Assignments

• Today
  • VDem (2024); pages 9-45 (Interactive visualization)
  • Garcia-Ponce and Wantchekon (2023)
• Thursday (3/14)
  • Hassan et al. (2022)
  • Lebas and Young (2023)

Agenda

1. V-Dem
2. Garcia-Ponce and Wantchekon
3. Final Project Essentials: Interaction terms

Polyarchy (Dahl, 1972)

Polyarchy is about the degree of political competition

• Democracy is an ideal too tough to define
• Instead, he describes procedures that make countries more/less democratic
• Contestation and inclusiveness allow for competition over power
• Competition makes governments accountable to citizens

Polyarchy (Dahl, 1972)

Polyarchy (Dahl, 1972)

Benefits of Democracy

Causal effects of regime-type are difficult, but…

• Higher economic growth
• Lower poverty (famines)
• Fewer international conflicts

Waves of Democracy

Varieties of Democracy

• Governance characteristics scored based on expert opinion
• 25 country experts (2/3 local and 1/3 foreign)
• 500+ indicators
• Sophisticated methods of aggregating into indices and estimating uncertainty across coders
• Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, Autocracy

Varieties of Democracy

How is governance changing?

Ongoing transitions across regions

How is governance changing?

How is governance changing?

Most deterioration seen on:

How is governance changing?

Broad trends

Critiques of VDem: Little & Meng

Incumbents are losing elections

Critiques of VDem: Little & Meng

Incumbents are losing elections

Critiques of VDem: Little & Meng

Mixed evidence on attacks on journalists

Defense of VDem

Defense of VDem

Defense of VDem

Lots of new anti-NGO laws

Why countries Democratize

• Correlation between income and democracy
  • Modernization theory: wealth, education, and urbanization are associated with democratization
• Why might this be true?

Context

• Anti-colonial movements chose between two strategies:
  • Rural insurgency
  • Urban protest
• Democratization was delayed by the Cold War

Theory

Why does opposition strategy affect democratization decades later?

Findings

Threats to inference

• Things that affect whether or not opposition uses insurgency vs protest might also affect current levels of democracy

Identification

• Covariates
• Sensitivity analysis
• Difference-in-Differences
  • Leverages changes within countries over time
  • Before the end of the cold war, groups look similar
  • After the end of the cold war, groups trend away from each other
• Instrumental Variables
  • Leverages ‘plausibly exogeneous’ variation in terrain
  • Terrain predicts strategy choice

Instrumental Variable

Mechanisms: Institutions

We do not seen an impact of Post-WWII Opposition Strategy on Post-1990 Institutions

Mechanisms: Behavior

Policy Implications

• Historical social movements help understand the link between structural conditions and democratic development
• Non-violent collective action appears critical for the establishment of lasting democracy

Interaction Terms

What is an interaction term?

• Simple linear models assume that the effect of predictors is independent of other factors
• Interaction terms allow us to estimate the difference in the slope of a predictor across unit characteristics

\[ Y_i = \alpha + \beta_1 X_{i1} + \beta_2 X_{i2} + \beta_3 X_{i1}*X_{i2} + \epsilon_i \]

Interaction Terms

What are interaction terms used for?

• Heterogeneous effects
• Difference-in-differences

Example: Continuous outcome with two binary predictors

• \(\alpha\): Intercept when \(X_{i1}\) and \(X_{i2}\) are 0
• \(\beta_1\) Slope when \(X_{i2} = 0\)
• \(\beta_2\) Difference in \(\alpha\) between \(X_{i2}=0\) and \(X_{i2}=1\)
• \(\beta_3\) Difference in \(\beta_1\) between \(X_{i2}=0\) and \(X_{i2}=1\)