The Politics of (De)liberalization: Studying partisan effects using mixed-effects models | Published now
A new article is published
online by Cambridge University Press in "Political Science Research and Methods" from Julian Garritzmann and Kilian Seng.
Abstract
Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms.
We then develop a framework
of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what conditions
parties matter. We test our (and rival) propositions with a new dataset on
(de)liberalization reforms in 23 democracies since 1973 covering several policy
areas.
Methodologically, we argue
that existing quantitative studies are problematic: They rely on time-series
cross-section models using country-year observations; but governments do not
change annually, so that the number of observations is artificially inflated,
resulting in incorrect estimates. We propose mixed-effects models instead, with
country-year observations nested in cabinets, which are nested in countries and
years. The results show under what conditions parties matter for (de)liberalization.
More generally, the paper argues that mixed-effects models should become the new standard for studying partisan influences.