'Varieties of Democracy: Goals, Measurement and Emerging Findings'

In this session, Staffan Lindberg will present path-breaking new approaches building on evolutionary biology that for the first time lay out the different 'evolutionary' paths of failing versus successful sequences of democratization. The session also introduces the new and largest ever database of democracy: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem).

Background

For 60 years, studies of democratization and human security that inform policy and practitioners have produced misleading results. Beyond individual case studies, essentially all studies look only at if x affects y.

• Is economic development good for democracy?
• Does democracy lower the risk of civil conflict?
• Is a strong civil society good for democratic survival? Yet, we know that democratization as such develops in a series of small steps and long chains of events.

About the speaker

Staffan I. Lindberg is Professor of Political Science, Director of the V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg, one of six Principal Investigators for Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem); Wallenberg Academy Fellow, awardee of an ERC Consolidator Grant, and selected member Young Academy of Swede.

He is author of Democracy and Elections in Africa (“Outstanding Academic Title”, Choice 2007) and editor of Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition?, and has also published many articles on egalitarian democracy, sequence analysis methods, civil society, electoral fraud, corruption, women’s representation, political clientelism, voting behaviour and turnovers, party and electoral systems, accountability, democratization, popular attitudes, and the Ghanaian legislature, and executive-legislative relationships.

With V-Dem, he was awarded the “Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Data Set Award 2016” by the American Political Science Association, Comparative Politics Section.