Archive Detail

Speaker:
Lotem Halevy

Lotem Halevy

Working with electoral data from autocratic regimes: Lessons from pre-democratic elections in the Kingdom of Hungary

Abstract

How can researchers effectively extract data from historical records while ensuring that the data reliably represents historical events? Throughout history, many emerging states held elections prior to achieving full democratic transition. However, scholars studying regime change often restrict their quantitative data to either the period preceding free and fair elections or the period following them. This truncation of data divides regime change into either "democratic" or not, disregarding the crucial role that pre-democratic elections played in both failed and successful transitions to democracy. In this paper, I present a mixed-method framework designed to study and utilize electoral data from pre-democratic elections in order to examine political outcomes associated with democracy or its absence. I conceptually break down the electoral institutions involved in the process of democratization into two components: inputs and outputs. I demonstrate the value of utilizing directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to theoretically analyze the underlying processes that drive pre-democratic elections. Additionally, I employ an original digitization of electoral data from the Kingdom of Hungary (1878-1935) to explore the relationships between various components within the DAGs. By measuring and controlling these relationships, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the causal links between electoral inputs and outputs during periods of political regime change. To achieve this, I illustrate how qualitative case studies of the inputs can be combined with quantitative historical data, bridging the qualitative gaps in existing quantitative studies.

Lotem Halevy is a mixed-method and interdisciplinary social scientist studying democratization and nationalism in Central Europe from a historical perspective. Her research aims to understand the intertwined origins of nationalism and democracy by bridging top-down and bottom-up explanations for regime change. She defended her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023 and is currently an Independent Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cluster.

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