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57 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Party Systems, Democratic Positions, and Regime Changes: Introducing the Party-System Democracy Index

  • Fabio Angiolillo, Felix Wiebrecht, Staffan I. Lindberg
  • Journal:
    British Journal of Political Science / Volume 55 / 2025
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 March 2025, e42
    • Article
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  • One of the most important global political developments is the current wave of autocratization. Most research identifies this as an executive-led process, while others highlight the role opposition actors play in resisting it. We combine this work into a common framework asking, how (anti-)democratic are party systems? Party-system literature emphasises and measures policy differences, while we conceptualise party systems’ democratic positions highlighting to what extent divergent regime preferences are prevalent across parties. To estimate this dimension, we introduce the Party-System Democracy Index (PSDI), capable of tracking regime preferences across party systems from 1970 to 2019 across 178 countries and 3,151 country-years. We implement well-established content, convergent, and construct validity tests to confirm the PSDI’s reliability. Finally, we also show that the PSDI is an important predictor for regime changes in either direction and that changes in the PSDI can signal a looming regime change. This work provides a new framework for studying regime changes and contributes to the renewal of the party-systems literature.

  • Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

  • Carl Henrik Knutsen, Kyle L. Marquardt, Brigitte Seim, Michael Coppedge, Amanda B. Edgell, Juraj Medzihorsky, Daniel Pemstein, Jan Teorell, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg
  • Journal:
    PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 57 / Issue 2 / April 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 January 2024, pp. 162-177
    Print publication:
    April 2024
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  • During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions.

Why Democracies Develop and Decline
  • Edited by Michael Coppedge, Amanda B. Edgell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg
  • Published online:
    28 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
  • The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem) pioneered new ways to conceptualize and measure democracy, producing a multidimensional and disaggregated data set on democracy around the world that is now widely used by researchers, activists, and governments. Why Democracies Develop and Decline draws on this data to present a comprehensive overview and rigorous empirical tests of the factors that contribute to democratization and democratic decline, looking at economic, social, institutional, geographic, and international factors. It is the most authoritative and encompassing empirical analysis of the causes of democratization and reversals. The volume also proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework and presents an up-to-date description of global democratic developments from the French Revolution to the present. Each chapter leverages the specialized expertise of its authors, yet their sustained collaboration lends the book an unusually unified approach and a coherent theory and narrative.

  • 8 - Causal Sequences in Long-Term Democratic Development and Decline

  • Edited by Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Amanda B. Edgell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Universitetet i Oslo, Staffan I. Lindberg, Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    Why Democracies Develop and Decline
    Published online:
    28 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022, pp 215-261

  • Summary

    This chapter summarizes the explanations developed in preceding chapters, fits them into a more comprehensive theoretical framework, and tests them using path analysis, which helps researchers understand causal sequences. Democratization is characterized by punctuated equilibrium. Distant historical factors such as geography and demographic characteristics, together with incrementally changing aspects of social and economic development, affect a country’s level of democracy, but only roughly. Institutions and organizations such as a healthy civil society, the rule of law, and institutionalized political parties, tend to reinforce one another and keep each country’s level of electoral democracy close to an equilibrium or set point. However, short-term economic performance, anti-system movements, and opposition campaigns can sometimes disturb the equilibrium, making significant upturns and downturns possible.

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