2017-18 Abstract: What is the effect of electoral personalism (the personal vote) on policy outcomes and party organization?

In countries throughout the world, electoral systems are based on what is known as proportional representation. Voters cast their votes for their preferred party or candidate, and legislative seats are apportioned according to the number each party/candidate receives. There are different methods of organizing electoral competition in these systems. In closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) systems, voters vote for parties, with the party leadership allocating seats according to its candidate ranking. In open-list proportional representation (OLPR), voters vote for individual candidates. A literature that is nearly three decades old has argued that because of its features, CLPR systems will be more partisan and more focused on national policy since candidates are beholden to a centralized party leadership. OLPR systems will be more candidate-centered, and politicians will place local, parochial interests before the national interest. 

The goal of this project is to reconsider this received wisdom and question whether the grip of parties over candidates in CLPR systems is as strong as the conventional wisdom discussed above suggests. 

Professor Monika Nalepa together with CISSR visitor, Jose Antonio Cheibub will organize a workshop at CISSR to explore whether the contrast between CLPR and OLPR has been overestimated in both the electoral and legislative arenas. The invited papers from a team of international political scientists will investigate why parties may play a relevant role in affecting candidate behavior in OLPR, both during the campaign and in the legislature.  

2018-19 Abstract: Transitional Justice and the Quality of Democratic Representation 

How do former authoritarian elites utilize the secret information acquired by the former enforcement apparatus associated with their respective regimes? I seek to learn whether such information can be used to blackmail politicians to make policy concessions, or whether previously undisclosed information about human rights abuses can jeopardize a new democracy's chances of survival. This line of research marks a new direction in comparative politics that examines the relationship between transitional justice (TJ) and the quality of democratic representation. It focuses on policies aimed at vetting political candidates for acts of collaboration with the authoritarian regime, and possible human rights violations committed in the past. This process is known as lustration. Revealing evidence of past authoritarian wrongs may prevent former authoritarian elites from influencing policy in new democracies. In preliminary work, I show that former authoritarian elites' influence tends to decrease with severity of transitional justice, but increases as voters view politicians' involvement with the former authoritarian regime as an important issue. The work also suggests that the effectiveness of TJ policies is reduced in the absence of a free press, as the media's inability to uncover empty threats which allows former autocrats to extract policy concessions. Surprisingly, the magnitude of ideological differences between current politicians and successors of authoritarian elites has no bearing on the ability of former autocrats to extract such concessions. This research will work to develop stronger measure of TJ severity to help evaluate how transitional justice can contribute to stable democratic transitions. 

2019-20 Abstract: Autocratic Regime Institutionalization: A Global Dataset

Despite the increasing prominence of studies focusing on authoritarian institutions, accurate measures of autocratic regime institutionalization have yet to be developed, leaving researchers to depend on poor proxies for real institutional strength. In this ongoing project, Monika Nalepa and collaborators hope to fill in this missing data gap by developing a global dataset of autocratic regime institutionalization in which each country-year combination from 1960 to 2015 is scored across various dimensions of institutionalization. 

2020-21 Abstract: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab 

Transitional Justice, that is the act of reckoning with a former authoritarian regime after it has ceased to exist, has direct implications for democratic processes. It influences who decides to go into politics, shapes politicians' behavior while in office, and, finally, influences how they delegate policy decisions. That is why mechanisms of transitional justice far from being the epilogue of an outgoing authoritarian regime are a constitutive part of the new democratic order. How successful these democracies become at staying democracies and their overall quality is a direct consequence of transitional justice. Monika Nalepa’s is currently working on a project to test a theoretical model of post-authoritarian purges by examining the relationship between post-authoritarian purges and the quality of democracy in countries that have transitioned from authoritarian rule.