Matthew Wilson

University of South Carolina | USC · Department of Political Science

Although empirical research has generally demonstrated that democracies experience more terrorism than autocracies, research suggests that this depends upon complex institutional differences that go beyond the democracy-autocracy divide. This study examines these differences, linking institutions to strategies of coercion and co-optation. Using zer...

To understand the limitations of discrete regime type data for studying authoritarianism, I scrutinize three regime type data sets provided by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland, Hadenius and Teorell, and Geddes. The political narratives of Nicaragua, Colombia, and Brazil show that the different data sets on regime type lend themselves to concept stretc...

In research on authoritarian institutions, legislatures are portrayed as capable of resolving dilemmas between the leader and opposition members. Nevertheless, repeated interactions between a leader and their ruling coalition can lead to both contested dictatorships, in which institutions constrain the leader, and established dictatorships, in whic...

This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of fail...

We describe and analyze patterns in the geographical focus of political science research across more than a century. Using a new database of titles and abstracts from 27,690 publications in eight major political science journals from their inception, we demonstrate that, historically, political scientists concentrated their studies on a limited num...

Are some countries better equipped from the onset of a democratization process to become democracies? We compared successful and failed episodes of liberalization over the period 1900 to 2018 to examine if starting state influences the probability of successful democratization. We show that liberalization in autocracies was more likely to succeed i...

This paper investigates conceptual ambiguities concerning the dimensionality of democracy and what it can tell us about political development. We explore variation in components of the Electoral Democracy Index from the Varieties of Democracy Project and evaluate the strength of their relationships to democratization and democratic stability. Facto...

While social scientists often theorize about the enduring effects of past regime characteristics, conceptual issues and data limitations pose real challenges for assessing these legacies empirically. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock, conceptualized as the accumulated experience of democratic rule within a polity. Using a weig...

Although scholars agree that ethnically divided societies are generally more prone to political violence, critics of consociationalism suggest that proportional representation and parliamentarism provide poor solutions for ethnically heterogeneous settings. I argue that extant findings about the impacts of powersharing institutions on conflict like...

This article presents evidence of a global trend of autocratization. The most visible feature of democracy – elections – remains strong and is even improving in some places. Autocratization mainly affects non-electoral aspects of democracy such as media freedom, freedom of expression, and the rule of law, yet these in turn threaten to undermine the...

This article describes a lesson plan that harnessed students’ abilities to generate new teaching material by constructing country timelines. This involved crowdsourcing, or the reliance upon task inputs from a large number of people to acquire information. The plan was motivated by an approach that conceives of learning as deriving from the joint a...

This article illustrates major trends in political science research and frames the progress of research agendas in comparative politics. Drawing on the titles and abstracts of every article published in eight major political science journals between 1906 and 2015, the study tracks the frequency of references to specific keywords over time. The anal...

This research note examines how domestic institutions can moderate the relationship between domestic and interstate conflict involvement. Previous work has found that military dictatorships are more likely to become involved in either domestic or international conflicts, compared to party-based autocracies. We argue that the same institutional expl...

An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower...

As with many other questions in political science, explaining the timing of democratization may require a more nuanced focus on temporal mechanisms such as tempo and order. Based on a sample of independent regimes for the post World War II period from 1946 to 2008, I examine the order of regime change as part of a long-term institutional history. I...

This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states or events. It includes innovative contributions on life course studies, transitions into and out of employment, contemporaneous and historical careers, and political trajectories. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course...

The logic of historical explanation obliges one to understand temporality as a moderator of various effects on political outcomes. Temporal problems remain in the empirical analysis of political phenomena, however, especially as it pertains to categorical data and long-term time dependence. Many theories in political science assert that sequencing...

There are myriad explanations for the existence of political institutions in authoritarian regimes, providing a valuable starting point for differentiating the causes for their emergence from their contemporary roles. This paper considers whether there is an order to the development of authoritarian institutions -- specifically, support parties and...

What influences the order in which bargaining between actors occurs? Does the order of bargaining influence the outcome of the crises? In this paper, we consider the effect of actors' behavior in 47 domestic crises to address whether specfic factors are associated with different patterns of bargaining and, furthermore, whether these patterns are as...

Do certain patterns of actors’ behavior reinforce or undermine democracy? Are different patterns of bargaining associated with different regime types? Earlier work (Casper and Taylor 1996) showed that countries where actors bargained intensely to install democracy after a period of authoritarianism were more likely to have negotiated a wide range o...

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