental policies. Instead, democracies with stronger social-liberal features adopt both stricter and more effective policies.

New Insights On Africa’s Autocratic Past

africa has not been immune to recent global trends in democratic backsliding. Although the vast majority of countries on the continent have been holding competitive multi-party elections since the end of the Cold War, we are currently witnessing attempts by elected presidents and ruling parties to extend their tenures through undemocratic means.1 These trends are concerning, not only for those seeing their rights and freedoms constrict, but because they are happening despite the presence of formal democratic institutions that are meant to curb the impulses of autocratic rule. Our current era is not the first in which Africans have seen the erasure of hard-fought political freedoms as African countries turned autocratic after brief flirtations with democracy at independence. And like today, the autocracies of Africa’s past boasted many of the formal institutions that we assume should constrain executives. For instance, data from the Varieties of Democracy project indicate that,...

Activists Against Autocrats: TSMO Networks and Democratic Diffusion

Do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) promote the international diffusion of democracy? If so, how? Scholars of democratization have studied a plethora of international factors in the spread of democracy, including geographic or regional proximity, colonial history, trade and alliance networks, and joint inter-governmental organization (IGO) memberships. Few have studied the role of TSMO networks in democratic diffusion. We theorize that TSMOs empower and connect civil societies and thus promote democracy from the “bottom up.” Leveraging a new TSMO Dataset and data on the dimensions of democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project over the 1953–2013 period, we find that TSMOs promote democratic diffusion. TSMOs are strongest at diffusing participatory democracy. TSMOs also contribute to the diffusion of electoral democracy but do so by promoting the diffusion of freedom of association and freedom of expression rather than elections.

Opening the black box of international aid: understanding delivery actors and democratization

Donor states may delegate to other actors to deliver aid through partnerships. We ask whether some partnerships are more effective than others with democratization aid. We identify five actors, arguing that they can affect the recipient’s democracy outcomes via the fungibility of the funds. We hypothesize that organizations that have relationships of accountability and dependency to the donor are most likely to use aid for its intended purposes (least fungible), making them the most likely to see positive effects on democratization. Those that do not have these relationships may use the money for other purposes, making them the least likely to see positive effects on democratization. We test these with data from 32 OECD countries and 126 recipients from 2004 to 2018. Using the electoral indicator from the Varieties of Democracy project, we find that NGO- and IGO-delivered aid is associated with significantly larger increases in a democracy than aid delivered by corporations.

Health-system equity, egalitarian democracy and COVID-19 outcomes: An empirical analysis.

Aims:The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a close connection between inequitable access to health care, welfare services and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have argued that democratic governments have generally failed relative to more autocratic ones, simply because autocrats can make the hard choices required for stemming the spread of viruses. We address this question by asking whether more ‘egalitarian’ forms of democracy matter, given that they contain more equitable health-care access and societal infrastructure, such as social capital and trust.Methods:We use standard regression techniques, including instrumental variables analysis addressing endogeneity on COVID-19 testing and deaths data as of the end of May and beginning of September. We use novel data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on health-system equity and egalitarian democracy.Results:Our results suggest that more equitable access to health care increases testing rates and lowers the death rate from COVID-19. Broader egalitarian governance, measured as egalitarian democracy, however, shows the opposite effect. Thus, factors associated with health-care capacity to reach and treat matter more than broader societal factors associated with social capital and trust. The results are robust to alternative testing procedures, including instrumental variable technique for addressing potential endogeneity.Conclusions:Despite a great deal of public health focus on how equitable governance helps fight the adverse effects of so-called neoliberal pandemics, we find that broadly egalitarian factors have had the opposite effect on fighting COVID-19, especially when an equitable health system has been taken into account. Fighting disease, thus, might be more about the capacity of health systems rather than societal factors, such as trust in government and social capital.

Women Leaders and Pandemic Performance: A Spurious Correlation

AbstractThe connection between women leaders and superior pandemic performance is likely spurious. This narrative overlooks that women currently govern precisely the kinds of countries that should mount effective pandemic responses: wealthy democracies with high state capacity. This article maps where women currently serve as presidents and prime ministers. The article then uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to show that many women-led countries score high on state capacity and that high-capacity states have low coronavirus mortality regardless of whether they are led by women or by men. Arguments emphasizing women chief executives’ superior pandemic performance, while offered in good faith, are misleading.

Do voters punish noncompliance with high courts? A cross-national analysis

Understanding how high courts successfully constrain the state poses a puzzle central to the study of constitutional review. An increasingly popular answer to this puzzle is that voters electorally punish governments for noncompliance with judicial decisions. This article conducts a cross-national analysis of the relationship between noncompliance and an incumbent government’s electoral success. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project on noncompliance with the national high courts of 74 countries from 2007 to 2017, I examine whether voters systematically punish or reward noncompliance. The analysis of a series of hierarchical linear models reveals that engaging in more noncompliance decreases an incumbent government’s vote share in contexts with a strong pre-existing norm of compliance. This result is robust to both the inclusion of potential confounding variables and alternative model specifications.

Youth, Institutional Trust, and Democratic Backsliding

In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth’s trust in political institutions—parliament, legal systems, and political parties—relative to trust of the older population. We use an unbalanced panel data set that combines a country-year indicator of liberal democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project with aggregate survey-based measures of absolute and relative institutional trust from the Survey Data Recycling database; the data set covers 46 countries from 2009 to 2017. We find that the ratio of youth’s institutional trust to that of older persons has a substantive effect on the quality of liberal democracy in the future, and that the effect is amplified by the relative size of the youth population.

Coherence objectivity and measurement: the example of democracy

Empirical research on democracy depends upon data. The need for such data has led to the development of measures of democracy. Measurement models are evaluated in terms of their reliability and validity, both of which may be thought of as related to the objectivity of the measure. Using the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) as an example, I consider how assessing reliability and validity of measurement models is challenging and argue that democracy might be understood as measured objectively when it is subject to theoretical, empirical, and pragmatic constraints. I call this coherence objectivity.

Hindsight bias in expert surveys: How democratic crises influence retrospective evaluations

Expert surveys provide a standardized way to access and synthesize specialized knowledge, thereby, enabling the analysis of a diverse range of concepts and contexts that might otherwise be difficult to approach systematically. However, while studies of public opinion have long argued that cognitive biases represent potential problems when it comes to the general population, less attention has been paid to similar issues among expert respondents. This study examines one form of cognitive bias, hindsight bias. Hindsight bias refers to the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight of a particular event. We argue that hindsight bias is a potential problem when it comes to retrospective evaluation due to the difficulty involved in separating our assessments of the pre-crisis period from the knowledge that a crisis occurred. Using disaggregated data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, we look for evidence of hindsight bias in coders’ evaluations of the periods that preceded major crises of democracy. We find that coder disagreement is significantly higher in pre-crisis scenarios than in our control group. Concerningly, despite this disagreement, coders remain similarly confident in their assessments. This represents a potential problem for those who seek to use these data to study democratic breakdowns and transitions.

Measuring Nation States’ Deliberativeness: Systematic Challenges, Methodological Pitfalls, and Strategies for Upscaling the Measurement of Deliberation

A theoretically reflected and empirically valid measurement of nation states’ democratic quality must include an assessment of polities’ deliberativeness. This article examines the assessment of deliberativeness suggested by two sophisticated contemporary measurements of democratic quality, that is, the Democracy Barometer and the Varieties of Democracy-project. We feature two sets of challenges, each measurement of deliberativeness must meet: First, it must address the methodological challenges arising in the course of conceptualizing, operationalizing, and aggregating complex concepts (see Munck and Verkuilen, 2002). Second, attempts to measure nation states’ deliberativeness are confronted with specific conceptual and systematic challenges which we derive from recent deliberative democracy scholarship. We argue that both Democracy Barometer and Varieties of Democracy-project provide highly sophisticated assessments of democratic quality, but ultimately fail to capture nation states “deliberativeness” in a theoretically reflected and methodologically sound manner. We examine the methodological, pragmatic, and systematic reasons for these shortcomings. The crucial task for measurements of nation states’ deliberativeness consists in providing a conceptual approach and methodological framework for “upscaling” existing meso-level measurements (such as the DQI). The concluding section presents conceptual and methodological strategies that can enable researchers to meet these challenges and to provide a theoretically grounded and empirically valid measurement of nation states’ deliberativeness.