Cabinets, Prime Ministers and Corruption. A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Governments in Post-War Europe

Why are some states more corrupt than others? Previous research explaining corruption suggests that multiparty governments are associated with higher levels of corruption since it is difficult for voters to hold parties in such cabinets accountable. Drawing on the literature on coalition governance, we suggest that a lack of government corruption has more to do with the ability of other key political actors to control the agents that have been delegated power in cabinet. We use a new dataset (Varieties of Democracy), giving us more specific measures on governmental corruption across a longer time-period. We show that corruption is significantly lower when the Prime Minister (PM) has strong constitutional powers, suggesting that the PM as a principal reduces agency problems

The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State

Relying on three new indicators of the information capacity of states, this paper provides new evidence on the ability of states to collect and process information about the territories and populations that they govern. The three indicators are (a) the availability of a reliable census, (b) the establishment of a permanent government agency tasked with processing statistical information about the territory and the population, and (c) the regular release of statistical yearbooks. We find, as expected, that there has been a secular increase in information capacity over time. We also investigate salient differences among countries from the early 1800s onward

V-Dem Comparisons and Contrasts with Other Measurement Projects

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 ways to measure democracy. In the first section of this document we critically review the field of democracy indices. It is important to emphasize that problems identified with extant indices are not easily solved, and some of the issues we raise vis-à-vis other projects might also be raised in the context of the V-Dem project. Measuring an abstract and contested concept such as democracy is hard and some problems of conceptualization and measurement may never be solved definitively. In the second section we discuss in general terms how the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project differs from extant indices and how the novel approach taken by V-Dem might assist the work of activists, professionals, and scholars.This research project was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; 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. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden, SNIC 2016/1-382 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems

War, Performance and the Survival of Foreign Ministers

Why do some foreign ministers stay longer in office than others? Are they punished when the country loses a war? Several scholars have focused on the tenure of leaders as an important predictor of foreign policy outcomes, such as war onset, creating an interest in leadership survival. We here shift the focus to the survival of other important politicians in cabinet – foreign ministers, hypothesizing that their tenure depends on their performance in office. For example, we expect that foreign ministers stay longer in office when the country experiences an armed conflict resulting in a win or in a compromise agreement. We evaluate and find support for several of our hypotheses using an original historical dataset, which comprises all foreign ministers of the world’s 13 great powers from the early modern period to the present, covering about 1,100 foreign minister-terms of office

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