Seraphine F. Maerz's research while affiliated with Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and other places

... The logic is that countries that actively participate in global climate cooperation will face higher pressure from the international community to introduce more stringent NZEPs. Since the same pressure may also come from domestic civil society [31,32], we additionally control for the robustness of the civil society is in each country, as reported in the Core Civil Society Index from the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) database [33]. ...

... Furthermore, the team ensures high levels of reliability and validity of constructs and instruments employed for the study(Coppedge et al., 2019). The database has been utilized in studies published in reputed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science (e.g.,Edgell et al., 2022) and the American Journal of Political Science (e.g., Claassen, 2020). Our dataset ...

... Besides elections, second, infringements of democratic procedures were widespread within both democracies and autocracies in 2020, and more so in autocracies. The Pandemic Backsliding Index (PanDem) created by the Varieties of Democracy Project measured authoritarian practices (emergency measures without time limit, disproportionate limitations on the role of legislatures, government disinformation campaigns) and illiberal practices (discriminatory measures, derogation of non-derogable rights, abusive enforcement) between March and December 2020 for 144 countries (Edgell et al. 2021). They found that around 80% of all countries violated democracy mainly on the basis of authoritarian practices and here it was predominantly the lack of limits on emergency measures, while less than 30% of the countries used illiberal practices. ...

... Just like in stable democracies, institutional arrangements in Serbia contracted further during the pandemic, justified by the urgency of the public health measures (Guasti 2020;Pozen and Scheppele 2020;Windholz 2020;Bolleyer and Salát 2021). Also, just like in non-democratic states, the pandemic made it easier for the autocratic rulers to further violate civic and political rights, use excessive force, manipulate the emergency measures, and limit the possibilities and voices of political and social actors, especially those in the opposition to them (YUCOM 2020; Hellmeier et al. 2021;White 2021). Serbia is one of the countries where major violations of democratic standards happened during the pandemic (Bethke and Wolff 2020: 368), with a key event the violent riots in July 2020, to which the police responded with disproportionate force. ...

... 15 Although the 1990 Supreme Court-packing helped to concentrate power in the executive and allowed the abuse of presidential legislative powers, Argentina did not just remain a democracy, but there was no backsliding. According to different conceptualizations and measurements of democratic erosion, there was no democratic erosion in Argentina between 1989and 1999(Boese et al 2021Coppedge 2017;Lührmann and Lindberg 2019;Mainwaring and Bizzarro 2019;Pelk and Croissant 2021). In fact, both the Liberal Democracy Index and the Electoral Democracy Index from V-DEM (standard indexes to measure democracy) remained stable over Menem's presidencies and above the usual cut-off points used to code a country as democratic (see Figure 1) (Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg 2018). ...

... The literature has presented competing findings about the effects of democracy and political stability on terrorism (Rosendorff & Sandler, 2004). For our democracy measure, we employ the V-Dem electoral democracy index (Coppedge et al., 2021). The measure uses multiple factors that capture the degree of electoral competition, free and fair elections, and ability of civil society organizations to operate freely. ...

... To this end we have used the recent V-DEM ERT dataset 14 and, based on their conceptualization we firstly selected two cases of "averted democratic regression" in liberal democracies (the United States between 2016 and 2021 during the presidency of Donald Trump and Israel between 2009 and 2021, the second tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister). We thus follow the definition provided by Maerz et al 15 and considered averted democratic regression as a "substantial decline in the democratic quality before reverting back to some higher democratic state". In other words, autocratization falls short of transforming liberal democracy in a stable electoral democracy, and is then reverted. ...

... It is an opportunity through technocratic tools (transfer of responsibility to politically unaccountable experts -virologists or epidemiologists), populist tools (polarising and national rhetoric, neglecting minorities) and anti-democratic (weakening the role of parliaments, strengthening the executive, silencing the opposition and civil society) to misuse their power (Guasti, 2020, 48). Maerz et al. empirically show these inclinations in their research into 143 countries -democratic standards have fallen 116 Institutiones Administrationis -Journal of Administrative Sciences Vol. 2 (2022) No. 2, 112-131 in 83 of them during the pandemic (Maerz et al., 2020). In this regard, courts ought to use their power to ensure that governments do not use the often vague wording of crisis laws and do not rule with their decrees -in the words of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: ECtHR) -"beyond the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the crisis". ...

... Further, in her analysis of speeches by Putin of Russia during the period 2012-2018, Maerz (2019) notes that "there is a slight prevalence of talking more about democratic than autocratic procedures. Yet, at the same time, Putin makes use of a comparatively illiberal style of language" (p. ...

... Building on this dual conceptualization of democracy, we follow Lührmann and Lindberg (2019) and take an episode approach to measure the concept of autocratization rather than modelling democratic breakdown as a discrete outcome (see also Boese et al. 2020;Edgell et al. 2020). Democracies tend to erode gradually, and the detection of the start and end dates of such episodes enable scholars to analyze democratic breakdowns and resilience as a two-or multi-stage process of erosion ). ...