Allen Hicken

Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach

InthewakeoftheColdWar,democracyhasgainedthestatusofamantra.Yetthereisnoconsensusabouthowtoconceptualizeand measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argueforanewapproachtoconceptualizationandmeasurement.Wefirstreviewsomeoftheweaknessesamongtraditionalapproaches. Wethenlayoutourapproach,whichmaybecharacterizedas historical, multidimensional, disaggregated,and transparent.Weendby reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

Presidents and Parties: How Presidential Elections Shape Coordination in Legislative Elections:

This article explicates the mechanisms through which presidential elections shape the legislative party system, an issue that has received little attention to date. The authors argue that presidential elections exert their influence through two distinct channels. First, they affect the incentives of candidates, voters, and parties to coordinate within electoral districts. Second and most importantly, they shape the incentives of candidates to coordinate across legislative electoral districts under a common party banner, leading to more aggregated or nationalized party systems when there are few presidential candidates. The authors find support for the relative importance of this cross-district effect using a unique data set of district-level election results from approximately 600 elections in 70 countries.

Party Fabrication: Constitutional Reform and the Rise of Thai Rak Thai

Among the most interesting questions in Thai politics today is how to account for the rise and (until recently) the success of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party. This article describes and analyzes some of the factors that contributed to the rise and success of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai, arguing that neither Thaksins personal assets nor the effects of the crisis are enough to explain Thai Rak Thais rise and success. It focuses instead on the 1997 changes to Thailands constitution. These institutional reforms were crucial because they altered Thailands political-institutional landscape in fundamental ways. The reforms provided new opportunities and incentives for political actors that Thaksin and his party adeptly took advantage of. The argument presented is that the key reforms that helped pave the way for the rise of Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai were those reforms that helped reduce the number of political parties and that increased the power of the prime minister relative to coalition partners and intraparty factions.

Shadows from the Past: Party System Institutionalization in Asia

This article explains variation in levels of party system institutionalization in Asia by testing available data against several major hypotheses in the literature. The authors make three contributions to the literature on party system institutionalization. First, this study finds that historical legacies are a crucial variable affecting current levels of party system institutionalization. In particular, the immediate postwar period was the crucible from which institutionalized party systems in Asia developed. Second, the authors claim that for a significant number of institutionalized party systems, historical legacies are rooted in some element of authoritarianism, either as former authoritarian parties or as semidemocratic regimes. Third, precisely because authoritarianism has played an important role in the origins of institutionalized party systems, the authors argue that the concept of institutionalization needs to be strictly separated from the concept of democracy.

Electoral Rules and the Size of the Prize: How Political Institutions Shape Presidential Party Systems

This paper explores how political institutions besides electoral rules shape the presidential party system. Our focus is upon what we call the “size of the presidential prize”: the degree to which authority is concentrated in the presidency vis-à-vis the legislature (horizontal centralization) as well as in the national level of government vis-à-vis the subnational levels (vertical centralization). We find a significant but nonlinear relationship between the horizontal centralization of authority in the presidency, operationalized either as an index of presidential powers or as regime type, and the presidential party system, operationalized as the effective number of presidential candidates. Specifically, for moderately powerful presidents, increasing presidential powers leads to fewer presidential candidates; however, for either extremely weak or extremely powerful presidents, increasing presidential powers produces a larger number of candidates. Further, we find that the substantive effect of horizontal centralization is generally larger than the effect of the electoral formula—heretofore the most discussed determinant. Our findings regarding vertical centralization, operationalized either as central government revenue as a percentage of GDP or central government revenue as a percentage of total government revenue, are similar to if weaker than our findings regarding horizontal centralization.

A guide to the constitutional structures and electoral systems of east, south and southeast Asia

In 1997 an economic crisis swept through much of Asia. In addition to the various proximal causes of the crises, e.g. overvalued exchange rates, lax banking regulations, etc., political structures have received much attention. Some claim that problems in countries’ political structures set the stage for the crisis. Others argue that governments’ responses to the crisis were helped or hindered by existing political institutions. However, research on the consequences of Asian political institutions is hampered by a lack of basic information on the different constitutional and electoral frameworks around the region. This article is an attempt to help fill this void by providing a description of the constitutional structures and electoral systems of 17 Asian-Pacific countries since 1945.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Are All Presidents Created Equal? Presidential Powers and the Shadow of Presidential Elections

Presidential elections with few candidates held in temporal proximity to legislative elections are believed to promote the nationalization and consolidation of the legislative party system. However, contrary to the existing literature, the authors argue here that the shadow presidential elections cast over legislative elections is contingent on the relative powers of the president vis-à-vis the legislature. Specifically, the authors find that proximate presidential elections with few presidential candidates promote the nationalization and consolidation of the legislative party system only when the president is neither very weak nor very powerful. They also find that proximate presidential elections with many presidential candidates promote the denationalization and fragmentation of the legislative party system only when the president is at least reasonably powerful.

Forcing the genie back in the bottle: Sociological change, institutional reform, and health policy in Thailand

In 2007, those behind the 2006 coup drafted a new constitution specifically aimed at turning back the political and policymaking clock to the pre-1997 era. However, in the preceding decade a significant transformation of Thai politics had taken place. Specifically, social cleavages had become politicized and particized in ways we have not seen before, and policy-focused, popular party programs had become part and parcel of serious party campaign strategies. Focusing on health policy, we thus argue in this article that institutional reforms have had predictable and observable implications for policymaking in Thailand, but only when considered in the context of changes to the broader social structure and other political conditions. While the 1997 reforms brought about a well-documented shift toward a more centralized, coordinated, and nationally focused policymaking environment, the 2007 reforms have been less successful at reversing that impact. In short, the coup makers are finding it harder than they supposed to force the genie back into the bottle.

The Politics of Economic Reform in Thailand: Crisis and Compromise

What explains the varying responses by Thai governments to changes in the international economic environment over time. To answer this the paper emphasizes the link between the nature of the political structure/policymaking environment and the government???s reform capacity. Thailand???s political structure typically undercuts the government???s reform capacity in two way. First, it is difficult to get needed reforms on the political agenda. Second, it is even harder to push reforms through the policy process to implementation. During the 1980s, Thailand was able to overcome some of the challenges inherent in its political system via an informal compromise between party politicians and technocratic reformers. This ???pork-policy compromise??? gave the government the capacity to adopt certain reforms???reforms that laid the foundation for the economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Changes in the political structure in the late 1980s brought an end to this compromise, thereby reducing the government???s reform capacity.

V-Dem Codebook V6

All variables that V-Dem is compiling are included in the Codebook.