Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – “the third wave of autocratization” – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz’s litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power

Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions

Replication Data for: "Rethinking the D'Hondt Method"

This archive contains replication materials for "Rethinking the D'Hondt Method" https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2019.1625712, including the data and R scripts, and version 0.2 of the seatdist R package

Replication Data for: Election Fraud: A Latent Class Framework for Digit-Based Tests

Digit-based election forensics typically relies on null hypothesis significance testing, with undesirable effects on substantive conclusions. This paper proposes an alterna- tive free of this problem. It rests on decomposing the observed numeral distribution into the ‘no fraud’ and ‘fraud’ latent classes, by finding the smallest fraction of nu- merals that either needs to be removed or reallocated to achieve a perfect fit of the ‘no fraud’ model. The size of this fraction can be interpreted as a measure of fraud- ulence. Both alternatives are special cases of measures of model fit–the π∗ mixture index of fit and the ∆ dissimilarity index, respectively. Furthermore, independently of the latent class framework, the distributional assumptions of digit-based election forensics can be relaxed in some contexts. Independently or jointly, the latent class framework and the relaxed distributional assumptions allow to dissect the observed distributions using models more flexible than those of existing digit-based election forensics. Reanalysis of Beber and Scacco’s (2012) data shows that the approach can lead to new substantive conclusions

Election Fraud: A Latent Class Framework for Digit-Based Tests

Digit-based election forensics (DBEF) typically relies on null hypothesis significance testing, with undesirable effects on substantive conclusions. This article proposes an alternative free of this problem. It rests on decomposing the observed numeral distribution into the “no fraud” and “fraud” latent classes, by finding the smallest fraction of numerals that needs to be either removed or reallocated to achieve a perfect fit of the “no fraud” model. The size of this fraction can be interpreted as a measure of fraudulence. Both alternatives are special cases of measures of model fit—the π∗ mixture index of fit and the Δ dissimilarity index, respectively. Furthermore, independently of the latent class framework, the distributional assumptions of DBEF can be relaxed in some contexts. Independently or jointly, the latent class framework and the relaxed distributional assumptions allow us to dissect the observed distributions using models more flexible than those of existing DBEF. Reanalysis of Beber and Scacco's (2012) data shows that the approach can lead to new substantive conclusions.</jats:p

Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world – “the third wave of autocratization” – has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars agree that these days the main threat to democracy arises from democratically elected rulers, who gradually erode democratic norms once in power. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elec- tions? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) argue that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocrats before they reach office. Such anti-pluralist traits include de- monizing rhetoric, the encouragement of political violence, disrespect for minority rights, and lacking commitment to the democratic process. Comparative political science researchers have not systematically collected and tested these potential early-warning indicators. This paper makes use of a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument.This research was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2018-016114], PI: Anna Lührmann, Knut and Alice Wallen- berg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2018.0144, and European Research Council, Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor’s office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg

Has the Tea Party Era Radicalized the Republican Party? Evidence from Text Analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican Primary Debates

ABSTRACTMuch ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology—associated with the Tea Party movement—and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.</jats:p