Ryan Bakker

Measuring party positions in Europe The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010

This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999−2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.

Complexity in the European party space: Exploring dimensionality with experts

Does the n-issue space in domestic European polities reduce to one, two, or more dimensions? How do these dimensions relate to each other? More broadly, how does dimensionality vary across countries? We attempt to advance our understanding of political contestation in Europe by mapping the dimensionality of the political space across 24 countries using Chapel Hill expert survey (CHES) data. We test how well different models of the European political space fit the CHES data and find that three-dimensional models best fit the data in all countries. However, there is considerable cross-national variation in how the three dimensions relate to one another. Given this, we present a new measure of dimensional complexity that captures the degree to which these three dimensions are related. In so doing, we improve our understanding of the complexity of the political space in European countries.

Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data

This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset.

Let them eat cake: Food prices, domestic policy and social unrest

Recent price spikes in the international commodity markets have been blamed for numerous riots, protests and other forms of civil unrest. While these effects are widespread, they are not universal. In this article we investigate the relationship between food prices and social unrest. More specifically, we are concerned with the factors that make civil conflict more or less likely when food prices are elevated. We borrow from the extant literature on civil conflict as well as agriculture economics in order to analyze this phenomenon and help explain the variation among different countries. By merging these two research programs, we hope to make a contribution to each. We utilize a domestic-level measure of food prices rather than the world market price in order to more accurately represent national-level economic conditions. Our results show a positive and significant relationship between food prices and outbreak of social unrest and conflict across a wide range of coutries. Thus, we recommend the inclusion of a food price variable into any future studies of civil conflict. More importantly, we have helped to identify the potential factors that might insulate countries from food-oriented conflict. Given the events of the past year, this issue is paramount for scholars and world leaders alike.

The European Common Space: Extending the Use of Anchoring Vignettes

In this article, we combine advances in both survey research and scaling techniques to estimate a common dimension for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Most previous scholarship has either ignored or assumed cross-national comparability of party placements across a variety of dimensions. The 2010 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as “bridge votes” to place parties from different countries on a common space. We estimate our dimensions using the “blackbox” technique. Our results demonstrate both the usefulness of anchoring vignettes and the broad applicability of the blackbox scaling routine. Further, the resulting scale offers a cross-nationally comparable interval-level measure of a party’s left/right ideological position with a high degree of face validity. In short, we argue that the left/right economic dimension travels well across European countries.

Anchoring the experts: Using vignettes to compare party ideology across countries

Expert surveys are a valuable, commonly used instrument to measure party positions. Some critics question the cross-national comparability of these measures, though, suggesting that experts may lack a common anchor for fundamental concepts such as economic left–right. Using anchoring vignettes in the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we examine the extent of cross-national difference in expert ideological placements. We find limited evidence of cross-national differences; on the whole, our findings further establish expert surveys as a rigorous instrument for measuring party positions in a cross-national context.

How much terror? Dissidents, governments, institutions, and the cross-national study of terror attacks

Our knowledge of the set of concepts that influence the number of terror attacks experienced by different countries is rudimentary. Existing work on the incidence of terror focuses upon the structural characteristics of polities, economies, and societies, and fails to place competition between dissidents and states center stage. It also tends to treat terror as isolated from other tactics that dissident groups might use to pressure the state. This study addresses these shortcomings by placing government and dissident group behavior at the center of the analysis. Drawing on arguments from the larger literature on dissent and repression, we argue that government behavior and dissident behavior are likely to be more important determinants of terror attacks than structural factors. We scour the literature for existing arguments to round out our model specification, and evaluate hypotheses using Bayesian statistical techniques and a broad scope of relevant data. For many of our independent variables we construct indices using measurement models that are able to account for measurement error and missing data, resulting in a more comprehensive set of data than previous studies. The results demonstrate that measures of government and dissident behavior have more explanatory power than measures of the concepts that populate existing research.

Betting the farm on high food prices: A consumer based approach to agriculture protection

Abstract Our question is quite simple: If agriculture protectionism is a product of economic development, why is agriculture protected at such varying degrees by otherwise similarly developed countries? Previous attempts to fit agriculture into general models of trade policy formation have relied exclusively on producer demand for protection and merely assume the associated demand for lower prices that might come from consumers. Not surprisingly, these previous studies add only minimally to this strange phenomenon. Our method turns this approach on its head by modeling the political strategy of agriculture protection on the costs incurred by the consumer. Taking both producers and consumers into account more accurately reflects the intent of extant theoretical models of protectionism. Our results show that using the consumer as the dependent variable provides more robust results on common independent variables. Recent global events show that consumer disapproval of agriculture policies should not be underestimated by political scientists or politicians.

Modeling Terror Attacks: A Cross-National, Out-of-Sample Study

We have developed a Bayesian, multi-level statistical model that contains at its center a theoretical account of dissidents’ choice to adopt terror tactics. The model has been estimated using data from all countries over the world during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but the out-of-sample performance of the model warrants investigation. Policy makers have considerable interest in being able to forecast terror attacks, even at an aggregated level of granularity such as the country-year. Scholars have yet to supply many of these models, and we provide our effort as a useful baseline that can be used to evaluate the performance of more region and country specific models to be developed in the future. Having scoured the literature to identify relevant covariates to use as controls in our dissident tactic centered model, our multi-decade, cross-national estimates make an especially attractive candidate for establishing a general baseline. Our analysis evaluates the sensitivity and specificity of the model’s performance, as well as the conditional distributions of positive and negative predicted values. Both the number of false positives and false negatives produced by the model suggest that it is not ready for use in policy planning. It’s value, then, is as a baseline against which to evaluate the performance of future forecast models.

Measuring social trust and trusting the measure

Abstract Decades of rigorous quantitative scholarship have generated a wealth of knowledge regarding the causes and consequences of crossnational variations in social trust. However, while some social science disciplines have made significant contributions to this conversation, others have largely failed to do so. The field of international relations, for example, has lagged behind in producing aggregate-level scholarship on social trust. This is surprising given that (1) trust influences public opinion and thereby the incentive structure for political leaders and (2) many peacebuilding efforts directly target the levels of trust in post-conflict settings. Country-level trust scholarship in international relations and the social sciences more generally is hampered by data scarcity. The main purpose of this article is to present a new publicly available data set on aggregate levels of social trust. Relying on a set of 19 widely accepted correlates, we construct a new cross-sectional measure of the concept that covers all countries from 1946 to 2010. We then perform a series of empirical tests establishing the validity of our measure. Finally, we offer a number of bivariate analyses to demonstrate the broad utility of our new variable for scholars in the social sciences.