In what sequence do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the processes and causes of institutional change that make up regime transitions. However, there has been limited research to evaluate the institutional...

This paper addresses three interrelated questions. First, how strong is the evidence that democracy has declined globally over the last decade? Second, how should we best measure (change in) democracy? Third, given that much of the recent evidencefor global backsliding comes from measurement...

This paper reviews the data quality of the first systematic global measurement of academic freedom, namely the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) by using a data quality assessment approach proposed by McMann et al. (2022). By analyzing three distinct components of data quality (content validity, the...

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 around five experts rate each case (country-year observation), and each...

Autocracies with popular leaders tend to survive longer. A growing body of scholarship therefore focuses on the factors that influence authoritarian popularity. However, it is possible that the perception of popularity itself breeds popularity in nondemocratic regimes, impacting incumbent...

A number of studies show that autocracies with ruling parties are more long-lived than those without. Much of the literature attributes this to party institutionalization at the elite-level, which is said to reduce elite schisms. Others point to the ability of grassroots party organizations to...

Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of economic crises and over the perceived failure of the elites, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected. Using the pandemic shock in the form...

While social scientists often theorize about the enduring effects of past regime characteristics, conceptual issues and data limitations pose real challenges for assessing these legacies empirically. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock, conceptualized as the accumulated...

Quantitative scholarship on civil conflict still largely relies upon the ethnic group as the foundation for measures of politically-relevant diversity and, in particular, identity-based political inclusion. However, ethnicity remains notoriously difficult to measure: even cutting-edge analyses...