The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond. CES Working Paper Series No. 177, 2010

The paper lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of a new historically-minded approach to the comparative study of democratization, centered on the analysis of the creation, development and interaction of democratic institutions. Historically, democracy did not emerge as a singular coherent whole but rather as a set of different institutions, which resulted from conflicts across multiple lines of social and political cleavage that took place at different moments in time. The theoretical advantage of this approach is illustrated by highlighting the range of new variables that come into focus in explaining democracy's emergence. Rather than class being the single variable that explains how and why democracy came about, we can see how religious conflict, ethnic cleavages, and the diffusion of ideas played a much greater role in Europe's democratization than has typically been appreciated. Above all, we argue that political parties were decisive players in how and why democracy emerged in Europe and should be at the center of future analyses

A Systematic Approach to Study Electoral Fraud

Integrity of elections relies on fair procedures at di?erent stages of the election process, and fraud can occur in many instances and di?erent forms. This paper provides a general approach for the detection of fraud. While most existing contributions focus on a single instance and form of fraud, we propose a more encompassing approach, testing for several empirical implications of di?erent possible forms of fraud. To illustrate this approach we rely on a case of electoral irregularities in one of the oldest democracies: In a Swiss referendum in 2011, one in twelve municipalities irregularly destroyed the ballots, rendering a recount impossible. We do not know whether this happened due to sloppiness, or to cover possible fraudulent actions. However, one of our statistical tests leads to results, which points to irregularities in some of the municipalities, which lost their ballots: they reported significantly fewer empty ballots than the other municipalities. Relying on several tests leads to the well known multiple comparisons problem. We show two strategies and illustrate strengths and weaknesses of each potential way to deal with multiple tests

Replication data for: Shaping Democratic Practice (APSR)

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original data set drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871–1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud’s incidence is significantly related to a society’s level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socioeconomic inequality, by making elections endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to the long-term process of democratization even after the “choice” of formally democratic rules

Landholding Inequality in Germany, at the Reichstag Constituency Level, and Prussian Chamber of Deputies Constituency Level, 1895

This dataset uses the agricultural census of 1898 to reconstruct land inequality (using the measure of gini-coefficient) in the size of agricultural units for each electoral district at two different levels of analysis: the Reichstag constituency level, and the Prussian Chamber of Deputes’ constituency level. The analysis is based on data on the size and number of farms as reported in an agricultural census conducted at the Kreis level of over 5 million agricultural units (Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt. 1898. Statistik des Deutschen Reichs. Bd. 112. Berlin: Verlag des Königlich Preussichen Statistischen Bureaus, pp. 351-413 [Table 9]

Bagaimana Demokrasi Mati apa yang diungkapkan sejarah tentang masa depan kita = How Democracies Die

271 hlm.;20 c

Bagaimana Demokrasi Mati

Demokrasi bisa mati karena kudeta—atau mati pelan-pelan. Kematian itu bisa tak disadari ketika terjadi selangkah demi selangkah, dengan terpilihnya pemimpin otoriter, disalahgunakannya kekuasaan pemerintah, dan penindasan total atas oposisi. Ketiga langkah itu sedang terjadi di seluruh dunia dan kita semua mesti mengerti bagaimana cara menghentikannya. Dalam buku ini, dua profesor Harvard Steven Levitsky dan Daniel Ziblatt menyampaikan pelajaran penuh wawasan dari sejarah untuk menerangkan kerusakan rezim selama abad ke-20 dan ke-21. Mereka menunjukkan bahayanya pemimpin otoriter ketika menghadapi krisis besar. Berdasarkan riset bertahun-tahun, keduanya menyajikan pemahaman mendalam mengenai mengapa dan bagaimana demokrasi mati; suatu analisis pemicu kewaspadaan mengenai bagaimana demokrasi didesak; dan pedoman untuk memelihara dan memperbaiki demokrasi yang terancam, bagi pemerintah, partai politik, dan individu

Complete Reichstag Election Dispute Dataset, 1871-1914

This dataset includes electoral fraud data on every electoral constituency for all thirteen national parliamentary elections in Imperial Germany’s history (between 1871 and 1914). Each constituency-year is coded 1 or 0 depending on whether or not the constituency became the subject of an official investigation for the Reichstag’s Election Investigation Committee. If the committee deemed that the election in a constituency in a particular year was possibly subject to some form of malpractice or fraud and thus needing investigation, the constituency receives a score of 1. If the committee decided that elections in a district in a year did not need investigation, the constituency receives a score of 0. The data also records the gross number of petitioned cases during the entire 1871-1914 period (including multiple investigations of the same seat in a single year) and the net number of seats investigated, excluding the multiple investigations of a single disputed seat within a given year. The source for these scores is the Reichstag Parliamentary Minutes (Stenographische Berichte, 1871-1914) as originally collected for research by Robert Arsensche