Measuring Symbolic Politics: New Data on Buildings & Monuments across the World

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III & Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III

Abstract

Constructing physical symbols for power, nations, or persons such as palaces, flags,
or statues, have been a feature of politics since ancient times. Why do governments
build such costly symbolic infrastructure and what are its political effects? System-
atic, data-based answers to these questions across countries and time periods have
been obstructed by the difficult measurement of symbolic infrastructure. To address
this problem, we collect original, highly detailed data on three ubiquitous features of
symbolic politics: All government and parliament buildings in use 1789 - 2021 as symbols for institutionalized power, all mega-flagpoles constructed globally since 1789 as symbols for the nation, and leader statues of all heads of state and government in power between 1960-2021 as symbols for the political importance of individual persons. We show that (1) that regimes legitimized through nationalist ideologies are more likely to build mega flagpoles, and (2) that personalism-based regimes are more likely to build statues of their leaders, and that (3) regimes with higher levels of corruption generally construct more and larger symbolic infrastructures.

Authors

• Jonas Willibald Schmid, Stockholm University

• Haakon Gjerløw, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• Felix Haass, University of Oslo

• Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo