Independent judges are thought to promote democratic regime survival by allowing perceived violations of rules limiting arbitrary power to be challenged non-violently in a fair setting, governed by transparent rules. Yet, judges are often subjected to public shaming and politically motivated...

What citizens hold their political representatives accountable for in the era of democratic elections, constitutes one important set of incentives for politicians in a time of competitive elections. Based on a pre-election survey carried out in Ghana in August 2008, this study finds that 70% of...

This study seeks to establish the composition of one key political institution (the office of Member of Parliament of Ghana-MPG) in one African country (Ghana) in terms of both the formal rules and the informal norms, and to explore the relationship between the composition of the institution and...

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project is generating a new dataset of indicators for various facets of democracy. Although many of the indicators are quite useful by themselves, most users of V-Dem data probably require measures of democracy at a higher level of aggregation.This paper...