2023 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Transitions within Democracy: Institutions, Interests, and Accountability
| Project/Area Number |
20K01457
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
Kellam Marisa.A 早稲田大学, 政治経済学術院, 准教授 (30711866)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2025-03-31
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| Keywords | Comparative Politics / Democracy / Democratic Backsliding / Populism / Political Institutions |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The primary output from this research project is an article published in 2023 in Democratization, which is one of the leading journals for current research on democratic backsliding. The title of this article is “Who’s to blame for democratic backsliding: populists, presidents or dominant executives?” This article was co-authored with Antonio Benasaglio Berlucchi who was a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University at the time of publication and is now a member of the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University.
The article provides a global analysis of the causes of democratic backsliding in close to 100 democratic countries between 1970 and 2020 using matching methods to infer the causal effects of several ideological and institutional factors related to executives. The findings demonstrate that populists increase, on average, the amount of democratic backsliding. While case studies and regional analyses have previously pointed to populism’s detrimental effect on democracy, this is the first global analysis to support these claims with rigorous empirical evidence.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
I canceled the initial field work component of this project due to the coronavirus pandemic. The remainder of the work is proceeding as expected.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I am now expanding upon the global executive-level dataset previously compiled for this project to examine how executives leave office. Whereas this project primarily focused on how executives govern while in office, my future research will examine how executives are removed from office. Still, the research continues to emphasize the comparison of leaders who engaged in democratic backsliding with leaders who did not.
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| Causes of Carryover |
The amount is minimal (39 yen).
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