The simplification of the political landscape in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’ is common across most democracies, if not most of the world. This would suggest that the terminology has a shared core ...meaning in different political contexts. While no such stable element has been established in the political science literature, various potential dividing lines that may form the core meaning have been proposed. This paper is the most extensive comparative study to our knowledge that evaluates these proposals by studying responses to open‐ended survey questions on what voters associate with the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. Data from eight different democratic political contexts are analysed using quantitative text analysis methods. The results demonstrate varied support for the different explanations. Evidence is found in all contexts for the hypothesis that acceptance of inequality divides left‐ from right‐wing politics. That the left‐right dimension is a divide between those for and against government intervention in the economy, or between those for change and against change, is mostly congruent with our findings. We find less evidence that either secular/religious divisions, or different conceptions of equality, consistently differentiate left from right. Our findings point towards the existence of a context‐independent underlying dimension of left‐right competition.
The rise of China as a "non-traditional" development partner has been one of the most important phenomena in the field over the past decade. The lack of transparency in Chinese development projects, ...coupled with an uninterested stance towards governance, lead many to wonder if Chinese engagement will contribute to or undermine existing development efforts. This paper adds to the debate by inquiring as to the relationship of Chinese development efforts with perceptions of, and experiences with, corruption when projects are closely-located to those from a traditional donor, the World Bank. Taking advantage of spatial data, the paper evidences an association between the location of a larger number of Chinese projects and higher experiences with and, to some extent, perceptions of corruption when accounting for co-located World Bank projects. Likewise, while World Bank projects are associated with lower levels of corruption in the absence of Chinese projects, this relationship disappears when Chinese projects are nearby. However, these relationships only hold for Chinese projects which are not "aid-like," suggesting that the differentiation of Chinese overseas flows is an important consideration when studying China as a development partner.
How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime ...types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.
The idea that democracy is contagious, that democracy diffuses across the world map, is now well established among policy makers and political scientists alike. The few theoretical explanations of ...this phenomenon focus exclusively on political elites. This article presents a theoretical model and accompanying computer simulation that explains the diffusion of democracy based on the dynamics of public opinion and mass revolutions. On the basis of the literature on preference falsification, cascading revolutions, and the social judgment theory, an agent-based simulation is developed and analyzed. The results demonstrate that the diffusion of attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolutions, is indeed a possible theoretical explanation of the spatial clustering of democracy.
The outcomes of two recent Irish referendums - on marriage equality in 2015 and abortion in 2018 - have placed contemporary Irish voters in sharp contrast with their long-standing conservative ...Catholic reputation. These referendums also stand out internationally because of an associated deliberative innovation. This paper aims to explain the watershed abortion vote drawing on theories of generational change, issue-voting, cue-taking and deliberative democracy, using data from an exit poll at the 2018 abortion referendum. We show that cleavage and age effects are key to understanding the referendum outcome. These results offer insight into how societal processes such as rapid secularisation, generational replacement and democratic innovations shape politics. Moreover, voters who were aware of the deliberative innovation were more likely to support the liberal referendum option. To increase willingness to deviate from the status quo, engaging citizens actively in the debate is a fruitful approach.
Abstract
The study of international relations by definition deals with interdependencies among countries. One form of interdependence between countries is the diffusion of country-level features, ...such as policies, political regimes, or conflict. In these studies, the outcome variable tends to be categorical, and the primary concern is the clustering of the outcome variable among connected countries. Statistically, such clustering is studied with spatial econometric models. This article instead proposes the use of a statistical network approach to model diffusion with a binary outcome variable. Using a statistical network instead of spatial econometric models allows for modeling autocorrelation in policy outcomes rather than the corresponding latent variable, and it simplifies the inclusion of temporal dynamics, higher level interdependencies, and interactions between network ties and country-level features. In our simulations, the performance of the Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model (SAOM) estimator is evaluated. Our simulation results show that spatial parameters and coefficients on additional covariates in a static binary spatial autoregressive model are accurately recovered when using SAOM. To demonstrate this model, the paper applies SAOM to original data on the international diffusion of same-sex marriage and gives practical instructions for using such models.
This paper considers the extent to which the ‘Aid for Trade’ (AfT) initiative has been effective in promoting improved export outcomes at the firm level. Specifically, the paper uses geo-referenced ...data on AfT projects from the AidData database and firm activity from a survey of nearly 150 exporting firms in Nepal to spatially identify impacts of the projects on export performance. We find qualified evidence that proximity to (more) AfT projects improves export performance but that some projects may be more effective than others. These findings are supplemented by interviews with 21 exporting firms. The results suggest that the research approach could be utilized more broadly to draw more generalized conclusions about AfT and firm export performance.
Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational ...regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.
ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper is to provide a cohesive description and a critical comparison of the main estimators proposed in the literature for spatial binary choice models. The properties of ...such estimators are investigated using a theoretical and simulation study, followed by an empirical application. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper that provides a comprehensive Monte Carlo study of the estimators' properties. This simulation study shows that the Gibbs estimator performs best for low spatial autocorrelation, while the recursive importance sampler performs best for high spatial autocorrelation. The same results are obtained by increasing the sample size. Finally, the linearized general method of moments estimator is the fastest algorithm that provides accurate estimates for low spatial autocorrelation and large sample size.
Many comparative scholars classify personalist regimes as a distinct category of nondemocratic rule. To measure the process of regime personalization, and to distinguish such a process from overall ...authoritarian reversal, is difficult in comparative context. Using the Russian political regime in 1999-2014 as a case study, we examine the dynamics of regime personalization over time. Relying on original data on patron-client networks and expert surveys assessing the policy influence of the key members of the ruling coalition, we argue that having more clients, or clients who are more powerful, increases the power of patrons - and that where the patron is the ruler, the resulting measure is an indication of the level of personalization of the regime. We trace regime personalization from the changes in political influence of the president's associates in his patron-client network versus that of other elite patron-client networks. We find that as early as 2004, the Russian regime can be regarded as personalist, and is strongly so from 2006 onward.
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