This paper provides a critical assessment of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) and compares it with other prominent indices that address specific components of governance: V-Dem, WGI, and BTI. We offer a comparative assessment of content validity of these governance measures, their data generation processes, and their convergent validity. We conclude that the SGI's most important contribution is the conceptualization of policy performance as a discrete index. Other relative strengths are the theoretical embeddedness and the exclusion of irrelevant meanings of governance, and the conceptualization of three governance components (Governance, Policy Performance, and Democracy).However, in terms of geographic and temporal coverage, the SGI is clearly inferior to WGI and V-Dem. The handling of third-party statistical data, the absence of uncertainty scores, and the (a-theoretical) aggregation of different indicators are additional shortcomings of the SGI. Finally, the SGI's iterative process of expert deliberation has merits but is prone to biases.

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Autocratization affects democracies and autocracies with gradual setbacks in democratic qualities. The current debate on autocratization is lacking a comprehensive and systematic overview of different autocratization concepts and empirical measures. Addressing the gap, this research note identifies and discusses different strategies of operationalizing autocratization periods with continuous democracy data from Freedom House, Polity IV and the Varieties of Democracy (V‐Dem) project. Evidence for 26 different autocratization measures for 1900‐2019 reveals major inconsistencies between different measures. Our findings suggest that autocratization episodes should be measured with V‐Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) or with V‐Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), which provide fine‐grained data and the possibility to test for measurement noise. A 10% threshold reduces the risk of conceptual stretching and enables researchers to detect both autocratization episodes that do and do not result in regime breakdown. We also recommend researchers to additionally test empirical findings with different carefully selected thresholds.

What effect does economic inequality in authoritarian regimes have upon the political participation of its citizens? Do individual income and repression each have a greater effect than economic inequality? Three prominent theories, namely the Conflict, Relative Power, and Resource Theories address the inequality-participation puzzle in the context of democracies. However, theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for non-democratic regimes are scarce. I argue that it is individual income and the level of repression rather than economic inequality that explain political participation in autocracies. Using three-level hierarchical models that combine micro and macro level data for 65,000 individuals covering a various set of 31 authoritarian regimes and 54 country-years, this analysis demonstrates that higher levels of economic inequality hardly suppress political participation among all citizens. However, individual income has a more powerfully effect on civil society participation, while the level of repression decreases the voting likelihood more powerful than income. These findings suggest that the Resource Theory generates the greatest empirical support for autocracies.