Regime Legitimation Strategies (RLS) 1900 to 2018

Abstract

In this paper we introduce new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies for 179 countries in the world from 1900 up until 2018 that are comparable across time and space. Country experts have rated the extent to which the government promotes or references its performance, the person of the leader, rationallegality, and ideology in order to justify the regime in place. With regards to ideology, the experts are further asked to categorize the ideology of the regime as nationalist, communist/socialist, conservative/restorative, religious, and/or separatist. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and validate the data against expectations on claims from case studies as well as with existing regime type classifications. We show that experts do understand and can be employed to code legitimation claims. Not only do we document historical shifts in legitimation claims, but the measures also pick up recent trends, such as, an increased emphasis of the leader in countries such as Russia, Turkey, Cambodia over the last decades, and more recently also in India and the Philippines; as well as recent increases in legitimation claims based on both conservative and nationalist ideologies the European countries Serbia, Hungary and Poland, which also have experienced autocratization in recent years.

Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

“…IV. A nationalist ideology variable captures the extent to which government uses nationalism to legitimise its rule (Tannenberg et al, 2019), plausibly increasing its credibility in committing to war-related causes. Finally, an index capturing the intensity of public protests and its relative concentration to the capital city is constructed based on data from V-Dem (v.12).…”

Governance in Crises: Ideologies, Political Systems, and Pandemic Responsiveness

“…the ideological basis of government action, whereas the latter pertains to public trust in the government and implies popular compliance with COVID policies (Christensen and Laegreid, 2020;Kleinfeld, 2020;Willoughby, 2021), which relates to policy effectiveness but not the main interest of this study. Based on the literature about the ideological influence on COVID as reviewed above, we focus on socialist (v2exl_legitideolcr _1) and conservative (v2exl_legitideolcr _2) ideologies as the two mainstream legitimation strategies of contemporary governments (Tannenberg et al, 2019). Figure 3 below plots the country cases in our dataset onto the two ideological dimensions.…”

Levels of policy drivers: Introducing and demonstrating an analytical framework for education policy spread

“…As domestic variables, I use GDP per capita in 10000 US$ (Inklaar et al, 2018), levels of democratization (Lührmann et al, 2018), a binary indicator of whether the government ideology can reasonably be described as socialist (Tannenberg et al, 2019), and the percentage of adults without any formal schooling attainment (Barro and Lee, 2015). This data has been, where appropriate, interpolated.…”