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In fall 2017, Primo and Milyo mounted the first survey of campaign finance scholars that asks for their normative as well as objective views on the US campaign finance system. The authors study whether public perceptions of campaign finance are in-step or out-of-step with what scholars believe, and whether experts’ beliefs about money in politics are correlated with their own ideological and partisan leanings. In their survey, Primo and Milyo find that campaign finance experts, compared with the American public, are far more liberal and Democratic, are more polarized by party and ideology on campaign finance issues, are less jaded about American politics, have a narrower conception of corruption and its prevalence in American politics, better use existing scientific understandings to analyze the role of money in politics, and believe deeply in campaign finance reform. Primo and Milyo discuss the implications of these findings for the scientific study of campaign finance.

The chapter outlines the main aim of the book — to assess and explain the extent to which political parties across Europe succeed in representing diverse voters. Two important features of the European political landscape complicate the task of assessing party representation. First, in the new democracies in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe representation may not be only differentially achieved compared to the West but may also be attained by different mechanisms. Second, parties in both West and East must now seek to represent voters that are increasingly diverse, specifically between partisan and independent supporters. We refer to the challenges of representation of diverse voters as ‘the strain of representation’. Finally, the chapter presents the evidential basis for the empirical analysis which follows — the expert surveys that were conducted in 24 European countries on party positions that were merged with other available data on voters, party characteristics, and country conditions.

The study of how party competition affects vote choices requires valid and reliable measures of the policy positions of political parties. This chapter compares the three most commonly used measures of party positions in comparative research, namely Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data, party expert surveys, and voter surveys. Additional attention is devoted to how scholars can make better use of the CMP data to develop time-series measurements of party positions. The chapter presents an innovative approach to the construction of scales for left-right, libertarian-authoritarian and the European integration dimensions using CMP data. The cross-validations of the different manifesto and survey measures are encouraging since they demonstrate that despite the variation in the construction of these measures they provide very similar rankings of parties on a left-right dimension.

Chapter 4 presents and justifies a set of assumptions regarding the future of fertility in high-fertility countries based on an overview of fertility experiences in these countries, a review of factors influencing fertility change, a global survey of experts, and a final experts’ meeting. Future fertility trends in high fertility countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, will be the main determinants of global population growth over the rest of this century. Accordingly, this chapter describes the diversity of experiences of the countries with currently high fertility from those well advanced in the fertility transition to countries that have barely started. The expert survey emphasizes the importance of female education, urbanization, and access to family planning in fertility declines. The literature review confirms these judgements. The chapter ends with a technical description of the procedure for deriving the assumptions for projecting fertility in high fertility countries until 2100.

This chapter outlines the core concept and measure of electoral integrity, the key yardstick used by the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) to evaluate free and fair elections. EIP defines the idea of electoral integrity as the presence of a set of agreed-upon international conventions and global norms, applying universally to all countries worldwide through the election cycle, including during the pre-election period, the campaign, on polling day, and its aftermath. For evidence, EIP developed an expert survey of Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI), which gathers information covering all independent nation-states around the world that have held direct (popular) elections for the national parliament or presidential elections, excluding micro-states (with populations below 100,000). The 213 elections in 153 nations analyzed in the latest release used in this study, PEI-4.5, fall within the period from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2016.

Analyses of party manifestos, of expert judgements on party positions, and of parties’ actual behaviour when voting on military missions all show that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension. Support for the military and its interventions is systematically related to the left/right dimension in a skewed inverted U-curve: support is weakest at the far left and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to the centre right where it reaches its peak. The far right is less supportive then the centre right but less opposed than the far left. The relation to the ‘new politics’ dimension is shaped very similarly but is generally weaker. Party-political contestation of military missions in the post-Communist party systems in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe follows a different pattern than elsewhere. In the post-Communist party systems, the relationship between left/right and support of military interventions is weaker, and the relationship with the ‘new politics’ dimension is either weak or even points in the opposite direction as in Western Europe. It is important to note, however, that the influence of the left/right dimension is not limited to Western Europe. As the manifestos of various non-European countries show, the correlation can also be found in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America.

This chapter outlines the conceptual framework for assessing and explaining the influence of international bureaucracies. It first conceptualizes international bureaucracies before elaborating the dependent variables and the concept of “influence” as used in the research, and then considers three clusters of factors that may explain variation in the degree and type of influence of international bureaucracies: Cognitive, normative, and executive influence. Based on these three factors, the chapter presents bureaucracies as knowledge brokers, negotiation facilitators, and capacity builders. It also discusses the concept of relative change in the behavior of actors and compares bureaucratic influence with regime effectiveness. The chapter concludes by expounding the empirical research procedures, including case selection, field research and interview methodology, and the expert survey.

This chapter examines the patronage pillar of regime personalisation, determined by the strength of the ruler's patronage network, “Collective Putin.” It charts how Vladimir Putin's patron-client network developed and acquired control across institutions. It introduces original data on patron-client networks in Russia and maps these networks over time. Based on expert surveys of policy influence, it further explains how Putin's patron-client network has grown in dominance over time. The chapter finds that the path toward personalisation in Russia centred on the relatively swift acquisition of control over security and enforcement institutions, but a much more gradual penetration of other institutions by the ruler's network. It also finds that within the ranks of the Russian ruling coalition, this network emerges as dominant in early 2007, which also permitted Vladimir Putin to govern the regime from the subordinate position of prime minister from 2008--12. The patron-client network had further consolidated in strength and scope by 2012. Furthermore, Putin's return to presidential office, which coincided with the strengthening of personalisation on other pillars, made him largely autonomous from his own coalition. As the Russian leader has remained unchallenged in office for a considerable period of time, loyalty to the ruler no longer depended on whether officials had personal ties and belonged to the ruler's patronage network. Instead, loyalty came to be determined by the logic of a personalist system so that all officials regarded the ruler as their overall patron.

This chapter examines the process of deinstitutionalisation and the dynamics of dismissals and rotations in the inner circle of the Russian regime. The existence of institutions designed to manage the intra-elite conflict, such as the United Russia party, alongside extensive patronage networks poses a puzzle as to the extent that the regime is deinstitutionalised. As a result of the dominance of Putin's patron-client network across state institutions, the regime has become more deinstitutionalised, wherein the personal attributes of officeholders, such as their informal connections, become more important than the formal power of their office. Drawing from an expert survey and original data on the careers of individual members of the political elite, and using a novel empirical measure, the zeta-ratio, this chapter estimates the relative importance of office versus officeholder within the ranks of the Russian political elite. It finds that regime deinstitutionalisation has gradually increased from 1999 to 2011. However, there are visible signs of a reversal from 2012 onwards as the president began to replace his old supporters and rely less on informal networks for governance. This chapter argues that the increase in the rate of reshuffles, firing and hiring, as well as replacement of the key members of Putin’s inner circle was an expected development given the stage of regime personalisation after 2012, when no political actor but the ruler was indispensable.

Chapter 4 considers the sources of systematic evidence that are available to diagnose problems of American elections. Many claims and counterclaims about alleged malpractice are often heard in partisan debate and journalistic commentary—but during an era of low trust in the legacy news and isolating bubbles in social media, what could help to sort out fact from fiction? What are the pros and cons of alternative sources of evidence? This chapter compares electoral performance data on issues of voter registration permissiveness, ballot access, system security, and gerrymandering from several expert indices, institutional measures, and mass surveys.

This chapter reflects on the main research questions and outlines how the book’s empirical findings support the argument that the Russian political regime can be understood as a personalist regime in the making. Russia is highly personalised in terms of patronage networks, the ruler’s authority is widely understood to be implicitly permanent, but it is only moderately deinstitutionalised, and it has a relatively low level of media personalisation. This chapter further discusses the multidimensionality of personalistic politics and that consequently political regimes typically do not resemble “ideal types,” nor do they necessarily strive to become ever more personalist. In fact, even though the levels of personalisation change over time, by and large the Russian regime may be in a steady state in between a democracy and a full-blown personalist regime. A state that allows it to solve various problems of governance and that reflects preferences of the ruler and those of the ruling coalition. While the overall focus is on the dynamics in Russia, this study also illuminates how other personalist and personalising regimes emerge, develop, and function. Finally, it demonstrates how scholars of other non-democratic regimes may improve their studies by relying on similar techniques to those introduced in The New Kremlinolog and discusses methodological implications for the study of authoritarian politics in general.