Many standard survey items ask respondents about "democracy," a term that varies widely across contexts and often elicits broadly supportive but imprecise answers. To reduce that ambiguity, a new measurement approach evaluates specific rights and institutions rather than relying on a single, general label.
How does a major corruption scandal shape public support for democratic institutions? This study uses the unexpected timing of Brazil’s historic 2015 corruption revelations to estimate causal effects on system support.
Scholarly views diverge on whether ethnic politics undermines or reinforces democracy. This study shifts attention from minority-focused ethnic politics to parties that represent a majority ethnic group and asks when such parties pursue democratic backsliding rather than adapting to a changing electorate.
The authors ask which states condemned Russia at the UN and which imposed sanctions after the 2022 invasion, and whether regime type or trade relationships better predict those behaviors. Using an “opportunity and willingness” framing, the study compares democratic versus nondemocratic states’ propensity to issue substantive or symbolic condemnation and examines whether countries’ positions in international trade networks — including trade in fuels and dual‑use goods — predict who imposed sanctions. The paper reports results from multinomial logit models that use commodity trade data to distinguish fuels, dual‑use goods, and aggregate trade and evaluates whether close preexisting trade ties to Russia explain condemnation or sanctions.
This article asks whether a democratic middle power — Germany — uses high‑level visits to help democratic durability in other countries during periods of domestic instability. Using a novel dataset of German chancellor visits from 1991–2023, the authors assess whether Germany’s visits are more likely when host countries face internal turbulence and whether regime type and party politics shape that responsiveness.
Do problems with government performance change public support for democracy? This study reports results from a 2022 survey experiment of nearly 2,000 residents in Spain that used short writing prompts to make respondents think about two types of poor government performance—corruption or unemployment—and, for corruption, whether it was framed as caused by elites or by the system. The paper examines whether these prompts shift attitudes toward democracy measured both as broad democratic support and as support for specific democratic practices.
This paper tests Margaret Canovan’s influential argument that populism emerges from a tension between what she called democracy’s pragmatic and redemptive faces. Using cross-national survey evidence, the authors evaluate whether indicators of pragmatic politics reduce (or increase) support for populist parties and movements, offering one of the first empirical assessments of Canovan’s theoretical claim.
This study asks whether citizens in consolidated European democracies have become less supportive of democracy and whether any decline is widespread or concentrated in specific age groups or countries. Using new cross‑national survey evidence from 18 European countries (1981–2018), the authors disentangle age, cohort and period effects and report results from pre‑registered analyses to reduce selective reporting. The paper documents continued overall endorsement of self‑governance, while identifying country‑specific signs that some younger cohorts express weaker forms of democratic support.
Why do some executives repress the press while others leave it free? This study tests whether two external constraints — courts that can rule against leaders and citizens who can vote them out — shape executives' decisions to attack media. Using a global panel covering executive-branch attacks on the press from 1949–2016, the authors evaluate whether judicial independence and electoral democracy reduce press attacks and whether these constraints substitute for one another.
This letter asks whether a "state-first" approach—where a strong state promotes democratic development—holds up when the concept of state strength is disaggregated. Using new Varieties of Democracy data covering 1789–2015, the authors specify eight versions of the state-first argument and test them across the modern democratic era. Their central contribution is to separate bureaucratic quality from broader measures of state capacity and to evaluate their distinct associations with democratic survival and deepening.
This article re-examines the predictive model of state-level political instability developed by Goldstone et al. (2010). While their model accurately identified institutional factors, particularly factionalism in partial democracies, as key drivers during its original validation period (1995-2004), this accuracy has significantly decreased since then.
Publication bias is common in social sciences because journals favor statistically significant results. However, publication bias depends on a variable's role—key or control—in regression models. This study shows that when democracy is a key variable (rather than a statistical control) it faces stronger publication bias.
New research on the historical origins of old-age pensions from a political regime perspective shows stark differences between democratic and nondemocratic systems. Democratic regimes introduced significantly higher legal pension coverage rates than their autocratic counterparts.
Scope and Puzzle: Recent decades have seen a wide spread of liberal norms in global governance—sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. Scholarship explains trajectories of particular norms but offers less on why international organizations (IOs) as institutions commit to these liberal norms at different depths.
This study investigates the relationship between internet adoption, citizen political trust, and different governance systems across nations.
New theory challenges simplistic views of women's movement influence on policy change in Africa.
Researchers face a tradeoff when applying latent variable models to time-series, cross-sectional data. Static models minimize bias but assume data are temporally independent, resulting in a loss of efficiency. Dynamic models explicitly model temporal data structures, but smooth estimates of the latent trait across time, resulting in bias when the latent trait changes rapidly.
Does democracy protect all citizens from police violence? The answer is complex. This paper examines whether democratic institutions are less likely to use torture against three groups: political dissidents, criminals, and marginalized communities. Using the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data, we analyze this question through logistic regressions with random effects.
* The Puzzle:* Older citizens in Latin America report higher preference for democracy, a finding that conflicts with parts of the literature predicting stronger pro-democracy views among younger cohorts socialized under democratic regimes. One plausible explanation is that older cohorts experienced political repression under authoritarian rule, producing an aversion to non-democratic regimes.
Many social scientists have either overlooked or insufficiently explored how political factors shape state capacity. Prior work tended to focus on institutional traits of regimes—especially democracy—without fully considering the role of governments and their ideologies. This paper broadens that approach by examining both democratic features and executives’ partisanship as influences on state capacity.
This article argues that economic sanctions often undermine democracy in targeted states. Economic hardship produced by sanctions can be leveraged by incumbent leaders to consolidate authoritarian rule, weaken opposition forces, and justify restrictions on political liberties by portraying sanctions as an external threat to regime survival.