Taylor Richardson

Oakland University Honors College

trichardson2@oakland.edu

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE MACRO ECONOMY WHEN MEAURING DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING?

The importance of my project is to highlight factors of the macro economy and the other all impact these factors may have on the rate of executive aggrandizement counties may experience. This will be done through two sets of data collection for both violating and non violating countries applying the established economic factors to both groups and evaluating results.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years the wave of democracy has begun to decline. Following this decrease, the levels of executive aggrandizement found in counties around the world has begun to esculate with leaders tipping the scales of power by changing or removing political institutions meant to establish checks and balances. Leaders are increasingly changing their countries constitutions to further benefit there own power. Changes to the constitution are one of the first steps and most powerful when distinguish a country who may be exhibiting democratic backsliding. Within years time we would expect these countries to form some kind of autocratic regime following years of backsliding. The purpose of my study is to establish when leaders decide to make decision to change the constitution, there are many different factors of why a leader may choose to do so like neighboring conflict, civil rights conflict, and high levels of immigration but one of the most important factors and the one I've chosen to study is the state of the macroeconomy.

The economy is the baseline for class divisions, citizens way of life and well being, and how powerful a counties may be perceived by the world. For many counties, the state of the economy is the most important factor when making an major decision as we have seen in past, economic depression and inflation can cause wars and uprisings if not taken care of properly. Because of this i believe the state of the macro economy could be extremely important to measure why leaders may be persuaded to change term limits.

related studies

The economy always been a major factor in measuring the democracy of a country in terms of both the growth rate, size of the economy and rate of employment. Political scientists understand that the more money is in the pockets of the people, the more likely the county is democratic. But measuring the economy as an increasing/decreasing agent for executive aggrandizement is largely unexplored. We don't know the answer to our theory due leaders decision to engage in democratic backsliding being relatively mental, its not like leaders announce to the world today "I will change my term limits and here's why..." if only this was the case. Instead, I've had to look else where at related articles with a similar premises, all focused on executive aggrandizement but the results from changes to political institutions, the concept of affective political ties and prior partisanship before aggrandizement took place

Vanessa A. Boese, Amanda B. Edgell, Sebastian Hellmeier, Seraphine F. Maerz, and Staan I. Lindberg in collaboration with the Vdem report explores the concept of what distinguishes democracies that prevail against autocratization? This article breaks new ground by conceptualizing democratic resilience as a two-stage process, whereby democracies first exhibit resilience by avoiding autocratization altogether and second, by avoiding democratic breakdown given that autocratization has occurred. Using a selection-model, they simultaneously test for factors that make democracies more prone to experience democratic regression and, given this, factors that explain democratic breakdown.

Aykut Ozturk explore the conditions under which the strength of affective political ties leads to democratic backsliding. He established the concept of "affective political ties" as an umbrella term, including partisan identities, partisan emotions, and affective polarization. This helps reveals how interactions between various forms of affective political ties and political institutions condition the relationship between the strength of affective ties and democratic erosion.

Following the 2017 constitutional referendum under Partisi's (Justice and Development Party-AKP) rule in Turkey, the reforms granted judicial and legislative powers to the head of the executive under a presidential system. Fulya Apaydin,Ferit Serkan Öngel, and Erol Ülker paper finds that partisan identity moderates support for AKP's push for challenging the separation of powers and change in his own limits. The authors results found that persisting economic issues that delt with higher amounts of dept reduced workers support for AKP after realizing no change to public dept would be made. This article relates to how when the economy may be a worst state, leaders may still change the constitution in there favor despite the mass support.

Hypothesis / Hypotheses

While analyzing related studies I was able to build my hypothesis, Does macroeconomic performance affect the likelihood of executive aggrandizement? if other words when considering to change term limits do leaders look at the macro economy to make that decision. For example when countries experience high/low levels of inflation, is a leader more inclined to change term limits? Could change in the constitution regarding term limits happen more when citizens turn a blind eye because the economy is doing well? Or, do more leaders change limits when the economy is suffering and the leader's advocating only they can eliminate the problem by staying in office?

RESEARCH DESIGN

My research focuses on why presidents engage in aggrandizement and if the state of the economy has influence in this decision. But before I can study the economy I need to establish what countries engaged in term limit violated and those who did not. I gather information from a prior research paper by Kristin McKie establishing my two groups of 18 counties those who violated and those who did not.

To measure this I focused on 4 macroeconomic conditions, economic growth (GDP annual growth rate %), unemployment rate, merchandise trade and inflation rate (all based on GDP) gathering all of my data from the World Bank data base. For countries that engaged in some form of term limit change, I gather data from 2 years before. This way I could understand for the presidents that violated term limits what the state of the economy looked like before they made the decision a few years in advance and how they could have been influenced both positively (good economy) and negatively (worsting economy). For the other 18 countries, I had to incorporate the same ‘time dimension’. I gathered my data from McKie's list of presidents who did not change term limits and took the average of each term year for each different economic condition. This way I understand the macroeconomic state of the nation within that presidents term and established that when the economy was great/bad, why those presidents still decided not to engage in executive aggrandizement.

I understand that there are some rival factors in determining the strength of a counties reliance to backsliding that may need to be measured outside the realm of the economy. I have established two dummy variables, both being a measurement of a counties' domestic political aggrandizement, otherwise known as the rational in the presidency. My first rival hypothesis studies a country experience with civil wars or whether or not they have faced a coup. This will be measured from a binary scale of countries who have experienced domestic political aggrandizement as a “1” and those who haven't as a “0”. My second measurement is the same with binary scale of whether or not the countries part of the sample were once a dictatorship. This will be measured by “1” for counties that once were a dictatorship and “0” for those who were not.

RESULTS

While evaluating my data I examined various histograms and though many were consistent with little change in data between those who violated term limits and those who did not, one economic variable did stand out. Economic growth (GDP) supported my theory that leaders may change term limits when the economy is doing well, illustrated by the first table. This general change though small, can also be proven through a t-stat where economic growth has a small standard error and a pvalue of 0.05, this does not completely prove my theory though as the change is not great enough to be considered strong but may just be strong enough to reject the null hypothesis. This measurement of economic growth was the only one of my variables that exhibited any relationship that wasn't extremely weak.

Another histogram that caught my attention was a slight increase in the amount of violates that change term limits when counties is experiencing high levels of inflation. this contest with the results I found from economic growth, the information could allude to higher change in term limits when the counties is experiencing economic troubles, though shown my the t-stat there is little to no significance to this theory and the counties that have violated during high levels of inflation are outliers compared to the other counties. To further analysis my results I conduced a deeper study on the value changes when each economic factor may increase by one through a regression table.

This table further explains that the relationship between variables is not statistically significant. Even when we account for rival factors like coups or a history of dictatorships the data illustrates that leaders may not take into account the state of the macro economy when decided whether or not they will expand term limits. This doesn't mean that leaders don't consider the economy though. When looking at the rate of economic growth there is clearly some significant illustrating a pvalue of 0.09, even when this information is above our 0.05 p value threshold, the data is strong enough that we may consider the information to explain why leaders may change term limits when the economy is doing well.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

My conclusion is that my hypothesis is not statistically significant, this doesn't mean there's not some kind of relationship though! At least one of my factors can be considered to be significant with a semi weak relationship, still there is a relationship that can be established both on its own, when we account countries who have violated and not, and when accounting for rival factors. To test a leaders decision making at this level we also have to take into account that this is all relative and cannot be precisely measured, given this information the overall conclusion that can be made is that leaders tend to change term limits when the economy is exhibiting positive growth. Of courses this conclusion can always be expanded on.

More research needs to be done including an expanded focus group, the entire list of McKie's list, as well as a change to the economic factors measured. By analyzing a bigger group, more economies are being measured which will always bring better results to the research. I believe some changes need to be made to the factors included in my measurement of the economy. I may want to establish a better ways to test my hypothesis, clearly there is a correlation just not a strong relationship.