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...

It is widely believed that clientelism-the giving of material goods in return for electoral support-is associated with poorer development outcomes. However, systematic cross-country evidence on the deleterious effects of clientelism on development outcomes is lacking. In this paper we examine...

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...

This paper is one of the first to systematically identify the relative influence of ethnic identity, campaign strategies of political parties' candidates , poverty, evaluations of public and private goods performance in making citizens turning new democracies into swing voters. It brings...

This document lists (a) every country in the eventual V-Dem database, (b) the years for which we have collect data or plan to collect data (in parentheses next to the entry); (c) the polities that comprise each country's 20th century history (even if falling outside the time-period that we wish...

Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, numerous scholars have found empirically that corruption decreases at high levels of democracy but actually increases at low levels. A key weaknesses of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship, however, is that...

This study takes a new tack on the question of modernization and democracy, focused on the outcome of theoretical interest. We argue that economic development affects the electoral component of democracy but has minimal impact on other components of this diffuse concept. This is so because...

The comparative politics literature is replete with cross-national studies of corruption, though the precise dimensions this term encompasses frequently remain unclear. According to an oft-cited definition by Robert Klitgaard (1998: 4), “corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus...

Over 90 percent of the world's states currently select their national leaders through multi-party elections. However, in Africa the quality of elections still varies widely, ranging from elections plagued by violence and fraud to elections that are relatively “free and fair”. The literature...

While the definition of extended conceptions of democracy has been widely discussed, the measurement of these constructs has not attracted similar attention. In this paper we present new measures of polyarchy, liberal democracy, deliberative democracy, egalitarian democracy, and participatory...