Daniel Pemstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 296629 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Pemstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Pemstein |
| SIGNATURE | PEMSTEIN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dakota State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1144-6337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 458 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Vote buying and local public goods provision: Substitutes or complements
We seek to better understand the demand side of vote buying: the conditions under which voters participate in, eschew, tolerate, or punish the exchange of targeted material benefits for votes. We ask whether voters perceive vote buying as substituting for local public goods provision in office, or whether they think that candidates who buy votes will excel at securing local public goods. Voters who place great value on future public goods may opt…
Measuring electoral democracy with observables
Most cross‐national indices of democracy rely centrally on coder judgments, which are susceptible to bias and error, and require expensive and time‐consuming coding by experts. We present an approach to measurement based on observables that aim to preserve the nuanced quality of subjectively coded democracy indices. Our observable‐to‐subjective score mapping is free of idiosyncratic coder errors arising from misinformation, slack, or biases. It i…
Experts, coders and crowds: An analysis of substitutability
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
V-Dem Codebook v14
Understanding vote buying in Nepali elections
Measuring online political activity: Introducing the Digital Society Project Dataset
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et a…
Measuring Backsliding with Observables: Observable-to-Subjective Score Mapping
Multiple well-known democracy-rating projects—including Freedom House, Polity, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)—have identified apparent global regression in recent years. These measures rely on partly subjective indicators, which—in principle—could suffer from rater bias. For instance, Little and Meng (2023) argue that shared beliefs driven by the current zeitgeist could lead to shared biases that produce the appearance of democratic backslidi…
Estimating latent traits from expert surveys: An Analysis of Sensitivity to Data-Generating Process
Models for converting expert-coded data to estimates of latent concepts assume different data-generating processes (DGPs). In this paper, we simulate ecologically valid data according to different assumptions, and examine the degree to which common methods for aggregating expert-coded data (1) recover true values and (2) construct appropriate coverage intervals. We find that the mean and both hierarchical Aldrich–McKelvey (A–M) scaling and hierar…
Assessing Data Quality: An Approach and An Application
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
V-Dem Codebook v11
V-Dem Dataset v11.1
Democracy promotion and electoral quality: A disaggregated analysis
The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments. In theory, aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democra…
An Ordinal, Concept-driven Approach to Measurement: The Lexical Scale
A key obstacle to measurement is the aggregation problem. Where indicators tap into common latent traits in theoretically meaningful ways, the problem may be solved by applying a data-informed ('inductive') measurement model, for example, factor analysis, structural equation models, or item response theory. Where they do not, researchers solve the aggregation problem by appeal to concept-driven ('deductive') criteria, that is, aggregation schemes…
V-Dem Codebook V10
Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change
Varieties of Democracy is the essential user's guide to The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), one of the most ambitious data collection efforts in comparative politics. This global research collaboration sparked a dramatic change in how we study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy. This book is ambitious in scope: more than a reference guide, it raises standards for causal inferences in democratization research and introduces …
Proposal: A Political Science Peer Review and Publication Consortium
The traditional process of peer review and publication has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. The time seems propitious for a consideration of alternatives in political science. To that end, we propose a Peer Review and Publication Consortium. The Consortium retains the virtues of the traditional peer-review process (governed by academic journals) while also mitigating some of its vices
Gender, Incumbency and Party List Nominations
This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover,…
Terrorism and internet censorship
The internet provides a powerful tool to terror organizations, enhancing their public messaging, recruitment ability, and internal communication. In turn, governments have increasingly moved to disrupt terror organizations' internet communications, and even democracies now routinely work to censor terrorist propaganda, and related political messaging, in the name of national security. We argue that democratic states respond to terror attacks by i…
V-Dem Codebook V9
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class
It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background characteristics of leaders affect the way they rule. Who are the leaders of the world? We generate a composite portrait of the global political elite with data from the Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders in most countries of the world. We offer comparisons across office, regions, regi…
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally - including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies - from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset,…
The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Dataa
Measuring candidate selection mechanisms in European elections: Comparing formal party rules to candidate survey responses
Students of party organization often rely on politicians’ perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties’ European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties’ selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mecha…
Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type
Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, f…
Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher offices in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how …
IRT Models for Expert-Coded Panel Data
Data sets quantifying phenomena of social-scientific interest often use multiple experts to code latent concepts. While it remains standard practice to report the average score across experts, experts likely vary in both their expertise and their interpretation of question scales. As a result, the mean may be an inaccurate statistic. Item-response theory (IRT) models provide an intuitive method for taking these forms of expert disagreement into a…
Gender, Incumbency and Party List Nominations
This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover,…
Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class
It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background characteristics of leaders affect the way they rule. Who are the leaders of the world? We generate a composite portrait of the global political elite with data from the Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders in most countries of the world. We offer comparisons across office, regions, regi…
Brussels Bound: Policy Experience and Candidate Selection in European Elections
Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees’ policy-making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategi…
Assessing Data Quality: An Approach and An Application
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally - including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies - from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset,…
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et a…
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Measuring online political activity: Introducing the Digital Society Project Dataset
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies
The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states …
Democracy promotion and electoral quality: A disaggregated analysis
The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments. In theory, aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democra…
Measuring candidate selection mechanisms in European elections: Comparing formal party rules to candidate survey responses
Students of party organization often rely on politicians’ perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties’ European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties’ selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mecha…
Estimating latent traits from expert surveys: An Analysis of Sensitivity to Data-Generating Process
Models for converting expert-coded data to estimates of latent concepts assume different data-generating processes (DGPs). In this paper, we simulate ecologically valid data according to different assumptions, and examine the degree to which common methods for aggregating expert-coded data (1) recover true values and (2) construct appropriate coverage intervals. We find that the mean and both hierarchical Aldrich–McKelvey (A–M) scaling and hierar…
An Ordinal, Concept-driven Approach to Measurement: The Lexical Scale
A key obstacle to measurement is the aggregation problem. Where indicators tap into common latent traits in theoretically meaningful ways, the problem may be solved by applying a data-informed ('inductive') measurement model, for example, factor analysis, structural equation models, or item response theory. Where they do not, researchers solve the aggregation problem by appeal to concept-driven ('deductive') criteria, that is, aggregation schemes…
Terrorism and internet censorship
The internet provides a powerful tool to terror organizations, enhancing their public messaging, recruitment ability, and internal communication. In turn, governments have increasingly moved to disrupt terror organizations' internet communications, and even democracies now routinely work to censor terrorist propaganda, and related political messaging, in the name of national security. We argue that democratic states respond to terror attacks by i…
Experts, coders and crowds: An analysis of substitutability
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
Measuring Backsliding with Observables: Observable-to-Subjective Score Mapping
Multiple well-known democracy-rating projects—including Freedom House, Polity, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)—have identified apparent global regression in recent years. These measures rely on partly subjective indicators, which—in principle—could suffer from rater bias. For instance, Little and Meng (2023) argue that shared beliefs driven by the current zeitgeist could lead to shared biases that produce the appearance of democratic backslidi…
Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher offices in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how …
Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type
Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, f…
Brussels Bound: Policy Experience and Candidate Selection in European Elections
Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees’ policy-making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategi…
The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Dataa
Measuring candidate selection mechanisms in European elections: Comparing formal party rules to candidate survey responses
Students of party organization often rely on politicians’ perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties’ European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties’ selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mecha…
Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies
The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states …
IRT Models for Expert-Coded Panel Data
Data sets quantifying phenomena of social-scientific interest often use multiple experts to code latent concepts. While it remains standard practice to report the average score across experts, experts likely vary in both their expertise and their interpretation of question scales. As a result, the mean may be an inaccurate statistic. Item-response theory (IRT) models provide an intuitive method for taking these forms of expert disagreement into a…
V-Dem Codebook V9
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class
It goes without saying that “leaders rule.” And it stands to reason that the background characteristics of leaders affect the way they rule. Who are the leaders of the world? We generate a composite portrait of the global political elite with data from the Global Leadership Project (GLP), the first dataset offering biographical information on a wide array of leaders in most countries of the world. We offer comparisons across office, regions, regi…
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally - including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies - from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset,…
V-Dem Codebook V10
Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change
Varieties of Democracy is the essential user's guide to The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), one of the most ambitious data collection efforts in comparative politics. This global research collaboration sparked a dramatic change in how we study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy. This book is ambitious in scope: more than a reference guide, it raises standards for causal inferences in democratization research and introduces …
Proposal: A Political Science Peer Review and Publication Consortium
The traditional process of peer review and publication has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. The time seems propitious for a consideration of alternatives in political science. To that end, we propose a Peer Review and Publication Consortium. The Consortium retains the virtues of the traditional peer-review process (governed by academic journals) while also mitigating some of its vices
Gender, Incumbency and Party List Nominations
This study assesses how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, it explores what determines whether parties place women in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, it directly examines a mechanism – party nomination – central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover,…
Terrorism and internet censorship
The internet provides a powerful tool to terror organizations, enhancing their public messaging, recruitment ability, and internal communication. In turn, governments have increasingly moved to disrupt terror organizations' internet communications, and even democracies now routinely work to censor terrorist propaganda, and related political messaging, in the name of national security. We argue that democratic states respond to terror attacks by i…
V-Dem Codebook v11
V-Dem Dataset v11.1
Democracy promotion and electoral quality: A disaggregated analysis
The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments. In theory, aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democra…
An Ordinal, Concept-driven Approach to Measurement: The Lexical Scale
A key obstacle to measurement is the aggregation problem. Where indicators tap into common latent traits in theoretically meaningful ways, the problem may be solved by applying a data-informed ('inductive') measurement model, for example, factor analysis, structural equation models, or item response theory. Where they do not, researchers solve the aggregation problem by appeal to concept-driven ('deductive') criteria, that is, aggregation schemes…
Assessing Data Quality: An Approach and An Application
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
Estimating latent traits from expert surveys: An Analysis of Sensitivity to Data-Generating Process
Models for converting expert-coded data to estimates of latent concepts assume different data-generating processes (DGPs). In this paper, we simulate ecologically valid data according to different assumptions, and examine the degree to which common methods for aggregating expert-coded data (1) recover true values and (2) construct appropriate coverage intervals. We find that the mean and both hierarchical Aldrich–McKelvey (A–M) scaling and hierar…
V-Dem Codebook v14
Understanding vote buying in Nepali elections
Measuring online political activity: Introducing the Digital Society Project Dataset
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Computer Science (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Democracy (9 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Economics (7 works)