Democratic Legacies: Developing a Measure of Democratic Stock

• In Event: New Methods and Measurement Strategies in the Study of Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

Prior experiences under democratic rule have enduring legacies for subsequent regimes and political outcomes of interest. Several recent studies demonstrate the importance of accumulated democratic experience on economic growth and human development. Others argue that experience with competitive politics under authoritarianism promotes democratization. To date, however, measuring the legacies of democratic rule has posed statistical and conceptual challenges. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. The measure captures greater nuance in the degree to which individuals within a polity experience the five institutional guarantees for polyarchy first identified by Dahl. This allows states that fall below conventional thresholds of democracy on dichotomous measures to nonetheless accumulate democratic stock during periods where the authoritarian regime allows greater access to these institutional guarantees. It also avoids some of the pitfalls made by previous measures of democratic stock using the Polity IV index. We demonstrate the usefulness of this measure by exploring two questions common in the literature: What effect do democratic legacies have on economic development? Does prior democratic experience have an effect on regime change, both in the form of democratization and autocratization?

Authors

• Amanda B. Edgell, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

• Sandra Grahn, University of Gothenburg

• Matthew Charles Wilson, University of South Carolina

• Vanessa Alexandra Boese