Democracy,autocracy and the news: the impact of regime type on media freedom

Mass media is critical for the functioning of every contemporary political system. Thus, we can expect a variation in media freedom depending on the type of government since political regimes differ with regard to the political, legal and economic framework in which news coverage operates. This article investigates the effects of regime types, namely democracy and autocratic subtypes, on media freedom. It is argued that regime legitimation and governance are the driving forces behind diverging media policies in autocracies. From this theory, hypotheses regarding media freedom and regime type are derived and tested empirically, relying on statistical analyses that cover 149 countries over a period from 1993 to 2010. The empirical results demonstrate that democracies lead to significantly higher levels of media freedom than autocracies, with other things being equal. Within the autocratic spectrum, electoral autocracies, monarchies and military regimes have the freest media, whereas the most illiberal media can be found in communist ideocracies, where the ruling party holds a communication monopoly. Media freedom in personalist and non-ideological one-party regimes is on an intermediate level.     

An Experimental Test of Selectorate Theory

This article uses a laboratory experiment to test one of the main predictions of selectorate theory, that is, that democratic leaders invest more resources in public goods than autocratic leaders. The results of the experiment confirm this prediction and further show citizens are better off on average under democratic institutions than autocratic institutions. Meanwhile, autocratic leaders receive higher payoffs than democratic leaders. Additionally, this article attempts to bring domestic politics into international relations experimentation with a focus on how communication may allow democracies to organize more efficiently for war than autocracies. A game theoretical model shows democracies have the potential to organize optimally and use their citizens’ skills to their full advantage while autocracies do not. The results of the experiment reveal some evidence that democracies organize more efficiently than autocracies, but that this increased efficiency did not produce a higher percentage of conflict wins.     

Do multiparty elections improve human development in autocracies?

Improvements in human development under democratic institutions are often attributed to electoral contestation. We evaluate the effect of multiparty contestation on infant mortality in the authoritarian context. Contrary to what extant scholarship argues, we find no evidence that multiparty elections in authoritarian regimes reduce infant mortality. Specifically, we show that electoral autocracies do not produce better infant mortality outcomes compared to closed autocracies holding no multiparty elections. We also demonstrate a non-monotonic effect of electoral competition on infant mortality: Infant mortality increases in levels of electoral contestation common in electoral authoritarian regimes and decreases only at levels of contestation that are nearly exclusive to democracies. Finally, we show that increases in infant mortality in electoral authoritarian regimes operate partially through increased political violence and reduced state capacity.     

Political institutions and FDI inflows in autocratic countries*

ABSTRACT

Why do some autocratic countries attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) than others? Surprisingly, few studies have explored the considerable variation in FDI inflows to non-democratic countries. In this article, I argue that non-democratic countries with seemingly democratic political institutions, such as elected legislatures, attract more FDI inflow than others. This is because these institutions can (1) reduce the transaction costs of investment activities due to the relative transparency of the policy-making process, and (2) act as veto players, making the existing market-friendly policy changes difficult, and thus, promising a more stable investment environment. My empirical results support the main expectation that autocratic countries with legislatures attract more FDI than other autocratic countries, and the institutions’ effects are conditionally modified by the quality of market protecting institutions.     

Campaigning for Capital: Fair Elections and Foreign Investment in Comparative Perspective

This article makes several contributions to the literature on political risk and the determinants of capital inflows. First, I clarify the relationship between capital flows and democracy’s constituent parts in a way that takes arguments beyond aggregate democracy indicators and static political institutional structures. Specifically, I argue that fair elections signal government respect for democracy and the rule of law in a highly visible manner investors can access. I show how investors therefore use the fairness of elections as a way to assess political risk and to inform their investment strategies. However, the type of investment and the kinds of evidence of electoral misbehavior condition elections’ influence on capital flows. I also disaggregate capital flows into foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio investment. I argue that the logic of investing is different in the short term (portfolio) versus the long term (FDI). When it comes to political risk, I provide evidence that portfolio investment is much more sensitive to risk factors than FDI because of the relative ease with which portfolio investors can extricate themselves from an increasingly risky market and seek safer returns elsewhere compared to direct investors.     

Time for a haircut: political regimes and sovereign debt restructurings

ABSTRACT

Conventional wisdom claims that reputation leads sovereign states to full debt repayment. However, defaults are recurrent, some debtor countries take a lot of time to end them, and some extract costly concessions from investors. This article argues that these differences are largely explained by the political regimes in the borrowing countries. While previous research examines whether democracies make more credible commitments, we analyze how democracies affect bargaining with foreign investors after a default occurs. Democracies, with their institutional checks, electoral uncertainty, greater transparency, and public deliberation, make swift decision-making harder, create incentives to pander and posture, and give leverage to minimize the win set of viable agreements. We test our theory on a comprehensive dataset of debt restructurings with private creditors in the period 1975–2017. The event history analysis indicates that democracies experience longer restructurings and the double-hurdle regression analysis shows that democracies obtain larger creditor losses. Further, there is interesting variation among democracies and autocracies. Our findings suggest that political regimes are crucial to explaining why cooperation fails in international debt markets.     

Can I stay a BIT longer? The effect of bilateral investment treaties on political survival

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) have proliferated throughout the international system. While ostensibly commercial in purpose, do BITs have domestic political ramifications? I argue that BITs affect a leader’s tenure through their effect on the property rights environment in developing countries. BITs, by segmenting a country’s property rights environment for foreign and domestic firms, reduce the incentive for foreign firms to lobby for property rights protections in the host country thus leading to a stagnating domestic property rights environment. In autocracies, a stagnating domestic property rights regime benefits domestic business elites who can continue to stymie small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The political benefits of BITs, however, decrease as a country becomes more democratic. Using a dataset of developing country leaders over the period 1965-2011, I find support for my hypothesis that BITs are associated with a decreased hazard of losing office and that the effect diminishes with higher levels of democracy. My results highlight the consequences of the legalization of global investment on the domestic political economy.     

Foreign direct investment and the risk of regime transition in autocracies

Economic globalization and, in particular, foreign direct investment (FDI) have often been considered to be catalysts for economic reform and political liberalization. It is argued that openness to foreign investment spurs democratization by empowering pro-liberalization actors and undermining elite cohesion. This article explores and tests three alternative hypotheses linking FDI and autocratic regime survival. The liberalization hypothesis claims that FDI promotes democratization. The state-capture hypothesis suggests that FDI, by increasing the value of power, may raise the risk of an autocratic transition. Lastly, the stabilization hypothesis, contrary to the first two, claims that FDI can enhance dictatorships’ stability by opening new opportunities for distributing benefits to regime elites. The empirical analysis, covering about 100 countries for the time period 1970–2008, uses data on autocratic breakdowns and transition types to test the above hypotheses. The reported evidence does not support the liberalization or the state-capture hypothesis. FDI is found to reduce the likelihood of democratic transitions.     

Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.     

Autocracies,democracies, and the violation of civil liberties

Research on autocracies and their consequences has been a growth industry in the latest decade. Nonetheless, the relationship between the type of autocracy and the violation of civil liberties has largely been ignored. In this article, we employ a new dataset, which includes cross-temporal data on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly/association, freedom of religion, and freedom of movement, to shed light on this issue. Analysing 182 countries in the period 1979–2008, we show that democracies repress civil liberties less than autocracies do, whereas we find little evidence to the effect that different kinds of autocracies violate civil liberties to different degrees. However, we also show that the differences between democracies and autocracies have declined starkly since the Cold War. Finally, our results demonstrate that the difference in the extent to which democracies and autocracies repress civil liberties is larger for the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly/association than for the freedom of religion and freedom of movement. We take the general difference between the two categories of liberties as evidence that autocracies repress political liberties more than private liberties because the former presents levers for oppositional activity. We argue that the cross-temporal differences are a consequence of the spread of more minimalist democracies since the end of the Cold War.     

Watchdog or Lapdog? Media Freedom, Regime Type, and Government Respect for Human Rights

A main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to have government-controlled media, some democracies have government-controlled media, and some autocracies have free media. How this mismatch between regime type and media system influences government behavior is a puzzle worth exploring. One of the most widely criticized government behaviors is the violation of physical integrity rights. The question posed here is, how does media freedom affect government respect for these rights? In this article, I theorize that the relationship between media freedom and government respect for human rights differs, depending on the presence of democratic institutions. The findings support my premise. Specifically, the influence of media freedom on government respect for human rights is negative for the most autocratic regimes and positive for only the most democratic regimes .     

Elite Co-optation,Repression, and Coups in Autocracies

This article provides an explanation for the significant variation in coups in autocracies. The existing theoretical literature focuses on the strategies that leaders use to thwart mass mobilization and survive in power. However, most autocratic leaders lose power through a coup, indicating that the main threats to political survival in autocracies emerge from insiders and not from outside the incumbent coalition. This article focuses on leaders’ strategies to mitigate elite threats and argues that autocrats’ strategies of co-optation and repression within the ruling elite and the armed forces affect the risk of coups in opposite ways. Elected authoritarian legislatures are instruments that leaders employ to co-opt members of the incumbent coalition and are expected to decrease the likelihood of coups. In contrast, purges of insider actors constitute a repressive strategy that depletes bases of support and increases the risk of coups. We find empirical support for these hypotheses from a sample of all authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2004.     

Democracies only: When do IMF agreements serve as a seal of approval?

Conditional lending by the IMF is predicated, in part, on the belief that IMF programs are associated with increased capital inflows to participating countries. This belief is generally consistent with theoretical arguments in the academic literature (e.g., Bird and Rowlands 1997; Bordo et al. 2004) but the empirical literature often finds otherwise (e.g., Jensen 2004). This paper argues that the effect of IMF agreements on a country’s access to foreign direct investment (FDI) depends on its domestic institutions. Access to FDI depends on a country’s ability to credibly commit to implementation, and this ability varies systematically across regime type. The theory is empirically tested using a treatment effects model with a Markov transition in the treatment equation in a dataset covering 142 countries from 1976 to 2006. We find that in democracies IMF program participation has a strong positive effect on FDI inflows and in autocracies participation has a weak negative effect.     

Leadership Style, Regime Type, and Foreign Policy Crisis Behavior: A Contingent Monadic Peace?

While a substantial body of theory suggests that democracies should behave peacefully toward all states (monadically), most empirical evidence indicates they are only pacific in their relations with fellow democracies (dyadically). A new theoretical synthesis suggests that the missing link between democratic constraints and pacific monadic behavior is leaders' perceptions of, and responses to, these constraints. Research on political leadership indicates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, leaders respond in systematically different ways to domestic constraints: "constraint respecters" internalize constraints in their environments, while "constraint challengers" view such constraints as obstacles to be surmounted. An analysis of 154 foreign policy crises provides strong support for this contingent monadic thesis: democracies led by constraint respecters stand out as extraordinarily pacific in their crisis responses, while democracies led by constraint challengers and autocracies led by both types of leaders are demonstrably more aggressive.     

Endogenizing legislative candidate selection procedures in nascent democracies: evidence from Spain and Chile

This article contributes to filling a gap in the resurgent literature on legislative candidate selection procedures by analysing the adoption of such procedures in nascent democracies. We contend that within transitional systems distinct contexts constrain choice and bargaining for candidate selection procedures in different ways, and condition the adoption of legislative candidate selection procedures by parties. In particular we posit that the relative levels of uncertainty about the installation and continuance of democracy, strategic complexity of the electoral system, and party leadership autonomy, create incentives for the adoption of more or less inclusive candidate selection procedures. We evaluate our propositions based on evidence from the relevant political parties in Spain and Chile.     

Trade and investment: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue focuses on a variety of political-economy questions on trade and investment and is guided by a shared understanding that trade and investment processes can no longer be studied in isolation from each other. Three articles provide new insights into the study of the design of preferential trade agreements and effects thereof, two of which focus on the politically salient issues of non-trade concerns. A third one investigates which export sectors win from improved market access opportunities, in order words, how gains from trade are distributed. Two articles study the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system. One contribution is unpacking the role of the most important and influential firms and investors in affecting US behavior in WTO disputes, a second contribution studies how leadership changes in democracies and autocracies have different effects on dispute behavior. Finally, the special issue includes a new study on how the shadow economies in developing states are affected by the integration into the world economy (trade and investment) and by policy programs of the International Monetary Fund.     

Subverting autocracy: emancipative mass values in competitive authoritarian regimes

Competitive elections in authoritarian regimes are inherently ambiguous: do they extend regime persistence or, vice versa, operate as subversive events? This article tests Inglehart and Welzel's “emancipatory theory of democracy”, which has not been tested for competitive elections in autocracies: when emancipative values grow strong, autocratic power appears increasingly illegitimate in people's eyes, which motivates subversive mass actions against authoritarian rule. For electoral outcomes this suggestion implies, first, that authoritarian incumbents are more likely to suffer electoral defeat when emancipative values have become more widespread. Second, post-electoral protest against fraudulent elections is more likely when emancipative values have become more widespread. To test these hypotheses, we analyse 152 elections among 33 electoral authoritarian regimes over 21 years from 1990–2011. We find that emancipative values are indeed strongly conducive to incumbent defeat while their effect on post-electoral protest is conditional: it only occurs in elections won by the incumbent. These findings intertwine two separately developed literatures: one on authoritarian regime subversion and the other on emancipatory cultural change.