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

民主在世界各地面临着许多挑战，从美国等成熟民主国家长期以来的民主规范受到侵蚀，到拉丁美洲和东欧的政党制度重新动荡，再到土耳其或泰国等国家的全面独裁逆转。本项目研究政党在控制其政治家方面所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，从而产生导致民主侵蚀的两种现象。本项目发展一般性的理论论点，收集来自多个国家的政党和政治家的数据，提出衡量政党制度不稳定性、政治家表现和候选人魅力的新策略，并将研究结果总结为一般性政策建议。为了帮助了解民主倒退背后的原因，该项目将确定最有利于稳定的政党和健康的民主制度的政策和体制安排，这是国家繁荣和国际和平的两个关键组成部分。该研究项目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，在这些相互作用有助于解释各种形式的民主破坏的前提下，研究作为长期实体的政党与其短视的个人候选人之间的战略相互作用。该项目开发了新的方法来捕捉政治家魅力、在职表现和政党实力等难以衡量的概念。利用一系列准实验方法和自然实验，我们用来自多个国家的数据检验了从正式模型中得出的丰富的新经验含义。这些分析既验证了理论，又产生了系统的经验证据，为学术和政策辩论提供了信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.