Collaborative Research: Charismatic Politicians, Weak Parties, and the Disruption of Democracy

民主在世界各地都面临着许多挑战，从美国等成熟民主国家长期坚持的民主规范受到侵蚀，到拉丁美洲和东欧的政党制度新一轮剧变，再到土耳其或泰国等国家的全面独裁逆转。该项目研究政党在控制其政客方面面临的障碍如何与选举规则、背景条件和选民压力相互作用，以产生导致民主被侵蚀的两种现象。这个项目发展了一般的理论论点，收集了来自多个国家的政党和政治家的数据，提出了衡量政党制度不稳定、政客表现和候选人魅力的新战略，并总结了一般政策建议中的发现。为了帮助理解民主倒退背后的原因，该项目将确定最有利于稳定政党和健康民主的政策和制度安排，这是国家繁荣和国际和平的两个关键组成部分。研究计划包括三个关键组成部分：理论发展、实证分析和方法创新。该项目开发了一系列正式的理论模型，在这些互动有助于解释各种形式的民主破坏的前提下，考察了作为较长期实体的政党与其目光短浅的个人候选人之间的未被充分研究的战略互动。该项目开发了新的方法，以捕捉政治家魅力、在任表现和政党实力等难以衡量的概念。采用一系列准实验方法和自然实验方法，利用来自多个国家的数据对形式模型得出的丰富的新的经验含义进行了检验。这些分析既验证了理论，又提供了系统的实证证据，为学术和政策辩论提供信息。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Democracy is facing may challenges around the world, from the erosion of long-held democratic norms in mature democracies like the United States, to renewed party system upheaval in Latin America and Eastern Europe, to the full-blown autocratic reversal in countries like Turkey or Thailand. This project studies how the obstacles that parties face in controlling their politicians interact with electoral rules, contextual conditions, and voter pressures to produce two phenomena that contribute to the erosion of democracy. This project develops general theoretical arguments, collects data on parties and politicians from multiple countries, proposes new strategies to measure party system instability, politicians’ performance, and candidates’ charisma, and summarizes the findings in general policy recommendations. In contributing to the understanding of the causes behind democratic backsliding, the project will identify policies and institutional arrangements that are most conducive to stable political parties and healthy democracies, two key components of national prosperity and international peace.The research program integrates three key components: theory development, empirical analysis and methodological innovation. The project develops a series of formal theoretical models that examine the understudied strategic interactions between political parties as longer-lived entities and their shorter-sighted individual candidates, under the premise that these interactions can help explain a variety of forms of democratic disruption. The project develops new methodologies to capture hard-to-measure concepts of politician charisma, incumbent performance, and party strength. Using a series of quasi-experimental approaches and natural experiments, a rich set of novel empirical implications derived from the formal models are tested with data from multiple countries. The analyses both validate the theories and produce systematic empirical evidence to inform scholarly and policy debates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.