Political Constraints V

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Quick info
Data type Numeric
Scale Metric
Value labels Not applicable
Technical name polnat_polity_polconv_polcon
Category Political factors
Label Index of political constraints (POLCON V)
Related indicators Political Constraints III

Henisz' measures of political constraints (POLCON) capture the "feasibility of change", i.e. the "the extent to which a change in the preferences of any one actor may lead to a change in government policy" (Henisz 2002, 363). It ranges from 0 to 1 with higher values indicating more constraints. The POLCON V index takes five branches (executive, lower and upper legislative chambers, judiciary, and sub-federal entities) into account.

Coding rules

Henisz starts out from identifying the number of independent government branches, assuming policy preferences "independently and identically drawn from a uniform, unidimensional policy space" (Henisz 2002, 363) and taking the extent of partisan alignments across the branches into account. For a detailed description of the index construction see Henisz 2002, 380-389 (Appendix). In contrast to his POLCON III measure which only takes three government branches (executive, lower and upper legislative chambers) into account, POLCON V also considers the judiciary and sub-federal entities as additional veto branches.

Bibliographic info

Citation: Henisz, Witold J. 2000. "The Institutional Environment for Economic Growth." Economics and Politics 12 (1): 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0343.00066

Related publications:

Misc

Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (A01), Paul Bederke

Data release:
  • Version 0.001: Initial release

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