Multi-National Analysis of State Sponsored Unemployment Aid as Characteristics of Democracy.

By James Summers

     Throughout history there has been a notion within the United States that Democratic states and Autocratic states are stratified in a hierarchy in which Democratic states are superior to Autocratic states. This study seeks to situate itself to try and show if receiving state aid even lends to the idea of any differences in Democratic and Autocratic countries.
 
This research will operate with the following parameters:
Hypothesis: Receiving state aid for unemployment will be a necessary condition to be living in a democratic state.
Null: receiving state aid for unemployment has no relation to living in a democratic state.
IV: Receiving state aid for unemployment
DV: Living in a Democratic or Autocratic state
Causal Mechanism: Living in a Democratic country contributes to higher levels of State sponsored aid being held as essential of Democracies.
 
    Comparative studies from Sergio Espuela and Youngho Cho test comparative analyses of Dictatorships and Democracies that reveal some of result the dichotomous relationship of these regime types. In Sergio Espuelas’ study he looked at Dictatorships and if they are less redistributive than non- dictatorships. His study looked at countries that were currently dictatorships and evaluated their past regime types to see if being a dictatorship hampered social program spending. Some of the countries had regimes that carried over the four year period that changed from democracy to autocracy’s. What Espuelas found was that dictatorships were less generous in social spending than democracies.[1] This is one conversation that looks how Democracies and Autocracies differ on social policy looking at economic spending. Another study by Youngho Cho uses data from the World Value Survey to understand the support for democracies looking at states that are democracies and those that used to be non-democratic.[2] Both studies use a multi-national comparative analysis in trying to understand social policy spending and democratic support in democratic and non-democratic states. This is important because multi-national analysis helps to understand general trends happening around the world.  
 
Description of concepts, data, and measurement:
    My independent variable was measuring the idea of people who receive state aid for unemployment as an essential or non-essential condition for living in a democratic state. However I needed a definition for autocratic states and democratic states. I used data from the non-governmental organization Freedom House whose data denotes countries as “free” and “not free”.[3] I used this designation to find autocratic states and democratic states and create a dummy variable that will help to discern from the other. The new variable codes democratic states as “free” states and has a numeric value of 1. Autocratic states are coded as “not free” states and have a numeric value of 0. My dependent variable that is being tested is which country the respondent is living in at the time of their responses. My null hypothesis will help to determine if there is or is not a relationship between receiving state aid for unemployment and that being a condition of living in a democratic state.
       This recoding of data was a part of my larger data set that came from the World Value Survey. The World Value Survey studies the changes in values and their impact on social and political life around the globe. This is where the question about receiving state aid for unemployment as a characteristic of democracy and the data that was surveyed came from.[4] The question is scaled from 1 to 10 with 1 “being a not essential characteristic of a Democracy” and 10 being “an essential characteristic of Democracy”. This data is useful because it has a larger response population that allows for greater accuracy rather than one respondent from one country and analyzing based off of that.
 
Presentation of analysis and results:         
    In order to get results from this data I ran a comparative means Independent-Samples T Test to see if there was any significance between respondents in Autocratic and Democratic countries and receiving unemployment aid as "essential" or "non-essential" to living in a Democratic state. In the “independent samples test” chart in the column sig. (2- tailed), the results are .010 and .009. What this means is that if looking at a normal distribution chart at the ends of each side, or tail, the confidence level or either tail falls within .025 threshold for any significance to reject the null hypothesis. Another figure of importance on this chart is the column of significance, of sig., the p-value of this test is .001. Which means that the threshold for statistical significance of .05 has been met and there is a 99% confidence interval to reject the null hypothesis.
    The “Group Statistics” chart is important because it puts into perspective the Error Bar visual graph. The dependent variable on the x-axis is the democratic or non-democratic state respondents live in. The y-axis is the independent variable looking at state unemployment aid as a characteristic of a democracy. The Error Bar visualizes the error or uncertainty based off of the variables ran in the T Test. The length of the Error Bars, or lack thereof, reveals the uncertainty of the data point. These short bars show that the values are concentrated and reliable. However, when looking at the “Group Statistics” chart the number of respondents (N) is roughly 96,000 and difference in mean from “free” and “not free” states is .05 which means that the averages for both sides are not as large as the numerical values would have us believe. There is no overlap between “free” and “not free” Error Bars which is slight but still present still giving some statistical significance to the tests ran.
    Overall the T Tests and the Error Bar graph give us confidence to reject the null hypothesis and that receiving state aid for unemployment is a necessary condition to be living in a democratic state. This study correlates to democratic efficacy because that data shows that Democracies have a this leg up when it comes to state sponsored aid how that is an essential characteristic of Democracy.

Sources
[1] Sergio Espuelas, "Are Dictatorships Less Redistributive? A Comparative Analysis of Social Spending in Europe, 1950-1980." European Review of Economic History 16, no. 2 (2012): 211-32. www.jstor.org/stable/41708657.
[2] Youngho Cho, "To Know Democracy Is to Love It: A Cross-National Analysis of Democratic Understanding and Political Support for Democracy." Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 478-88. www.jstor.org/stable/24371886.
[3] “Freedom in the World 2018: Democracy in Crisis”, accessed Nov. 19, 2019, https://freedomhouse.org/.
[4] World Value Survey “Who We Are,” accessed Nov. 22, 2019, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp