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The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994 O'Loughlin, John Ward, Michael D. Lofdahl, Corey L. Cohen, Jordin S. Brown, David S. Reilly, David Gleditsch, Kristian S. Shin, Michael E. Uploaded 11-12-1997 Keywords Spatial diffusion exploratory spatial data analysis spatial statistics regional effects democracy measures of democracy space-time autocorrelation Abstract Research to date on democratization neglects the interconnections between temporal and spatial components that influence this process. This article presents research that reveals the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion in the world-system since 1946. We provide strong and consistent evidence of temporal cascading of democratic and autocratic trends as well as strong spatial association (or autocorrelation) of authority structures. The analysis uses an exploratory data approach in a longitudinal framework to understand global and regional trends in democratization. Our work also reveals discrete changes in regimes that run counter to the dominant aggregate trends of democratic waves or sequences. We demonstrate how the ebb and flow of democracy varies between the world's regions. We conclude that further modeling of the process of regime change from autocracy to democracy as well as reversals should start from a "domain-specific" position that disaggregates the globe into its regional mosaics.

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Democracy as a Latent Variable Treier, Shawn Jackman, Simon Uploaded 07-16-2003 Keywords democracy Polity measurement latent variables Bayesian statistics item-response model ordinal data latent class analysis democratic peace Markov chain Monte Carlo Abstract Measurement is critical to the social scientific enterprise. Many key concepts in social-scientific theories are not observed directly, and researchers rely on assumptions (tacitly or explicitly, via formal measurement models) to operationalize these concepts in empirical work. In this paper we apply formal, statistical measurement models to the Polity indicators of democracy and autocracy, used widely in studies of international relations. In so doing, we make explicit the hitherto implicit assumptions underlying scales built using the Polity indicators. We discuss two models: one in which democracy is operationalized as a latent continuous variable, and another in which democracy is operationalized as a latent class. Our modeling approaches allow us to assess the measurement error in the resulting measure of democracy. We show that this measurement error is considerable, and has substantive consequences when using a measure of democracy as an independent variable in cross-national statistical analysis. Our analysis suggests that skepticism as to the precision of the Polity democracy scale is well-founded, and that many researchers have been overly sanguine about the properties of the Polity democracy scale in applied statistical work.

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Paper

Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation Svolik, Milan Uploaded 02-21-2007 Keywords democratic consolidation transitions to democracy split-population models cure rate models mixture models Abstract I investigate the determinants and the process of authoritarian reversals and democratic consolidation. I employ a new empirical model that allows me to distinguish between two central dynamics: the likelihood that a democracy consolidates, and the timing of authoritarian reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. I demonstrate that existing democracies are a mixture of transitional and consolidated democracies rather than a single population. This approach leads to new insights into the causes of democratic consolidation that cannot be obtained with existing techniques. I find that the level of economic development, type of executive, and authoritarian past determine whether a democracy consolidates, but have no effect on the timing of reversals. That risk is only associated with economic recessions. I also find that the existing studies greatly underestimate the risk of early reversals while they simultaneously overestimate the risk of late reversals, and that a large number of existing democracies are in fact consolidated.

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Direct Democracy and Social Issues Matsusaka, John Uploaded 05-29-2007 Keywords Direct democracy initiative social issues representation Abstract This paper explores the connection between the initiative process -- the most potent form of direct democracy -- and social issues by examining laws on seven social issues in all 50 American states. Initiative states are 18 percent more likely than noninitiative states to choose a conservative than a liberal policy on the median issue after controlling for public opinion, demographic, and regional variables. The conservative shift is majoritarian: initiative states are 8 percent more likely than noninitiative states to choose laws that reflect the majority's preference. The initiative effect does not appear to depend on the institutional features that scholars and reformers often discuss.

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Direct Democracy and Public Employees Matsusaka, John Uploaded 05-29-2007 Keywords Direct democracy public employees initiative patronage interest groups Abstract In the public sector, employment may be inefficiently high because of patronage, and wages may be inefficiently high because of the strength of public employee interest groups. This paper explores whether the initiative process, a direct democracy institution of growing importance, can control these political economy problems, as proponents and some research suggests. Based on a sample of 500+ cities in 2000, I find that when public employees are allowed to bargain collectively, driving up wages, the initiative appears to cut wages by about 5 percent but has no measurable effect on employment. When public employees are not allowed to bargain collectively and patronage is a problem, initiatives appear to cut employment but not wages.

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Paper

Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type Pemstein, Daniel Meserve, Stephen Melton, James Uploaded 02-07-2008 Keywords democracy measurement democracy measurement regime regime type latent variable analysis Bayesian latent variable analysis UDS Unified Democracy Scores multi-rater ordinal probit Abstract Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from ten extant scales. We accompany this new scale with quantitative estimates of uncertainty, provide estimates of the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, and quantify what the ordinal levels of each of the existing measures mean in relationship to one another. Our method eschews the difficult -- and often arbitrary -- decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars.

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Paper

The Democracy Paradox Gagnon, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Jean-Paul Uploaded 02-24-2010 Keywords democracy theory political science governance problems paradox what is democracy Abstract This paper argues that democracy is a governing method endemic to human nature. It also argues that since democracyâ??s growth and stylizations (for example by the Mycenaeans, Greek, Ottoman, and later the modern post-colonial world) it has been misunderstood and incorrectly defined. At present, many scholars (such as Beetham, Breton, Dahl, Diamond, Huntington, Keane, and to a certain extent Touraine) seek to explain democracy as theorists and philosophers have been trying to do for millennia. The lack of explaining the general laws of democracy in a universally accepted definition is a major crux in political theory. The current political science focus on indices which appoint performance scores regarding how â??democraticâ?? a country is reveals another example of how, increasingly, more mainstream political thinking seeks to define democracy with general criteria (evincing a desire to appoint universal laws to democracy). This paper will show that there is, and has been for well over 3500 years, a democracy paradox by explaining what it is and how it came about. Such will be done firstly by revealing the history of the paradox; then discussing how it came to the modern era without being solved; finishing with the answer to the paradox derived from the authorâ??s doctoral thesis.

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Paper

How Factual is your Counterfactual? King, Gary Zeng, Langche Uploaded 07-12-2001 Keywords counterfactual causality forecasting democracy Abstract Inferences about counterfactuals are essential for prediction, answering ``what if'' questions, and estimating causal effects. However, when the counterfactuals posed are too far from the data at hand, conclusions drawn from well-specified statistical analyses become based on speculation and convenient but indefensible model assumptions rather than empirical evidence. Yet, standard model outputs do not reveal the degree of model-dependence, and so this problem can be hard to detect, regardless of its severity. We develop easy-to-apply methods to evaluate counterfactuals that do not require sensitivity testing over specified classes of models. One analysis with these methods applies to the class of all models, for any smooth conditional expectation function, and to the set of all possible dependent variables, given only the choice of a set of explanatory variables. We illustrate by studying the scholarly literatures that try to assess the effects of changes in the degree of democracy in a country (on any dependent variable); we find widespread evidence that scholars are inadvertently drawing conclusions based more on their hypotheses than on their empirical evidence.

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The Influence of the Initiative Process on Interest Groups and Lobbying Techniques Boehmke, Frederick Uploaded 09-22-1999 Keywords Initiative direct democracy survey analysis interest groups lobbying selection bias Abstract I use survey data on interest groups and their activities drawn from four state populations to test hypotheses about the implications of direct democracy for the characteristics and strategic choices of interest groups. I use this data to test predictions about direct democracy's effect for group populations, confirming previous work (Boehmke 1999b) and extending it by exploring more detailed characteristics such as membership and resources. I then link these characteristics to lobbying techniques to test if the initiative process has an impact at the group level. As expected, groups involved in initiative campaigns tend to accentuate outside lobbying strategies, but even groups not currently involved in initiatives are influenced by the possibility of its use. This is because the initiative process alters the characteristics that can be effectively used when attempting to influence policy. The analysis makes use of a technique to correct for heterogeneous response rates across group types. By gathering information about a high percentage of an additional, smaller sample, I am able to correct for this response rate differential through a weighting procedure. The correction is found to have a substantial effect on the results: its absence would leave the researcher to conclude that the initiative plays little role in state interest group activities. This data will also be used to test and correct for possible sample selection bias.

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Paper

Populists in the Pluralist Heaven: How Direct Democracy Reduces Bias in Interest Representation Boehmke, Frederick Uploaded 10-15-1999 Keywords Initiative direct democracy interest groups lobbying fixed effects representation Abstract This paper explores the effect of direct democracy on state interest group populations, providing an empirical test of a formal model of how access to the initiative process affects group formation and activities (Boehmke 1999), which predicts that more groups will mobilize and become active in initiative states. This prediction is supported by the findings in this paper, which also suggest that the effect of the initiative on group mobilizations has increased from the late 1970s to 1990. The prediction that groups that face a greater collective action problem are influenced more by the initiative is also confirmed since government and social groups are among those most affected. Counterfactual analysis indicates that the initiative process makes a state's interest group population more diverse, though the gains are decreasing from 1975 to 1990.

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Paper

Getting the Odds Right: Casino Gaming Diffusion, the Initiative Process and Expected Voter Support Boehmke, Frederick Uploaded 10-27-1999 Keywords Initiative direct democracy interest groups lobbying event history casino gaming formal model Abstract In this paper I develop and test a formal model of the role that the initiative process plays in shaping policy outcomes. By introducing uncertainty over the median voter's ideal point, I show that the possibility of proposing an initiative makes it cheaper for an interest group to change policy, both through the initiative process and by using contributions to convince the legislature to change policy. By also allowing groups to use information drawn from neighboring states' adoptions to estimate the probability an initiative would pass, I show that policy diffusion should function primarily as information diffusion between initiative states. The predictions of the model are then tested through an event history analysis of state casino gaming legalizations. The initiative process is found to be a positive and significant predictor of adoption and its effect is increased by voter liberalism. There is strong support for the informational approach to diffusion with a positive flow between initiative states and none from or to non-initiative states.

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Paper

Democracy and Exchange Rates: An Experimental Study Freeman, John R. Hays, Jude Stix, Helmut Uploaded 07-17-1998 Keywords Markov switching model exchange rates comparative democracy political economy Abstract The world's financial markets are becoming increasingly liberalized and interconnected. There is much debate about whether this development is socially desirable. Of increasing interest in this debate are the implications of the globalization of finance for democracy. The relationship between the workings of currency markets and democratic institutions is studied. The economic literature on exchange rate determination is briefly reviewed. The Markov switching model is considered as one of the most useful with which to analyze the politics of exchange rate determination. Next, the political science literature is discussed, including the research on electoral systems and comparative democracy. Out of this discussion emerge several competing propositions about how political (re)equilibration affects currency markets, more specifically, what the Markov switching framework should show about the impact of electoral outcomes and political polls on compound returns (the log difference of the exchange rate) in some or all democracies. A design for testing these propositions then is laid out and implemented. The results support the view that democratic politics affects currency markets. In particular, opinion polls about chief executive and government performance have a direct effect on the probabilities of switches between currency regimes. This suggests that these polls cause currency traders to revise their expectations about the stability of governments and (or) the content of public policy. In addition, the results refute claims that pluralist and majoritarian forms of democracy are more likely to be a source of trader uncertainty and hence regime shifts than corporatist and consensual forms of democracy. There is some evidence that (democratic) institutional "incoherency" (Garrett, 1998) is a source of market uncertainty and therefore that the effects of opinion polls and other political variables on the probabilities of regime shifts are greater in the respective countries.

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Poster

WhentheSTARs Align:What IOs AreMoreConducivetoDemocratization Chyzh, Olga Uploaded 07-31-2011 Keywords democracy spatial dependence diffusion international organization spatial regression m-STAR Abstract The scholars of democracy have long noted the tendency of democratic states to cluster in time and space. While most theoretical explanations of this phenomenon posit causal mechanisms related to spatial interdependence (e.g. diffusion, socialization), very few studies have conducted adequate empirical tests of these theories. This methodological oversight is due both to the scarcity of available statistical techniques that allow for testing these types of effects, as well as to the methodological sophistication of the existing techniques. Yet the value of empirical inferences is largely dependent on correct model specification. I develop several hypotheses linking state democracy level to membership in international organizations (IOs) that vary in scope, institutional capacity, and centralization. I test these hypotheses using several alternative approaches that allow to correct or explicitly model spatial and temporal dependence. I start with more common approaches, such as the use of a lagged dependent variable, fixed effects, and panel corrected standard errors, and then re-estimate the results using a multi-parametric spatio-temporal autocorrelation model (m-STAR). In this final model, I test my hypotheses using overlapping IO memberships in different types of IOs, as well as geographic contiguity as the spatial weights. I argue that while the lagged dependent variable, fixed effects, and panel-corrected standard errors show more desirable qualities than a naïve model, the m-STAR provides for the most adequate testing, from both a methodological and a theoretical perspective. Unlike the former three techniques that treat spatial and temporal dependence as a nuisance, the M-STAR allows for explicit modeling and estimation of contemporaneous spatial effects. Its ability to estimate spatial effects occurring within the same time-period as the unit-level effects makes this model particularly useful at evaluating the hypotheses posited in this paper, as well as such phenomena as diffusion and socialization more broadly.