Scholars have emphasized the importance of having a “Weberian bureaucracy” for the socio-economic development of a country, but few attempts have been made to measure public administrations according to their degree of ...

Why have different industrialized capitalist market economies developed such varying systems for social protection and social insurance? The hitherto most successful theory for explaining this is the Power Resource Theory ...

With an increased awareness of the detrimental effects of corruption on development, strategies to fight it are now a top priority in policy circles around the world. Since Africa is home to most of the thoroughly corrupt ...

Social scientists face the challenge of determining whether their data are valid, yet they lack prac- tical guidance about how to do so. Existing publications on data validation provide mostly abstract information for ...

Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, numerous scholars have found empirically that corruption decreases at high levels of democracy but actually increases at low levels. A key weaknesses of studies ...

For policymakers, activists, academics, and citizens around the world the conceptualization and measurement of democracy matters. The needs of democracy promoters and social scientists are convergent. We all need better ...

This paper presents a new measure of electoral democracy, or "polyarchy", for a global sample of 173 countries from 1900 to the present based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, enabling us to address several ...

Domestically, democracy or democratization has not proved as successful in bringing about preferred economic and social consequences as has “good governance” and quality of government. Within the field of international ...

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 ...

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 ...