Person:

Norris, Pippa

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defense. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of Human Security, focusing on the welfare of ordinary people against a broad range of threats. This has aroused vigorous debate. Part I of this paper proposes an analytical model of Human Security. Part II argues that it is important to measure how ordinary people perceive risks, moving beyond state-centric notions of Human Security. We examine new evidence, drawing upon survey items specially designed to monitor perceptions of Human Security, included for the first time in the 6th wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), with fieldwork conducted in 2010-2012.Part III demonstrates that people distinguish three dimensions: national, community, and personal security and then explores some structural determinants driving these perceptions. Part IV discusses why perceptions of Human Security matter, in particular for explaining cultural values and value change around the world. The conclusion argues that the shift from a narrow focus on military security toward the broader concept of Human Security is a natural response to the changing challenges facing developed societies, in which the cost-benefit ratio concerning war has become negative and cultural changes have made war less acceptable. In this setting, valid measures of perceptions of Human Security have become essential, both to understand the determinants of Human Security among ordinary people, and to analyze their consequences.

Does democratic governance expand wealth and prosperity? There is no consensus about this issue despite the fact that for more than half a century, rival theories about the regime-growth relationship have been repeatedly tested against the empirical evidence, using a variety of cases, models and techniques. To consider the issues, Part I of this paper reviews and summarizes theories why regimes are expected to influence economic growth directly, either positively or negatively. After considering these debates, Part II discusses the technical challenges facing research on this topic and how it is proposed to overcome these. Part III presents the results of the comparative analysis for the effects of democratic governance on economic growth during recent decades. The descriptive results illustrate the main relationships. The multivariate models check whether these patterns remain significant after controlling for many other factors associated with growth, including geography, economic conditions, social structural variables, cultural legacies, and global trends. The evidence supports the equilibrium thesis suggesting that regimes combining both liberal democracy and bureaucratic governance are most likely to generate growth, while by contrast patronage autocracies display the worst economic performance. The conclusion considers the implications.

The concept of trustworthiness can be understood to involve an informal social contract where principals authorize others to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfill their responsibilities, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. When evaluating the trustworthiness of political institutions, public judgments are expected to reflect the quality of government procedures, especially the principles of competency, impartiality and integrity. The most extensive body of cross-national empirical research about these issues has focused largely on established liberal democracies, such as Nordic states, characterized by freedom of the press and media pluralism, as well as affluent post-industrial European societies with highly educated populations. This study theorizes that the accuracy of any public judgments of the trustworthiness of government procedures are likely to be mediated by the information environment in open and closed societies, as well as by the cognitive skills of citizens. To understand these issues, Part I summarizes the theoretical argument. To identify the drivers of trust, data is drawn from around 80 societies around the globe included in Wave 7 of the European Values Survey/ World Values Survey (2017-21). Part II examines individual-level data to analyze how far confidence in political institutions is strengthened by subjective perceptions about the quality of governance. For a more rigorous test, Part III compares objective performance indicators to see how far independent measures of the quality of government by monitoring agencies predict public judgments of the trustworthiness of core political institutions in each country -- and how far such relationships are condition by the type of information society, as well as by societal levels of education. Part IV highlight the key findings and considers their broader implications for understanding the conditions for trust and trustworthiness.

The early twenty-first century has seen growing concern about risks to academic freedom in America and worldwide. To understand these issues, Part I of the paper distinguishes two threats to academic freedom. Restrictions on independent scholarship can arise from outside institutions of higher education, through state laws and external regulatory bodies. They can also be due to internal cultural processes within the academy which limit viewpoint diversity. What is the relationship between these embedded dimensions? The study theorizes that legal regulations can exert a direct effect on academic freedom and also have an indirect chilling effect, through encouraging practices of self-censorship. To address these issues, Part II draws upon the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) Academic Freedom Index (AFI) in 179 nations worldwide. Net change in the Index is estimated since 2000 and it is illustrated by selected cases, including the United States. Part III builds upon this foundation to understand subjective perceptions of self-censorship within academia. Cross-national survey data from over 100 countries is used to examine the attitudes and behavior of scholars within the discipline of political science, a field dealing with issues at the forefront of culture wars in higher education. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the core findings and considers their broader implications. The evidence suggests that 1) growing limits on academic freedom are associated with broader processes of backsliding in liberal democracy, evident in many parts of the globe. Equally importantly, legal constraints on academic freedom encourage processes of self-censorship, thereby silencing unorthodox voices, suppressing debate, and weakening viewpoint diversity in higher education. Institutions of higher education need to resist pressures on academic freedom to fulfil their classic mission of advancing human knowledge.

In many countries, polling day ends with disputes about ballot-box fraud, corruption, and flawed registers. Which claims are accurate? And which are false complaints from sore losers? New evidence gathered by the Electoral Integrity Project has just been released in an annual report which compares the risks of flawed and failed elections, and how far countries around the world meet international standards. The EIP is an independent research project based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Pippa Norris. This annual report evaluates all national parliamentary and presidential contests occurring in 66 countries worldwide holding 73 election from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2013 (excluding smaller states with a population below 100,000), from Albania to Zimbabwe. Data is derived from a global survey of 855 election experts. Immediately after each contest, the survey asks domestic and international experts to monitor the quality based on 49 indicators. These responses are then clustered into eleven stages occurring during the electoral cycle and summed to construct an overall 100-point expert Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) index and ranking.

The standard explanation of electoral reform is offered by rational choice accounts. These regard the choice of rules as an elite-level issue, dominated by partisan interests bargaining within the legislature, where citizens are usually marginalized and powerless. Such accounts may help to explain what specific reforms are enacted but they lack the capacity to account satisfactorily for the logically prior questions: when and why are any successful reforms raised on the policy agenda? Part I presents a general policy cycle model identifying multiple actors in the process of electoral change. Working within this framework, the study seeks to test the proposition that political culture -- notably citizen dissatisfaction with regime legitimacy -- heightens the salience of institutional reform on the policy agenda. Part II summarizes the research design testing this proposition. Perceptions of regime legitimacy are measured at three levels: citizens’ aspirations for democracy, satisfaction with the performance of democracy, and confidence in regime institutions. Evidence draws upon the 2nd and 3rd waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), in the early to mid-1990s, covering almost fifty countries around the globe. Patterns of institutional reform are measured by major changes to the electoral systems used for the lower house of parliament during the following decade. The study uses binary logistic regression to test whether macro-level perceptions of regime legitimacy in the early to mid-1990s influenced whether electoral reforms were passed during the subsequent decade, controlling for levels of democracy and development. Part III presents the results. The evidence demonstrates that democratic aspirations (support for democracy as an ideal) are a strong, significant, and robust predictor of the occurrence of subsequent electoral reforms. The conclusion in Part IV considers the implications of these findings, both for theories concerning regime legitimacy, as well as for revising standard accounts of processes of institutional change.

This paper examines the impact of descriptive representation in comparative perspective. The goals are to establish (1) whether descriptive representation mobilizes attitudinal and behavioral indicators of civic engagement; (2) whether the strength of any such relationship differs for women and young people; and (3) whether this relationship is evident cross-nationally. The first section provides an overview of existing research on descriptive representation and the civic engagement of women and young people. The second section presents the research design. The third reports and discusses the findings of the multilevel models and what these suggest about relationships between descriptive representation in national parliaments and patterns in civic engagement among citizens. The paper concludes with a summary of the major findings and reflects upon their implications for understanding and altering long-standing inequalities in civic engagement.

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P; Huntington's provocative and controversial thesis of a 'clash of civilizations', arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Survey/European Values Survey (WVS/EVS) allows us, for the first time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of the beliefs and values of Islamic and non-Islamic publics in 75 societies around the globe, confirms the first claim in Huntington's thesis: culture does matter, and indeed matters a lot, so that religious legacies leave a distinct imprint on contemporary values. But Huntington is mistaken in assuming that the core clash between the West and Islamic worlds concerns democracy. The evidence suggests striking similarities in the political values held in these-societies. It is true that Islamic publics differ from Western publics concerning the role of religious leadership in society, but this is not a simple dichotomous clash - many non-Islamic societies side with the Islamic ones on this issue. Moreover the Huntington thesis fails to identify the most basic cultural fault line between the West and Islam, which concerns the issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization. The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos.

There is widespread concern that academic freedom is threatened by growing demands for intellectual conformity and attempted censorship from intolerant zealots involving ‘woke wars’ and a ‘cancel culture’ pitting the socially liberal progressive left against the socially conservative right. This study seeks to understand the nature and scope of contemporary threats to academic freedom of expression around the world, especially the role of self-censorship in this process. Part I unpacks the notion of a ‘cancel culture’ in academia, understood as a chilly climate silencing speech deemed derogatory, hostile, factually incorrect, or morally offensive. The research explores processes of self-censorship where scholars are unwilling to express their authentic views in public. Mechanisms potentially driving these processes include heterodox status (cultural minorities out of step with majority views aka fish-out-of-water); institutions (constitutional principles, legal frameworks and administrative regulations used by educational authorities to govern academic speech); culture (attitudes, values, and social norms towards free speech); and academic status (inequalities in academic power, security, gender, and age). To establish empirical evidence, Part II sets out the research design. It draws upon new survey data collected from the second ECPR-IPSA World of Political Science survey (WPS-2023), monitoring the background and attitudes of almost 2000 political scientists living and working in around 100 countries worldwide. Part III analyzes the key results, confirming the reluctance of heterodox scholars to challenge majority views in controversial debates. The conclusion in Part IV summarizes the findings, considers their broader implications, and discusses the next steps in the research agenda.