Annette Baturo
Biographic Data
| ID | 88919 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annette Baturo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annette |
| FAMILY NAME | Baturo |
| SIGNATURE | BATURO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dublin City University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1108-5287 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 259 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Autocrats and Ideological Imperative: Russia’s Anti-Nazi Campaign in International Organizations
While scholarship exists on the contestation of liberal norms, the conditions under which autocrats gain global support for their own normative campaigns remain less understood. This paper proposes that dictatorships can gain normative standing in international organizations (IOs) by repurposing existing consensus, thereby making opposition more difficult. Alongside seeking majority support, autocrats also aim to isolate and force liberal actors …
“Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory”? Elite Incentives and Rhetorical Adaptation of Russia’s Members of Parliament on Social Media
How do authoritarian regimes that rely on the disengagement of their citizens adapt to the demands of a major international conflict, particularly in political communication? Instead of risking potential destabilization by exclusively turning to mobilizing messages, we propose that a more dynamic rhetorical adaptation will follow, with a mixture of mobilizing, legitimating, and co-opting messages in the state media and – hitherto underexplored su…
High-Level Leader Visits: A Promising Area of Study in IR
Once deemed a “nearly impossible” area of study, high-level leader visits—one of the most visible and consequential practices in global politics—have recently attracted renewed scholarly attention. This resurgence stems from the growing recognition of leader visits as a valuable lens for addressing foundational questions in international relations, including why states act as they do, the consequences of their actions, and how their behavior shap…
Personalization and Elite Rhetoric: How the Autocrat's Popularity and Political Repression Influence Policy Speech of Regime Officials
We study the implications of regime personalization on the incentives of political elites to politicize their policy agenda and express loyalty to the ruler. Because revering the autocrat is one of the observable manifestations of personalization, while the process of personalization may be, in turn, influenced by an increased prevalence of leader‐centered rhetoric, isolating the effects of personalization on policy and political rhetoric is diff…
Playing the sycophant card: The logic and consequences of professing loyalty to the autocrat
Despite the centrality of the loyalty–competence framework in research on authoritarian politics, scholars have only focused on material aspects of what elites do in their service to the dictator. Yet nonmaterial aspects such as sycophantically praising the autocrat in speech—a common, everyday practice under authoritarianism, have been ignored. We propose a novel theory to explain under what conditions elites “overpraise” the ruler and imitate h…
Autocratic Audiences and Linguistic Complexity
Making policy speeches is a major activity of authoritarian elites, yet we know surprisingly little about their incentives to be understood by constituents, and whether more effective communicators are rewarded. While many authoritarian actors care little about their audience and speak tediously, we argue that, in the service of legitimation and co-optation, simpler, more effective communication is required in protest-prone regions with lower reg…
Words to unite nations: The complete United Nations General Debate Corpus, 1946-present
Every year since 1946, the General Debate has taken place at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly session. Representatives from all UN member states deliver an address, discussing the issues that they consider most important in global politics, revealing their governments' positions, and seeking to persuade other states of their perspectives. The annual UN General Debate statements provide invaluable information for scholars …
Strategic Communication in Dictatorships: Performance, Patriotism, and Intimidation
Research shows that dictators’ public rhetoric shapes both elite and mass opinion and behavior. However, the determinants of dictators’ strategic communication remain undertheorized and underresearched. Theoretically, we argue that (i) dictators primarily use three key communication strategies (“performance” and “patriotism,” which serve to boost legitimacy, and “intimidation,” meant to deter opponents); (ii) they substitute between them dependin…
Leaders’ experience and the transition from populism to dictatorship
Seeded Sequential LDA: A Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Topic-Specific Analysis of Sentences
Topic models have been widely used by researchers across disciplines to automatically analyze large textual data. However, they often fail to automate content analysis, because the algorithms cannot accurately classify individual sentences into pre-defined topics. Aiming to make topic classification more theoretically grounded and content analysis in general more topic-specific, we have developed Seeded Sequential Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA…
The Incentives of Leaders in International Organizations: Evidence from the UN General Assembly
Voters and selectorates tend to prioritize domestic policy, so when and why do national political leaders choose to spend their time at international organizations (IOs)? Heads of state only began to address international assemblies such as the UN in recent decades; their appearances are puzzling, considering that leaders rarely get direct political benefit from multilateral cooperation, whose gains tend to be diffuse and slow-moving. This paper …
Incumbent takeovers
The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In democracies, this is known as 'subversions by the ruling executive', 'executive aggrandizement', or 'autogolpe'; in autocracies, researchers study 'personalization', 'transition to personal rulership', or 'power-grabbing'. While the terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expa…
When incumbents do not run: Presidential Succession and Democratization
When authoritarian incumbent presidents run in elections, they have significant incumbency advantage and almost always win. When incumbents comply with term limits or do not run for other reasons, they tend to designate successors in their stead. However, their chosen successors often lose. Do they lose because they cannot command the same electoral advantage in loyalty, resources and name recognition that incumbents can, or because succession an…
What Countries Select More Experienced Leaders? The PolEx Measure of Political Experience
How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of …
The Politics of Presidential Term Limits
Presidential term limits are one of the most important institutions in presidentialism. They are at the center of contemporary and historical debates and political battles between incumbent presidents seeking additional terms and their political opponents warning against democratic backsliding and the dangers of personalism. Bringing the team of country experts, comparativists, theorists, constitutional lawyers, and policy practitioners together,…
When Do Family Ties Matter? The Duration of Female Suffrage and Women’s Path to High Political Office
While the percentage of female heads of state in the world has increased to around 10 percent in the 2010s, a female president or prime minister still remains an exception. Recent scholarship has proposed a number of explanations behind this phenomenon, but there exist important gaps. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we use new and comprehensive data to undertake a systematic examination of the differences in the personal, educ…
Why do authoritarian regimes adopt bicameralism? Cooptation, control, and masking controversial reforms
The adoption of bicameralism in the world is increasingly an authoritarian phenomenon: while the percentage of bicameral democracies is in decline, there has been a steady increase in bicameral non-democracies. What makes non-democracies turn to bicameralism? We argue that bicameralism may serve as a means of post-conflict reconciliation or control of the legislature when the opposition gains seats in the lower chamber. We also propose a novel ex…
Is there a ‘revolving door’ to the private sector in Irish politics
The connections between Irish politicians and the private sector are the subject of constant speculation, particularly in the post Celtic Tiger period. However, there is little systematic evidence whether publicised cases of such ties represent the exception to the rule, or if they are symptomatic of a larger problem. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the public–private nexus and investigate whether a revolving door – the movement of indivi…
Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus
Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how…
On the importance of personal sources of power in politics: Comparative perspectives and research agenda
Democracy, Development, and Career Trajectories of Former Political Leaders
One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This article argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concern—specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers—is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic understanding of their careers and whether former rulers reti…
Cursus Honorum: Personal Background, Careers and Experience of Political Leaders in Democracy and Dictatorship—New Data and Analyses
Politics in democracy and dictatorship is markedly different; democracy and dictatorship are also associated with distinct policy outcomes. Do political regimes also select different leaders, i.e., do democratic leaders have distinct personal backgrounds to those of their peers in dictatorships, do they tend to hold different prior careers and posts while climbing the “greasy pole” of politics? The aim of this paper is to introduce the new data o…
Blair disease? Business careers of the former democratic heads of state and government
Dynamics of regime personalization and patron–client networks in Russia, 1999–2014
Many comparative scholars classify personalist regimes as a distinct category of nondemocratic rule. To measure the process of regime personalization, and to distinguish such a process from overall authoritarian reversal, is difficult in comparative context. Using the Russian political regime in 1999–2014 as a case study, we examine the dynamics of regime personalization over time. Relying on original data on patron–client networks and expert sur…
Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits
A national constitution or other statute typically specifies restrictions on executive power, often including a limit to the number of terms the chief executive may hold office. In recent decades, however, some presidents of newly established democracies have extended their tenure by various semilegal means, thereby raising the specter—and in some cases creating the reality—of dictatorship. Alexander Baturo tracks adherence to and defiance of pre…
Dynamics of regime personalization and patron–client networks in Russia, 1999–2014
Many comparative scholars classify personalist regimes as a distinct category of nondemocratic rule. To measure the process of regime personalization, and to distinguish such a process from overall authoritarian reversal, is difficult in comparative context. Using the Russian political regime in 1999–2014 as a case study, we examine the dynamics of regime personalization over time. Relying on original data on patron–client networks and expert sur…
Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus
Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how…
The Stakes of Losing Office, Term Limits and Democracy
Some presidents facing term limits attempt – often successfully – to scrap tenure restrictions, while others step down when constitutionally required. Whether democratic, partly democratic or non-democratic, there is considerable variation among electoral regimes as to whether presidents respect term limits. This article focuses on what is at stake for a president required to leave the highest political office. It argues that for a given level of…
Democracy, Development, and Career Trajectories of Former Political Leaders
One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This article argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concern—specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers—is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic understanding of their careers and whether former rulers reti…
When Do Family Ties Matter? The Duration of Female Suffrage and Women’s Path to High Political Office
While the percentage of female heads of state in the world has increased to around 10 percent in the 2010s, a female president or prime minister still remains an exception. Recent scholarship has proposed a number of explanations behind this phenomenon, but there exist important gaps. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we use new and comprehensive data to undertake a systematic examination of the differences in the personal, educ…
Office or Officeholder? Regime Deinstitutionalization and Sources of Individual Political Influence
How to separate the office from the officeholder is one of the most difficult questions in the empirical study of institutions and leadership. We argue that provided there is an indicator for the overall individual influence among members of the political elite and there is sufficient variability among individuals taking the same office, being promoted and demoted into different offices over time, we can separate latent individual and institution…
Strategic Communication in Dictatorships: Performance, Patriotism, and Intimidation
Research shows that dictators’ public rhetoric shapes both elite and mass opinion and behavior. However, the determinants of dictators’ strategic communication remain undertheorized and underresearched. Theoretically, we argue that (i) dictators primarily use three key communication strategies (“performance” and “patriotism,” which serve to boost legitimacy, and “intimidation,” meant to deter opponents); (ii) they substitute between them dependin…
Cursus Honorum: Personal Background, Careers and Experience of Political Leaders in Democracy and Dictatorship—New Data and Analyses
Politics in democracy and dictatorship is markedly different; democracy and dictatorship are also associated with distinct policy outcomes. Do political regimes also select different leaders, i.e., do democratic leaders have distinct personal backgrounds to those of their peers in dictatorships, do they tend to hold different prior careers and posts while climbing the “greasy pole” of politics? The aim of this paper is to introduce the new data o…
Flatliners: Ideology and rational learning in the adoption of the flat tax
What factors explain the wave of adoption of the flat tax in Eastern Europe? It is argued in this article that, once the first few successes were underway, governments with liberal outlooks toward taxation adopted the reform through a process of rational learning: an often radically new government will tend to adopt the policy based on successful implementation of its neighbours. The issue of policy diffusion is approached by explicitly modeling …
Why do authoritarian regimes adopt bicameralism? Cooptation, control, and masking controversial reforms
The adoption of bicameralism in the world is increasingly an authoritarian phenomenon: while the percentage of bicameral democracies is in decline, there has been a steady increase in bicameral non-democracies. What makes non-democracies turn to bicameralism? We argue that bicameralism may serve as a means of post-conflict reconciliation or control of the legislature when the opposition gains seats in the lower chamber. We also propose a novel ex…
What Countries Select More Experienced Leaders? The PolEx Measure of Political Experience
How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of …
Seeded Sequential LDA: A Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Topic-Specific Analysis of Sentences
Topic models have been widely used by researchers across disciplines to automatically analyze large textual data. However, they often fail to automate content analysis, because the algorithms cannot accurately classify individual sentences into pre-defined topics. Aiming to make topic classification more theoretically grounded and content analysis in general more topic-specific, we have developed Seeded Sequential Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA…
Life of Brian Revisited: Assessing Informational and Non-Informational Leadership Tools
Recent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders’ rhetorical signals facilitate followers’ co-ordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article…
Reading the Tea Leaves: Medvedev's Presidency through Political Rhetoric of Federal and Sub-National Actors
In the absence of public information on the inner workings of the Russian political regime, especially during Medvedev's presidency, outside observers often have to rely on politicians' unguarded comments or subjective analysis. Instead, we turn to quantitative text analysis of political rhetoric. Treating governors as a quasi-expert panel, we argue that policy positions revealed in regional legislative addresses explain how elites perceived the …
Is there a ‘revolving door’ to the private sector in Irish politics
The connections between Irish politicians and the private sector are the subject of constant speculation, particularly in the post Celtic Tiger period. However, there is little systematic evidence whether publicised cases of such ties represent the exception to the rule, or if they are symptomatic of a larger problem. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the public–private nexus and investigate whether a revolving door – the movement of indivi…
Blair disease? Business careers of the former democratic heads of state and government
Incumbent takeovers
The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In democracies, this is known as 'subversions by the ruling executive', 'executive aggrandizement', or 'autogolpe'; in autocracies, researchers study 'personalization', 'transition to personal rulership', or 'power-grabbing'. While the terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expa…
When incumbents do not run: Presidential Succession and Democratization
When authoritarian incumbent presidents run in elections, they have significant incumbency advantage and almost always win. When incumbents comply with term limits or do not run for other reasons, they tend to designate successors in their stead. However, their chosen successors often lose. Do they lose because they cannot command the same electoral advantage in loyalty, resources and name recognition that incumbents can, or because succession an…
Indigenous Students and Mathematics: Teachers' Perceptions of the Role of Teacher Aides
This study examined teachers' perceptions of the role of teacher aides in mathematics classrooms in rural and remote Indigenous communities. Twelve teachers from three schools in rural and remote Queensland participated in the study. The results from the first year of the project indicated that there were differences in how these teachers worked with their teacher aides, particularly the specific roles assigned to them in the mathematics classroo…
Playing the sycophant card: The logic and consequences of professing loyalty to the autocrat
Despite the centrality of the loyalty–competence framework in research on authoritarian politics, scholars have only focused on material aspects of what elites do in their service to the dictator. Yet nonmaterial aspects such as sycophantically praising the autocrat in speech—a common, everyday practice under authoritarianism, have been ignored. We propose a novel theory to explain under what conditions elites “overpraise” the ruler and imitate h…
Words to unite nations: The complete United Nations General Debate Corpus, 1946-present
Every year since 1946, the General Debate has taken place at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly session. Representatives from all UN member states deliver an address, discussing the issues that they consider most important in global politics, revealing their governments' positions, and seeking to persuade other states of their perspectives. The annual UN General Debate statements provide invaluable information for scholars …
Leaders’ experience and the transition from populism to dictatorship
High-Level Leader Visits: A Promising Area of Study in IR
Once deemed a “nearly impossible” area of study, high-level leader visits—one of the most visible and consequential practices in global politics—have recently attracted renewed scholarly attention. This resurgence stems from the growing recognition of leader visits as a valuable lens for addressing foundational questions in international relations, including why states act as they do, the consequences of their actions, and how their behavior shap…
Personalization and Elite Rhetoric: How the Autocrat's Popularity and Political Repression Influence Policy Speech of Regime Officials
We study the implications of regime personalization on the incentives of political elites to politicize their policy agenda and express loyalty to the ruler. Because revering the autocrat is one of the observable manifestations of personalization, while the process of personalization may be, in turn, influenced by an increased prevalence of leader‐centered rhetoric, isolating the effects of personalization on policy and political rhetoric is diff…
The Incentives of Leaders in International Organizations: Evidence from the UN General Assembly
Voters and selectorates tend to prioritize domestic policy, so when and why do national political leaders choose to spend their time at international organizations (IOs)? Heads of state only began to address international assemblies such as the UN in recent decades; their appearances are puzzling, considering that leaders rarely get direct political benefit from multilateral cooperation, whose gains tend to be diffuse and slow-moving. This paper …
Indigenous Students and Mathematics: Teachers' Perceptions of the Role of Teacher Aides
This study examined teachers' perceptions of the role of teacher aides in mathematics classrooms in rural and remote Indigenous communities. Twelve teachers from three schools in rural and remote Queensland participated in the study. The results from the first year of the project indicated that there were differences in how these teachers worked with their teacher aides, particularly the specific roles assigned to them in the mathematics classroo…
Flatliners: Ideology and rational learning in the adoption of the flat tax
What factors explain the wave of adoption of the flat tax in Eastern Europe? It is argued in this article that, once the first few successes were underway, governments with liberal outlooks toward taxation adopted the reform through a process of rational learning: an often radically new government will tend to adopt the policy based on successful implementation of its neighbours. The issue of policy diffusion is approached by explicitly modeling …
The Stakes of Losing Office, Term Limits and Democracy
Some presidents facing term limits attempt – often successfully – to scrap tenure restrictions, while others step down when constitutionally required. Whether democratic, partly democratic or non-democratic, there is considerable variation among electoral regimes as to whether presidents respect term limits. This article focuses on what is at stake for a president required to leave the highest political office. It argues that for a given level of…
Life of Brian Revisited: Assessing Informational and Non-Informational Leadership Tools
Recent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders’ rhetorical signals facilitate followers’ co-ordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article…
Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits
A national constitution or other statute typically specifies restrictions on executive power, often including a limit to the number of terms the chief executive may hold office. In recent decades, however, some presidents of newly established democracies have extended their tenure by various semilegal means, thereby raising the specter—and in some cases creating the reality—of dictatorship. Alexander Baturo tracks adherence to and defiance of pre…
Reading the Tea Leaves: Medvedev's Presidency through Political Rhetoric of Federal and Sub-National Actors
In the absence of public information on the inner workings of the Russian political regime, especially during Medvedev's presidency, outside observers often have to rely on politicians' unguarded comments or subjective analysis. Instead, we turn to quantitative text analysis of political rhetoric. Treating governors as a quasi-expert panel, we argue that policy positions revealed in regional legislative addresses explain how elites perceived the …
Office or Officeholder? Regime Deinstitutionalization and Sources of Individual Political Influence
How to separate the office from the officeholder is one of the most difficult questions in the empirical study of institutions and leadership. We argue that provided there is an indicator for the overall individual influence among members of the political elite and there is sufficient variability among individuals taking the same office, being promoted and demoted into different offices over time, we can separate latent individual and institution…
Cursus Honorum: Personal Background, Careers and Experience of Political Leaders in Democracy and Dictatorship—New Data and Analyses
Politics in democracy and dictatorship is markedly different; democracy and dictatorship are also associated with distinct policy outcomes. Do political regimes also select different leaders, i.e., do democratic leaders have distinct personal backgrounds to those of their peers in dictatorships, do they tend to hold different prior careers and posts while climbing the “greasy pole” of politics? The aim of this paper is to introduce the new data o…
Blair disease? Business careers of the former democratic heads of state and government
Dynamics of regime personalization and patron–client networks in Russia, 1999–2014
Many comparative scholars classify personalist regimes as a distinct category of nondemocratic rule. To measure the process of regime personalization, and to distinguish such a process from overall authoritarian reversal, is difficult in comparative context. Using the Russian political regime in 1999–2014 as a case study, we examine the dynamics of regime personalization over time. Relying on original data on patron–client networks and expert sur…
Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus
Every year at the United Nations (UN), member states deliver statements during the General Debate (GD) discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments’ perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7300 country statements from 1970–2014. We demonstrate how…
On the importance of personal sources of power in politics: Comparative perspectives and research agenda
Democracy, Development, and Career Trajectories of Former Political Leaders
One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This article argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concern—specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers—is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic understanding of their careers and whether former rulers reti…
When Do Family Ties Matter? The Duration of Female Suffrage and Women’s Path to High Political Office
While the percentage of female heads of state in the world has increased to around 10 percent in the 2010s, a female president or prime minister still remains an exception. Recent scholarship has proposed a number of explanations behind this phenomenon, but there exist important gaps. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we use new and comprehensive data to undertake a systematic examination of the differences in the personal, educ…
Why do authoritarian regimes adopt bicameralism? Cooptation, control, and masking controversial reforms
The adoption of bicameralism in the world is increasingly an authoritarian phenomenon: while the percentage of bicameral democracies is in decline, there has been a steady increase in bicameral non-democracies. What makes non-democracies turn to bicameralism? We argue that bicameralism may serve as a means of post-conflict reconciliation or control of the legislature when the opposition gains seats in the lower chamber. We also propose a novel ex…
Is there a ‘revolving door’ to the private sector in Irish politics
The connections between Irish politicians and the private sector are the subject of constant speculation, particularly in the post Celtic Tiger period. However, there is little systematic evidence whether publicised cases of such ties represent the exception to the rule, or if they are symptomatic of a larger problem. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the public–private nexus and investigate whether a revolving door – the movement of indivi…
The Politics of Presidential Term Limits
Presidential term limits are one of the most important institutions in presidentialism. They are at the center of contemporary and historical debates and political battles between incumbent presidents seeking additional terms and their political opponents warning against democratic backsliding and the dangers of personalism. Bringing the team of country experts, comparativists, theorists, constitutional lawyers, and policy practitioners together,…
When incumbents do not run: Presidential Succession and Democratization
When authoritarian incumbent presidents run in elections, they have significant incumbency advantage and almost always win. When incumbents comply with term limits or do not run for other reasons, they tend to designate successors in their stead. However, their chosen successors often lose. Do they lose because they cannot command the same electoral advantage in loyalty, resources and name recognition that incumbents can, or because succession an…
What Countries Select More Experienced Leaders? The PolEx Measure of Political Experience
How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of …
Seeded Sequential LDA: A Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Topic-Specific Analysis of Sentences
Topic models have been widely used by researchers across disciplines to automatically analyze large textual data. However, they often fail to automate content analysis, because the algorithms cannot accurately classify individual sentences into pre-defined topics. Aiming to make topic classification more theoretically grounded and content analysis in general more topic-specific, we have developed Seeded Sequential Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA…
The Incentives of Leaders in International Organizations: Evidence from the UN General Assembly
Voters and selectorates tend to prioritize domestic policy, so when and why do national political leaders choose to spend their time at international organizations (IOs)? Heads of state only began to address international assemblies such as the UN in recent decades; their appearances are puzzling, considering that leaders rarely get direct political benefit from multilateral cooperation, whose gains tend to be diffuse and slow-moving. This paper …
Incumbent takeovers
The expansion of power by incumbent political leaders has become the subject of increased scholarly attention. In democracies, this is known as 'subversions by the ruling executive', 'executive aggrandizement', or 'autogolpe'; in autocracies, researchers study 'personalization', 'transition to personal rulership', or 'power-grabbing'. While the terminological landscape is rich, there is little conceptual agreement of what leader-driven power expa…
Strategic Communication in Dictatorships: Performance, Patriotism, and Intimidation
Research shows that dictators’ public rhetoric shapes both elite and mass opinion and behavior. However, the determinants of dictators’ strategic communication remain undertheorized and underresearched. Theoretically, we argue that (i) dictators primarily use three key communication strategies (“performance” and “patriotism,” which serve to boost legitimacy, and “intimidation,” meant to deter opponents); (ii) they substitute between them dependin…
Leaders’ experience and the transition from populism to dictatorship
High-Level Leader Visits: A Promising Area of Study in IR
Once deemed a “nearly impossible” area of study, high-level leader visits—one of the most visible and consequential practices in global politics—have recently attracted renewed scholarly attention. This resurgence stems from the growing recognition of leader visits as a valuable lens for addressing foundational questions in international relations, including why states act as they do, the consequences of their actions, and how their behavior shap…
Political science (25 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (15 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Democracy (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Economics (12 works)