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.     

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 .     

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.     

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.     

Political Investment Cycles in Democracies and Autocracies

Extant research has shown considerable interest in whether host countries’ political uncertainty impedes foreign direct investment (FDI). Building upon the scholarly consensus on the adverse impact of political uncertainty on FDI, this article demonstrates that the extent to which investment climates are unpredictable varies cyclically, on the basis of election timing in democracies and leadership turnover in autocracies. The empirical results show that in presidential democracies, FDI tends to slowly increase after an executive election and then decline as the next executive election nears. However, I find that an electoral investment cycle is not found in parliamentary democracies where election timing is irregular, less predictable, and endogenous to domestic economic conditions. I also find that a similar political investment cycle exists in autocracies not through electoral cycle but through leadership tenure cycle. The level of FDI inflows tends to be relatively low early in autocrats’ tenure when political uncertainty is high and rise as autocratic leadership tenure increases over time but eventually wane again as autocratic leadership is destabilized in the late period of power transition. The findings indicate the existence of heterogeneous political investment cycles, depending on regime type.     

Machiavelli's Legacy: Domestic Politics and International Conflict

Research examining the effect of regime type on conflict has focused on the democracy/autocracy continuum expounded in the political philosophies of liberal thinkers such as Kant and Schumpeter. While this concentration has yielded impressive results (democratic peace), it seems plausible that other conceptions of regime type may yield similar success. This paper examines the philosophy of Machiavelli and develops a measure of his "imperial regimes." These states, which can either be democratic or autocratic, should exhibit an increased propensity to initiate international conflict. Testing this contention in Renaissance Italy (1250–1494) and the modern international system (1920–1992), this paper finds strong empirical support. Machiavelli's views illuminate key differences between democracies and autocracies that have been previously overlooked. Thus, it deepens rather than replaces our conception of how domestic institutions affect international conflict.     

Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices

States that choose to involve themselves in an ongoing dispute do so by choosing to align with or against one of the original disputants. What factors lead states to prefer to help one side over the other? We consider the effect of the disputants' power, political and economic institutional similarities between each disputant and the aligning state, and formal alliance commitments between each disputant and the aligning state on these alignment choices. We evaluate these expectations empirically by examining the alignment choices of states that joined with one side or another in a Militarized Interstate Dispute during the period of 1816 to 1986. The results indicate that regardless of regime type, institutional similarities matter to the aligning state's decision. We also find that power concerns matter only to autocracies; democracies do not seem to base their alignment choices on the power of the sides in the dispute. Finally, the evidence indicates that the alignment choices of democracies cannot be anticipated by their prior alliance commitments, although the alignment choices of autocracies can. These results suggest interesting implications for research on the democratic peace, the determinants of threat in the international system, and the impact of selection effects. The consistent empirical evidence that institutional similarity affects alignment decisions also increases our confidence that future investigations of institutional similarity generally, rather than an exclusive focus on joint democracy, will prove fruitful.     

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.     

Do governments mean business when they derogate? Human rights violations during notified states of emergency

Whether international human rights treaties constrain the behavior of governments is a hotly contested issue that has drawn much scholarly attention. The possibility to derogate from some, but not all, of the rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) during declared and officially notified states of emergency provides a hitherto unexplored test case. If governments were increasingly violating non-derogable rights during derogation periods then this provides evidence that the ICCPR has no sufficient constraining effect on state parties. I analyze whether specific individual human rights as well as two aggregate rights measures are systematically more violated during derogation periods in a global sample over the period 1981 to 2008. I find that regime type matters: autocracies step up violation of both non-derogable and derogable rights, anocracies increasingly violate some derogable and some non-derogable rights, whereas democracies see no statistically significant change in their human rights behavior during derogation periods. This result suggests that the main general international human rights treaty fails to achieve its objective of shielding certain rights from derogation where, as in autocracies and anocracies, a constraining effect would be needed most.     

Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force: A Research Note

This study represents an attempt at further developing the diversionary theory of force. The analysis covers the period 1949 to 1994 using a simultaneous system of equations that treat presidential approval and force as endogenous variables. After controlling for opportunities and Soviet/Russian crisis behavior, the model reveals a rally effect and that unemployment has a positive effect on force levels. I discuss how presidential decisions to divert are made in the context of poliheuristic decision processing.     

Give them toys? Military allocations and regime stability in transitional democracies

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that democratization reduces coups, 46% of coups targeted democracies from 2000–2009, twice the rate seen in the prior half-century. Efforts to explain coups have arrived at wildly varied conclusions regarding the vulnerability of democracies. We argue that this is attributable to regime type acting as a conditional influence. We theorize that democratization incentivizes old elites to veto the process, and these vetoes are more likely to occur when the new regime cannot credibly commit to the military’s corporate interests. Using cross-national data for 172 states for the years 1952–2009, we find that though young democracies are more vulnerable to coups than either civilian authoritarian regimes or older democracies, this vulnerability is mitigated when military expenditures are near or above the sample mean. We also find that commonly argued determinants of coups appear to be driven by their influence in democracies, suggesting the need for scholars to revisit commonly held assumptions regarding autocratic survival.     

What Determines Military Victory? Testing the Modern System

This paper assesses the relative importance of force employment as a cause of military victory. It focuses on the adoption of the modern system in interstate wars since 1917. Using cases, contingency tables, and regression analysis, we find that war participants who use the modern system are significantly more likely to succeed in decisive battlefield engagements. However, the modern system does not predict victory at a higher rate than more traditional unit-level explanations for combat effectiveness, suggesting that it might function as a causal mechanism linking factors like regime type and material endowments with martial capabilities. Exploring the possible links between unit-level explanations of military power and the organizational-level force employment indicators, we find that more materially powerful states and democracies tend to implement the modern system at a higher rate than other types of actors, but more extreme autocracies also frequently adopt. Combined, these findings suggest the relevance of continuing to explore how organizational-level variables impact military effectiveness.     

Unpacking Autocracy: Political Regimes and IMF Program Participation

Why do some countries participate in IMF programs while others refuse to do so? We suggest an answer to the question by unpacking one side of the typical democracy–autocracy dichotomy. Specifically, we utilize the growing literature on the varieties of authoritarianism to develop an argument linking the different incentives and constraints that leaders in party-based, personalist, and military regimes face when considering whether to sign agreements with the IMF. Empirically, we demonstrate that distinguishing among autocracies uncovers important variations in the sensitivity of such regimes to the political costs incurred by IMF participation. Party-based autocracies, for instance, respond to both sovereignty costs and the benefits of program participation during severe economic crises. Personalist regimes, however, are not sensitive to the sovereignty costs incurred with IMF participation and thus only participate when doing so provides needed revenue during economic crises. The unique features of military juntas, by contrast, suggests that such regimes are not sensitive to either of these political costs and thus do not respond to economic crises in the same way as their autocratic counterparts.     

Single-party government,Prime Minister psychology,and the diversionary use of force: theory and evidence from the British case

ABSTRACT

This paper develops expectations about the likelihood of diversionary conflict initiation by parliamentary democracies with single-party majoritarian (SPM) governments. While most of the literature on diversion and governmental arrangement claims that SPMs have little incentive and/or limited capacity to execute diversionary gambits, we contend that the structural and environmental impetuses for diversion in such states are in fact largely indeterminate. We posit that the psychological attributes of prime ministers under SPM – in particular, their level of distrust – is the most important predictor of how they view structural and environmental constraints, and thus of whether they will militarily divert from poor economic conditions. Distrustful prime ministers are predisposed to the use of force, will dwell on the costs of economic problems, and fear that co-partisan MPs (especially in the cabinet) have designs on their office. Thus, despite having a legislative majority, these leaders will choose diversionary conflict over economic policy fixes. We conduct a partial test of this hypothesis in the British case from 1945 to 2007, and our analyses provide robust support.     

When Killers Become Victims: Diversionary War,Human Rights,and Strategic Target Selection

The diversionary theory largely focuses on the incentives leaders have to use force. However, little attention has been given to the characteristics that make for a good target. We argue that US presidents choose targets that repress human rights since they are the easiest to sell to international and domestic audiences. By targeting repressive states US presidents can justify their use of force by cloaking their motivation in the language of human rights, responding to calls for intervention, pointing to the failure of international actors and institutions to resolve these problems, and building upon emerging norms that allow for intervention in repressive states. Updating US Use of Force data, we empirically test and find support for our hypothesis that presidents target human rights abusers when they face trouble at home. This paper contributes to target selection process by offering a complete theory of diversionary conflict accounting for cost/benefit calculation of presidents. Moreover, we believe that our findings reveal human rights practices’ role in international conflict, as well.     

Elections,Election Outcomes,and Democracy in Southern Africa

Elections and election outcomes are widely used as a convenient short cut to measuring democracy. If this were correct, information on elections and election outcomes would be a time- and cost-saving means of identifying regime type. However, this article shows that the influential democracy measures of Beck et al., Ferree and Singh, Przeworski et al., and Vanhanen fail to adequately identify regime type when applied to ten countries in Southern Africa. For most countries, it is not possible to distinguish democracies from non-democracies on the basis of elections and election outcomes. Multi-party elections are not always free, fair, and democratic; dominant parties and dominant party systems are not necessarily undemocratic; large election victories are not by themselves proof of foul play; and not all authoritarian regimes maintain their rule through overwhelming parliamentary or electoral majorities.     

Does economic inequality breed political inequality?

Does economic inequality generate political inequality? While there is a large literature on the effect of inequality on regime change and support for democracy, there is little research on its effect on political equality across socioeconomic positions. Yet democracy and political equality, although related, are distinct concepts. While political power tends to be more evenly distributed in democracies than in autocracies, there is substantial variation in both regime types. This study argues that economic inequality should decrease political equality through multiple mechanisms: (1) it increases the resources of the rich relative to the poor; (2) it widens the gap in policy preferences across income groups; (3) it reduces participation; and (4) it depresses support for democracy. Using three measures of inequality and data on more than 140 countries between 1961 and 2008, it was found that economic inequality tends to increase political inequality, even when one controls for the level of democracy. Results hold when the sample is restricted by regime type. Finally, evidence in favour of the mechanisms is provided.     

Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes

Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post–World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new data on the issues in dispute between democracies from 1946 to 1992. We findthat (1) a large proportion of the militarized disputes between democracies in the post-WWII period involve fisheries, maritime boundaries, and resources of the sea, (2) well-established democracies are able to remove territory as a contentious issue among them, (3) disputes between democracies have become less severe and shorter in duration over time, and (4) a majority of the post-WWII militarized disputes between democracies are not resolved. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these empirical findings for the democraticpeace literature.     

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.