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Using a new measure of “comprehensive democracy,” our analysis traces the global democratic trend over the last 116 years, from 1900 until 2016, looking in particular at the centennial trend’s cultural zoning. As it turns out, democracy has been proceeding and continues to differentiate the world’s nations in a strongly culture-bound manner: high levels of democracy remain a distinctive feature of nations in which emancipative values have grown strong over the generations.

Democracy is a system of peaceful conflict resolution. It places an absolute ban on the exercise, tolerance, and encouragement of political violence. Existing democracies, however, are not immune to violent action but suffer from multiple forms of political violence. Antidemocratic actors who openly justify and exercise violence are one part of the problem. Those who are suspicious of acting as their masterminds, accomplices, or sympathizers are the other part.

Since its foundation in the 1970s, the Manifesto Project has provided data for measuring party positions and preferences based on parties’ electoral programs. The Manifesto Dataset which offers data on party preferences on specific policy issues and overarching policy scales in over 60 countries has strongly influenced research on political parties in the last decades. Recently, the Manifesto Project has extended its data collection and now provides access to the Manifesto Corpus – the digital and annotated manifesto collection of MARPOR.

Discussant: Wolfgang Merkel
Moderated by Swen Hutter