During the past few decades, Latin American governments’ recurrent attacks against journalists have contributed to the erosion of press freedom in the region and, relatedly, of the quality of democracy. Yet what pushes governments to harass journalists? We argue that governments are more likely to harass journalists when popular support for them drops. Due to the ability of journalists to influence public opinion, governments could perceive the harassment of journalists as a means to punish and silence those individuals who are seen as contributing to their decline in public support or as obstacles to regaining popularity. We test our argument on a sample of Latin American countries observed from 1990 to 2019. We find that declines in governments’ popular support lead to more harassment of journalists. Our research contributes to the debate on the determinants of press freedom and sheds further light on the current decline of democratic quality in Latin America.

Is the quality of democracy undermined or enhanced by party-system fragmentation? Addressing this question would help us better assess normative claims about electoral reforms. Yet, doing so is difficult because of endogeneity issues: party systems are endogenous to many other dynamics in a polity. We overcome this problem by putting forward an instrument for the number of parties in a system, based on the level of fragmentation added by parties that narrowly make it to parliament. We then test the effect of party-system fragmentation on the quality of democracy, drawing upon an extensive battery of outcomes. Against previous literature, we find that a higher number of parties leads to more fractionalized governments, but has no impact on other democratic outcomes. Subsample analyses suggest that fragmentation may have some effect in contexts of very high polarization, but we find no effect in other theoretically meaningful subsamples. Our results indicate that party-system fragmentation may have fewer normative implications than previously assumed.

Given the academic and media salience of democracy and its measurement, in this contribution we take a closer look at the various existing datasets. For this purpose, in the first two sections we look at democratic conceptualization and measurement, and then focus on the most used datasets on democracy and assess them against the conceptual criteria illustrated in the first section. The third section focuses on the notion of quality of democracy and how it has advanced the understanding of contemporary democracies. The subsequent section illustrates changes in democratic scoring in European countries over the past 15 years. Our results show that democracy has not become more robust in European countries: on the contrary, several countries witnessed significant democratic deterioration. Furthermore, we show that – with the exception of Polity – the indexes analysed are highly correlated and therefore could be equally useful for an ongoing analysis of European democracies.

On October 23, 2019, Botswana held its twelfth free and fair election. For the first time in the history of Botswana’s electoral democracy, a former president (Ian Khama) defected from the ruling party and supported the opposition. The opposition coalition, working informally with Khama, mounted a spirited campaign against the well-oiled machine, the incumbent and long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Seabo and Nyenhuis reflect on the 2019 general election, analyze the outcome, and consider the implications for the future of Botswana’s electoral democracy. They argue that barring other factors, the BDP’s resounding victory was mainly a result of Batswana’s rejection of former president Ian Khama.

Scholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism.

Mounting evidence indicates that power-sharing supports transitions to democracy. However, the resulting quality of democracy remains understudied. Given the increasing global spread of power-sharing, this is a crucial oversight, as prominent critiques accuse it of a number of critical deficiencies. The present article advances this literature in two ways. First, it offers a comprehensive discussion of how power-sharing affects the quality of democracy, going beyond specific individual aspects of democracy. It argues that power-sharing advances some of these aspects while having drawbacks for others. Second, it offers the first systematic, large-N analysis of the frequently discussed consequences of power-sharing for the quality of democracy. It relies on a dataset measuring the quality of democracy in 70 countries worldwide, combining it with new fine-grained data for institutional power-sharing. The results indicate that power-sharing is a complex institutional model which privileges a particular set of democratic actors and processes, while deemphasizing others.

Democracies come in all shapes and sizes. Which configuration of political institutions produces the highest democratic quality is a notorious debate. The lineup of contenders includes ‘consensus’, ‘Westminster’, and ‘centripetal’ democracy. A trend in the evaluation of the relationship between empirical patterns of democracy and its quality is that the multidimensional nature of both concepts is increasingly taken into account. This article tests the assertion that certain centripetal configurations of proportionality in party systems and government, and unitarism in the remaining state structure, might outperform all other alternatives both in terms of inclusiveness and effectiveness. Analyzing 33 democracies, the results of interactive regression models only partially support this claim. Proportional–unitary democracies have the best track record in terms of representation, but there are little differences in participation, transparency, and government capability compared with other models.

After decades of authoritarianism and a twelve-year civil war ended by a negotiated peace agreement in 1992, El Salvador is a markedly different country. Despite important changes, however, public institutions have remained largely unresponsive, acute social exclusion persists and violent crime has soared. Rather than the possibly inevitable by-products of a post-conflict situation, these and other developments are the consequences of a regression from an incipient electoral democracy to electoral authoritarianism. The elite-controlled Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party had more to gain from the preservation of the status quo than from democratic changes and only accepted a politically inclusive system to restore the oligarchy's dominant position through electoral politics. Uncommitted to democratic consolidation, successive ARENA administrations maintained an institutional façade of democracy to reproduce authoritarian governance and defend elite interests.