Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy and Democratic Backsliding

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel takes up a topic of perennial interest to political scientists: how to conceptualize and measure democracy. In line with the APSA 2021 theme of “Promoting Pluralism,” our panel bridges the subfields of American, comparative, and international politics to shed fresh light on this topic. It also brings together scholars at diverse ranks and at academic institutions from diverse locations globally.

Two of our panel’s papers address the topic of democratic backsliding. Grumbach takes a within-country approach, developing new measures of democratic performance for fifty American states. His study reveals the partisan drivers of democratic expansion and contraction in the United States, which are rooted in party elites’ racial, geographic, and group-based incentives. Meyerrose looks cross-nationally, offering a new conceptualization of democratic backsliding that emphasizes the erosion of institutional checks on executive power. She then develops an original variable to measure this concept over time and across countries. Our panel will offer an opportunity to explore commonalities and differences in terms of how to study democratic backsliding within and across countries.

The other two papers explore regime types. Maerz and coauthors present research on episodes of regime transformations since 1900, which include transitions both to and away from democracy. Bush and Platas study how assessments of democracy are produced, showing how raters’ national identities affect how they conceptualize and measure democracy and, in turn, how their identities affect whether democracy assessments are perceived as authoritative by experts. Whereas the first study is global in scope, the second focuses in particular on the hybrid regime of Uganda, again offering a chance for studies making different kinds of comparison to be in dialog.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding - Jake M Grumbach, Princeton University

• Assessing Regime Transformation as Episodes of Democratization & Autocratization - Amanda B. Edgell, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

• Democratic Backsliding: Linking Globalization & Democratic Institutional Strength - Anna M. Meyerrose, Princeton University

• Who Rates? Identity, Bias, and Democracy Ratings - Sarah S. Bush, Yale University; Melina Raquel Platas Izama, NYU Abu Dhabi

Chair

• Hillel David Soifer Temple University

Discussants

• Michael K. Miller George Washington University

• John Gerring University of Texas, Austin