Research

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.

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Party system institutionalization is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but much of our understanding of this relationship remains disjoint and inconclusive due to unresolved conceptual, measurement, and data challenges. In this article, I focus the concept on the establishment and entrenchment of the rules that govern interparty competition, and construct a corresponding measure that covers 96 post-WWII democracies using a Bayesian latent variable measurement model, which enables me to account for measurement uncertainty and non-random missing data. The resulting measure not only has unmatched coverage and demonstrated validity, but also better corroborates theoretical expectations than existing measures. The conceptual approach and accompanying measure presented in this article should contribute to the advancement of systematic understandings about the causes and consequences of party system institutionalization across a global sample of democracies.

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.

Read the working paper HERE.

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.

Read the working paper HERE.

Against the conventional wisdom that the spread of democracy was a leading driver of the expansion of primary schooling, recent studies show that democratization in fact did not lead to an average increase in primary school enrollment rates. One reason for this null effect is that there was already considerable provision of primary education before democratization. Still, it is possible that the spread of democracy did improve other characteristics of education systems, such as the content of education and the extent to which teaching jobs are politicized. Studying this cross-nationally has not been possible due to data limitations. To address this gap, we take advantage of a new dataset covering 160 countries from 1945 to 2021 that contains information about education indoctrination and the politicization of the teaching career. We document that transitions to democracy tend to be preceded by a decline in the degree of indoctrination that occurs in schools and in the politicization of teaching jobs. However, soon after democratization occurs, this decline either halts or, in some cases, partially reverses.

Read the working paper HERE.

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 required for establishing a policymaking environment that promotes public goods expenditures, party system institutionalization seems to be more important for generating actual improvements in public goods outcomes.