Research

Assembling datasets is crucial for advancing social science research, but researchers who construct datasets often face difficult decisions with little guidance. Once public, these datasets are sometimes used without proper consideration of their creators’ choices and how these affect the validity of inferences. To support both data creators and data users, we discuss the strengths, limitations, and implications of various data collection methodologies and strategies, showing how seemingly trivial methodological differences can significantly impact conclusions. The lessons we distill build on the process of constructing three cross-national datasets on education systems. Despite their common focus, these datasets differ in the dimensions they measure, definitions of key concepts, coding thresholds and other assumptions, types of coders, and sources. From these lessons, we develop and propose general guidelines for dataset creators and users aimed at enhancing transparency, replicability, and valid inferences in the social sciences.

We compare the nature of party systems across bicameral legislatures using newly available data on upper chamber elections. We examine the similarity in the composition of political parties between the lower and upper chambers (partisan congruence) and introduce a novel measure that captures differences in the nationalization of parties between the two chambers (nationalization congruence). We explore variations in these measures across countries and over time and demonstrate that the power of the upper chamber (symmetry) is linked to both forms of congruence. Moreover, we apply these measures to understand how the interaction between congruence and symmetry—two key dimensions of bicameralism—influences policymaking, focusing on government spending patterns. Our findings reveal that partisan and nationalization congruence can have contrasting implications for government spending in symmetric bicameral systems but have negligible implications in asymmetric bicameral systems.

Party system institutionalization (PSI) is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracy. However, the systematic study of PSI in democracies is constrained by weaknesses in existing measures, which are limited in coverage or comprehensiveness, and do not account for the latent nature of the concept, measurement error, and non-random missing data. This article presents a novel measure of PSI that uses a Bayesian latent variable measurement strategy to overcome extant measurement issues. The subsequent measure not only offers unmatched coverage and has demonstrated validity, but also exhibits more robust empirical associations with a range of outcomes related to the performance of democracy than existing measures. The measure should facilitate more integrated research on the causes and consequences of PSI in democracies around the world.

For many decades, scholars have assumed that voluntary compliance and citizens’ commitment to a regime’s principles and values are critical for regime stability. A growing literature argues that indoctrination is essential to achieve this congruence. However, the absence of a clear definition and comprehensive comparative measures of indoctrination have hindered systematic research on such issues. In this paper, we fill this gap by synthesizing literature across disciplines to clarify the concept of indoctrination, focusing particularly on the politicization of education and the media. We then outline how the abstract concept can be operationalized, and introduce and validate an original expert-coded dataset on indoctrination that covers 160 countries from 1945 to the present. The dataset should facilitate a new generation of empirical inquiry on the causes and consequences of indoctrination.

Party system institutionalization is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non-democratic systems has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate whether the concept has meaningful and perhaps unique implications for the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that electoral volatility—the most common measure of party system institutionalization in democracies—conveys useful information in competitive authoritarian contexts by signaling the ability of the ruling party to manage the opposition, but note that it needs to be refined to be applicable to such contexts. To this end, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility, and further divide opposition party volatility into Type-A and Type-B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party’s seat share are accompanied by opposition party Type-B volatility. This paper demonstrates that the concept of party system institutionalization can be useful for making sense of regime dynamics even in non-democratic contexts.

In this article, I present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that focuses on the competition for majority control in legislative elections to explain how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of the national subsidy in South Korea. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Presidents are also anticipated to respond to the electoral cycle by shifting subsidies to riskier municipalities when elections approach. Using a novel data set on national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in favor of the hypotheses. This article demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives.

How do autocrats establish political control? Understanding the strategies autocrats use to generate mass compliance and elite loyalty remains a central question in comparative politics. Despite substantial scholarship on this topic, ongoing research underscores a need to develop more comprehensive accounts of how autocrats across diverse contexts and time periods combine different strategies of political control or which strategies might be more important for explaining regime durability. This article advances this line of research by integrating data from the Varieties of Democracy and Varieties of Indoctrination datasets to systematically map the use of six key strategies related to repression, co-optation, and indoctrination across 229 regimes from 1946 to 2010. We then apply model-based clustering and Bayesian model stacking methods to uncover common patterns in the deployment of these strategies and identify the set of strategies that best predicts regime breakdown. The paper's rich data, empirical approach, and findings provide a foundation for more integrated inquiries into autocratic regime performance and longevity.

Conflict over the distribution of power within a leadership group is a central feature of authoritarian politics. In contemporary autocracies power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the leader. Studies have explored how personalization shapes the use of repression. We know less about how the personalization of power shapes strategies of information control that generate voluntary compliance within society. To gain leverage on this question, we combine data on gradations of personalism with novel data on state control over education and the media across 212 authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2010. We show that in the process of concentrating power leaders not only increase state control over education and the media but also crucially shape their content to indoctrinate. Findings answer several calls to move beyond the study of repression for understanding the politics of non-democracies and have implications for research on personalism and authoritarian politics.

Recent studies show that the spread of democracy rarely led to the expansion of primary schooling because non-democracies already provided high quantities of it. Still, it is possible that democratization did impact other aspects of education systems, such as the content of education or the politicization of teaching jobs. Studying this cross-nationally has been infeasible due to data limitations. We address this gap using an original dataset that contains information about these aspects of education for 160 countries from 1945-2021. We document that transitions to democracy are often preceded by a decline in the politicization of education content and teaching jobs. However, soon after democratization occurs, this decline usually halts. Counterfactual estimates suggest that democratization roughly halves the degree to which teacher hiring and firing decisions are politicized, but has a smaller impact on the content of education. The empirical patterns that we uncover introduce important puzzles for future research.

I investigate how the interplay between two key dimensions of party systems—their degree of institutionalization and nationalization—shape the provision of public services in democracies. Party system institutionalization (PSI) enhances the ability of parties to sustain intertemporal coordination, whereas party system nationalization (PSN) shapes the geographic interests that parties represent. Given that these mechanisms are distinct, I argue that different configurations of PSI and PSN should have disparate consequences for policymaking and policy outcomes. Based on a study of 96 democracies from 1945 to 2018, I demonstrate that PSI and PSN are both necessary for increasing the supply of national policies, but that the former is more important for generating higher-quality public service outcomes. In a supplementary analysis, I demonstrate how party institutionalization and PSI can have divergent implications for the provision of public services, highlighting the need to disentangle the characteristics of individual parties and the party system when explaining key outcomes.

Theories of nation-building suggest that military conflict led to the expansion of compulsory education as part of broader efforts to foster citizen loyalty. In the post-World War II era, when access to education is nearly universal, the question shifts to whether and how conflict impacts educational content. Drawing on an expert-coded dataset covering education content worldwide from 1945 to 2021, we show that militarized, interstate disputes increase the politicization of education, particularly through the expansion of patriotic and political content. This effect is concentrated in consolidated autocracies with centralized policy authority. In these settings, educational reforms reflect deliberate strategies of ideological indoctrination and represent long-term investments to bolster regime stability and entrench power, rather than short-term responses to conflict. The paper's findings advance understanding of how growing international insecurity can lead modern states to politicize education.

The analysis of party systems has been central to the comparative study of democracies. However, many autocracies have also developed party systems as they have increasingly come to rely on elections and parties to consolidate power. Despite this trend, investigations into whether and how party systems might shape political outcomes in non-democratic settings remain limited. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining whether party system institutionalization (PSI)—long recognized as a key underpinning of democratic performance and stability—might also help explain regime durability in autocracies, and how it can cast long shadows that influence party system developments even after a transition to democracy. To this end, I construct a Bayesian latent variable measure of PSI that covers 142 countries from 1975 to 2019. I then apply the measure to explore the short- and long-term implications of PSI across regime types, offering new insights into the role and importance of party systems in non-democratic contexts.

This comparative study examines the co-evolution of three pivotal dimensions of party systems that shape democratic political landscapes in distinct but interconnected ways: institutionalization, nationalization, and polarization. While much of the existing literature examines these dimensions in isolation or narrowly focuses on specific cases or regions, we integrate novel data to present an overarching overview of party systems that covers a global sample of democracies from 1970 to 2018. We then employ growth mixture model techniques to identify common trajectories of party system developments over time and link these to long-term levels of democracy. Additionally, we use Bayesian stacking analysis to investigate which party system dimension best predicts occurrences of democratic backsliding. Our findings offer important insights into the role of specific features of political parties—long considered to be the bulwarks of democracy—in shaping the fortunes and resilience of contemporary democracies across diverse political contexts.