A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset

Abstract

* The ERT framework and dataset is the outcome of several years of collaborative work. The original conceptual foundation was created by Lindberg in the ERC grant application funding the project. Maerz, Edgell, and Wilson are the lead authors while Hellmeier contributed the section on conflict research and supported the data curation. All co-authors made valuable contributions on each aspect during the process, with overall supervision by Lindberg.

Mass Mobilization and Regime Change. Evidence From a New Measure of Mobilization for Democracy and Autocracy From 1900 to 2020

“…In the first part, we use standard panel models with mass mobilization (at time t) as the independent variable and the quality of democracy (at time t+1) as the dependent variable. In the second part, we build on recent advancements in the conceptualization and operationalization of regime transformations (Maerz et al, 2021) to estimate the effect of mass mobilization on the outcome of episodes democratization and autocratization episodes. In the following, we describe the design of our statistical analysis and the results.…”

“…Therefore, the second part of the analysis zooms in on these crucial moments of political change. We build on recent advances in the conceptualization and operationalization of episodes of regime transformations (ERT) by Maerz et al (2021) that emphasize the gradual and incremental nature of regime changes.…”

“…For example, among all democracies that experienced autocratization, some eventually broke down while others managed to avert breakdown (see South Korea 2008 -2016 for an example). Likewise, some countries that started democratizing held free and fair elections and became electoral or liberal democracies, whereas others reverted to autocracy (Edgell et al, 2021). To analyze how mass mobilization affects the final outcome of regime transformations, we aggregate all data at the episode level and use the episode outcome as the dependent variable.…”

“…In the first part, we analyze the effect of mass mobilization on changes in the overall level of democracy in a standard panel setting. In the second part, we look at the outcome of regime transformation such as democratic transition and democratic breakdown episodes, building on recent advances in the conceptualization and measurement of regime change (Maerz et al, 2021).…”

Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization

“…Our approach utilizes the newly created Episodes of Regime Transformations dataset (ERT; Edgell et al, 2020;Maerz et al, 2021b), which is constructed from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data (Coppedge et al, 2020). The full ERT offers data on episodes of democratization and autocratization since 1900.…”