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Now showing items 1-10 of 17
Patterns of Regime Breakdown since the French Revolution
(2018)
We present a new dataset comprising more than 1900 regimes in 197 polities over the time period 1789-2016. We use this dataset to describe dierent historical patterns of regime duration globally, leveraging ne-grained ...
Going Historical: Measuring Democraticness before the Age of Mass Democracy
(2016)
Most studies of democratic developments are limited to the period after World War II. However, political regimes varied according to different aspects of democracy long before the establishment of modern liberal mass ...
Party Institutionalization and Welfare State Development
(2017)
We propose that the extent to which political parties are institutionalized shapes welfare state development. Institutionalized parties allow politicians to overcome coordination problems, avoid capture by special interests, ...
Local Democracy and Economic Growth
(2016)
Theoretical work on the institutional sources of economic growth regards decentralization and democracy in a positive light. Despite this, empirical work shows that neither fiscal decentralization nor national democracy ...
Cui Bono? Business Elites and Interstate Conflict
(2020-08)
We address how regime supporters affect war-making by re-opening a classic debate on business elites and their influence on states' conflict behavior. Imperialist theories contend that business elites encourage executives ...
Female Empowerment and Economic Growth
(2020-06)
We discuss how inclusive institutions enhance technological change, the main driver of long-term economic growth. Specifically, institutions that promote female political empowerment advance technological change through ...
Autocrats and Skyscrapers: Modern White Elephants in Dictatorships
(2017)
Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue expensive and socially wasteful "white elephant" projects. Our argument highlights that weak accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize ...
Fighting the Disease or Manipulating the Data? Democracy, State Capacity, and the COVID-19 Pandemic
(2022-01)
We discuss and analyze how regime type and state capacity shape the abilities and incentives of political leaders to respond to COVID-19. We argue that there is likely a complementary relationship between democracy and ...
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century
(2018)
The Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset (Historical V-Dem) is a new dataset containing about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The ...
Electoral Democracy and Human Development
(2015)
This study attempts to reconcile competing positions in the debate over whether democracy improves human development by showing that some aspects of democracy – but not others – affect human development. Specifically, we ...