Research

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.

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.

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.

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), but also introduce a novel measure of congruence that captures differences in the nationalization of the parties across two chambers (nationalization congruence). We investigate cross-country and over-time variations of these measures and demonstrate that the powers of upper chambers (symmetry) are related to both types of congruence. Moreover, we apply our measures to understand how the interaction between congruence and symmetry—the two key dimensions of bicameralism—influence policymaking, focusing on government spending patterns. We find that partisan congruence and nationalization congruence have contrasting implications for government spending when the upper chamber is powerful, but have negligible implications when the upper chamber plays a less influential role in the policymaking process.

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.

Read the working paper HERE.

Contemporary autocracies are characterized by increasing personalization of power in the hands of the leader. However, little is known about how these personalist regimes function to remain in power, especially beyond the documented use of repression. Here we contribute to the knowledge of these types of dictatorships by focusing on their use of indoctrination, the intentional state control of the education system, and the use of media propaganda. Our analyses use novel, expert-coded data on indoctrination and confirm that personalist regimes heavily rely on indoctrination as a tool of political control. These findings contribute to the scholarly debate about whether repression substitutes or complements the use of other tactics of political control. Further, the results shed light on the time horizon personalist leaders have, as the use of indoctrination —especially through education—highlights a long-term strategy to build resilient mass support for the regime.  

I examine how two key dimensions of party systems—their degree of institutionalization and nationalization—shape the provision of public goods in democracies. Party system institutionalization enhances the capacity of parties to sustain the type of intertemporal coordination that is necessary for the effective provision of public goods, whereas party system nationalization incentivizes public goods provision by broadening the scope of the constituencies that parties cater to. Given that these mechanisms are distinct, I argue that different levels of party system institutionalization and nationalization should have disparate implications for the provision of public goods. In support, I demonstrate that while party system institutionalization and nationalization are both necessary for increasing the supply of national policies, the former is more important for generating higher quality and more equitable public service outcomes

Party system institutionalization (PSI) is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but autocracies have also developed novel types of party systems as they have increasingly come to rely on elections and parties to consolidate power. However, there has been little study of whether or how the stability and predictability of party systems may matter in autocracies. In this paper, I use a Bayesian latent variable measurement approach to develop a novel measure of PSI that covers 142 countries from 1975 to 2019. I then apply the measure to explore the short-term and long-term implications that PSI may have for the durability of regimes across regime types and over time.

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 on education systems, 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 more general guidelines for dataset creators and users aimed at enhancing transparency, replicability, and valid inferences in the social sciences.

Autocratic regimes use multifaceted strategies to maintain power, which include repression, co-optation, and indoctrination. Each strategy has distinct consequences and costs, but existing studies tend to examine each strategy in isolation and little work examines the relationship between these strategies or which of these strategies is most effective for ensuring regime survival. Furthermore, indoctrination remains relatively understudied as a tool of political control in the literature, partly due to the absence of reliable cross-national data. This paper fills this gap by drawing on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and the novel Varieties of Indoctrination (V-Indoc) dataset to establish a comprehensive dataset that covers the use of six political control strategies across 102 countries and 226 autocracies regimes from 1946-2010. Using this data, we demonstrate that there is considerable variation in the use of strategies of political control both across and within regimes. We also apply an ensemble Bayesian model stacking approach to show that indoctrination strategies outperform the other strategies in predicting patterns of regime breakdown.

Theories of nation and state-building have long argued that the threat of external and internal conflicts is linked to the timing of the expansion of state compulsory education as a means of building citizen compliance. We update these theories to make them applicable to the post-World War II context where most states already offer compulsory state education. Using novel expert-coded data on patriotic education, we show how autocracies, more so than democracies, are better able to capitalize on the threat of external conflict to generate the necessary consensus to push through reforms increasing the emphasis on patriotic education. Our findings show, how in the era of mass provision of compulsory state education, external threat continues to be used as an excuse to politicize education thus allowing for the investment in building the future political support of citizens, but only by established autocracies. We argue that for modern autocratic regimes, patriotic education is best understood as a long-term `investment' strategy for already consolidated regimes.