The Varieties of Democracy (V–Dem) project relies on country experts who code a host of ordinal variables, providing subjective ratings of latent—that is, not directly observable—regime characteristics over time. Sets of ...

Democracy is under threat globally from democratically elected leaders engaging in erosion of media freedom, civil society, and the rule of law. What distinguishes democracies that prevail against the forces of autocratization? ...

Rulers of weak states face a predicament. They lack capacity to monitor crime and need citizens to partake in intelligence-sharing. Yet, agents of such authorities are seldom trusted, raising doubts about whether locals ...

Using the literature on the political business cycle as a point of departure, this paper investigates whether incumbent politicians manipulate the enforcement of tax collection prior to elections, in order to win votes. ...

While clientelism is most often viewed as a symptom of traditional politics, empirical evidence suggests that it is actually a varied and multifaceted phenomenon, found in widely differing economic, political, and cultural ...

A large literature addresses the impact of regimes on domestic policies and outcomes, e.g., education, health, inequality, redistribution, public spending, wages, infrastructure, volatility, productivity, and economic ...

Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver ...

Although party organization plays a key role in a range of theories from democratic accountability and representation to democratic breakdown or the electoral success and persistence of parties, data on party organizational ...

The quality of government (QoG) is a concept without an undisputed benchmark. To contribute to its clarification, we propose a novel model of analysis that incorporates formal and informal institu-tions and operationalizes ...

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – “the third wave of autocratization” – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars agree that these days the main threat to democracy arises ...