How democracies prevail: democratic resilience as a two-stage process

This article introduces a novel conceptualization of democratic resilience - a two-stage process where democracies avoid democratic declines altogether or avert democratic breakdown given that such autocratization is ongoing. Drawing on the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, we find that democracies have had a high level of resilience to onset of autocratization since 1900. Nevertheless, democratic resilience has become substantially weaker since the end of the Cold War. Fifty-nine episodes of sustained and substantial declines in democratic practices have occurred since 1993, leading to the unprecedented breakdown of 36 democratic regimes. Ominously, we find that once autocratization begins, only one in five democracies manage to avert breakdown. We also analyse which factors are associated with each stage of democratic resilience. The results suggest that democracies are more resilient when strong judicial constraints on the executive are present and democratic institutions were strong in the past. Conversely and adding nuance to the literature, economic development is only associated with resilience to onset of autocratization, not to resilience against breakdown once autocratization has begun

Replication files for "Simulating Pluralism: The Language of Democracy in Hegemonic Authoritarianism", published in Political Research Exchange (PRX), 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2019.1605834

This article analyses the language authoritarian leaders use to legitimate their rule. It examines the official speeches of autocrats in hegemonic regimes and compares them to the rhetorical styles of leaders in closed or competitive regimes and democracies. While recent autocracy research has drawn most attention to the phenomenon of competitive authoritarianism, the survival strategies of hegemonic regimes are less explored. Thus, the study focuses on the simulation of pluralism as a key feature of hegemonic regimes. By installing non-competitive multiparty systems which merely pretend pluralism, these regimes maintain a strong grip on power. The study finds that the leaders of hegemonic regimes use a surprisingly democratic style of language to sustain this façade of pluralism. The dictionary-based quantitative text analysis of 2074 speeches of current leaders in 22 countries illustrates that compared to other autocracies, hegemonic regimes overemphasize the (non-existing) democratic procedures in their country to fake a participatory form of government and gain national and international legitimacy. The subsequent case studies of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia further reveal the differences in context and motives for autocrats in hegemonic, closed, and competitive regimes to use autocratic or democratic styles of language

Public Discourse and Autocratization: Infringing on Autonomy, Sabotaging Accountability

Ever since its existence, democracy is periodically diagnosed to be in crisis. When such crises are analyzed, reference has usually been made to the malfunctioning of core democratic institutions and the behavior of actors. We believe that this fails to capture a crucial element of the current crisis. It is words, not (only) deeds that present the contemporary challenge to liberal democracy even before such challenges materialize in institutional change. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to take into account the public discourse of leading political figures when study-ing democratic decline. In this article, we conceptualize illiberal and authoritarian public rhetoric as language practices that harm democracy. Such a practice-orientated approach allows for fine-graded assessments of autocratizing tendencies in democracies that goes beyond an exclusive focus on democratic institutions. By using a corpus of 4 506 speeches of 25 heads of government from 22 countries and data on government disinformation and party identity, we empirically illus-trate with dictionary analysis and logistic regression that illiberal and authoritarian public rhetoric are tightly linked to autocratization and should no longer be ignored.We recognize support by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2018.0144, as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor’s office of the University of Gothenburg

Supplemental Material for: The Many Faces of Authoritarian Persistence. A Set-Theory Perspective on the Survival Strategies of Authoritarian Regimes (forthcoming in Government and Opposition)

This article examines how authoritarian regimes combine various strategies of repression, co-optation, and legitimation to remain in power. The contribution of the article is two-fold. First, I conceptualize the hexagon of authoritarian persistence as a framework to explain how authoritarian regimes manage to survive. The hexagon is based on Gerschewski’s (2013) three pillars of stability but proposes some crucial modifications. In contrast to the model of the three pillars, the hexagon can grasp the causal complexity of autocratic survival because it is rooted in set theory and accounts for asymmetric causal relations, conjunctural causation and equifinality. Based on this, it illuminates how authoritarian regimes use multiple, mutually non-exclusive survival strategies. The second contribution is an empirical exploration which applies the hexagon and provides a case-orientated analysis of 62 persistent and non-persistent authoritarian regimes (1991-2010). By using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the findings of this assessment illustrate five configurations of the hexagon – called hegemonic, performance-dependent, rigid, overcompensating, and adaptive authoritarianism – as those combinations of strategies which facilitate authoritarian survival

Public discourse and autocratization: Infringing on autonomy, sabotaging accountability

Published versio

Worth the sacrifice? Illiberal and authoritarian practices during Covid-19

Excessive use of emergency powers and limitations of media freedoms have raised concerns that Covid-19 is infecting democracy itself. How do government responses to Covid-19 violate democratic standards? How do such violations relate to the countries’ success in limiting the Covid-19 death tolls? We propose a novel conceptualization of which government responses to Covid-19 qualify as a violation of democratic standards and measure such violations using a regularly updated dataset covering 143 countries from March 2020 onward. Our data track seven types of violations of democratic standards for emergency measures during the Covid-19 pandemic: discriminatory measures, derogation of non-derogable rights, abusive enforcement, no time limit on emergency measures, disproportionate limitations on the role of the legislature, official disinformation campaigns, and restrictions on media freedoms. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of the extent to which governments have violated democratic standards in their response to Covid-19. Using a regression analysis, we find no relationship between violations of democratic standards for emergency measures and Covid-19 death rates. Thus, violations of democratic standards during the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be justified by the achievement of better public health outcomes. Rather, such crisis driven violations need to be carefully observed as they could signal autocratization.This research was supported by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Grant number UD2020/08217/FMR

Replication files for: Comparing public communication in democracies and autocracies: automated text analyses of speeches by heads of government (published in Quality and Quantity, 2019)

Abstract: Renewed efforts at empirically distinguishing between different forms of political regimes leave out the cultural dimension. In this article, we demonstrate how modern computational tools can be used to fill this gap. We employ web-scraping techniques to generate a data set of speeches by heads of government in European democracies and autocratic regimes around the globe. Our data set includes 4740 speeches delivered between 1999 and 2019 by 40 political leaders of 27 countries. By scaling the results of a dictionary application, we show how, in comparative terms, liberal or illiberal the leaders present themselves to their national and international audience. In order to gauge whether our liberalness scale reveals meaningful distinctions, we perform a series of validity tests: criterion validity, qualitative hand-coding, unsupervised topic modeling, and network analysis. All tests suggest that our liberalness scale does capture meaningful differences between political regimes despite the large heterogeneity of our data. Full article available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11135-019-00885-

Replication Data for "Legitimation, Cooptation, and Repression and the Survival of Electoral Autocracies", Zeitschrift fuer Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 2017, vol. 11, pp. 213-235

For replication purposes please note that the analysis uses the raw data of: Lueders, Hans and Aurel Croissant. 2014. Wahlen, Strategien autokratischer Herrschaftssicherung und das Ueberleben autokratischer Regierungen. Zeitschrift fuer vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 8 (3-4): 329-355 The material uploaded here consists of two R scripts, one for replicating the analyses in the article and another for performing robustness tests. Furthermore, we provide the raw and calibrated data, the same as a pdf file with raw data, calibrated data, graphical representations of the data, and results from robustness tests

A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset

Gradual processes of democratization and autocratization have gained increased attention in the literature. Assessing such processes in a comparative framework remains a challenge, however, due to their under-conceptualization and a bifurcation of the democracy and autocracy literatures. This article provides a new conceptualization of regime transformation as substantial and sustained changes in democratic institutions and practices in either direction. This allows for studies to address both democratization and autocratization as related obverse processes. Using this framework, the article introduces a dataset that captures 680 unique episodes of regime transformation (ERT) from 1900 to 2019. These data provide novel insights into regime change over the past 120 years, illustrating the value of developing a unified framework for studying regime transformation. Such transformations, while meaningfully altering the qualities of the regime, only produce a regime transition about 32% of the time. The majority of episodes either end before a transition takes place or do not have the potential for such a transition (i.e. constituted further democratization in democratic regimes or further autocratization in autocratic regimes). The article also provides comparisons to existing datasets and illustrative case studies for face validity. It concludes with a discussion about how the ERT framework can be applied in peace research.This research project was principally supported by European Research Council, Consolidator Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg; but also by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2018.0144; as well as by co-funding from the Vice-Chancellor’s office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg

Deterring Dictatorship: Explaining Democratic Resilience since 1900

Democracy is under threat globally from democratically elected leaders engaging in erosion of media freedom, civil society, and the rule of law. What distinguishes democracies that prevail against the forces of autocratization? This article breaks new ground by conceptualizing democratic resilience as a two-stage process, whereby democracies first exhibit resilience by avoiding autocratization altogether and second, by avoiding democratic breakdown given that autocratization has occurred. To model this two-stage process, we introduce the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset tracking autocratization since 1900. These data demonstrate the extraordinary nature of the current wave of autocratization: Fifty-nine (61%) episodes of democratic regression in the ERT began after 1992. Since then, autocratization episodes have killed an unprecedented 36 democratic regimes. Using a selection-model, we simultaneously test for factors that make democracies more prone to experience democratic regression and, given this, factors that explain democratic breakdown. Results from the explanatory analysis suggest that constraints on the executive are positively associated with a reduced risk of autocratization. Once autocratization is ongoing, we find that a long history of democratic institutions, durable judicial constraints on the executive, and more democratic neighbours are factors that make democracy more likely to prevail.We recognize support by the Swedish Research Council, Grant 2018-01614, PI: Anna Lührmann; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2018.0144; by 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. The computations of expert data were enabled by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at National Supercomputer Centre, Linköping University, partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2019/3-516