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Political institutions determine the degree of freedom people enjoy and their capacity to influence their social and political environment. This chapter provides historical evidence on the evolution of political institutions drawing upon two major research projects: the PolityIV dataset and the Vanhanen dataset, which focuses on electoral participation and competition. Strengths and weaknesses of both databases are discussed. The chapter shows that global averages are tending to rise according to both datasets, but with significant differences in timing. Both datasets also show that the Western Offshoots and Western Europe took the lead in this process, while other parts of the globe often experienced a much less gradual evolution, with occasional violent swings in political rights. Yet in the long run, there has been an impressive improvement in the quality of political institutions worldwide.

What are the linguistic effects of political institutions? Are consensus-building, power-sharing democracies more likely to recognize minority languages? In this article, I argue (1) power-sharing institutions -- proportional electoral rules, parliamentary systems, and federalism -- are less likely to recognize minority languages than their moderation-inducing, power-concentrating counterparts; but (2) if there is recognition, the level of recognition is actually greater in the former than in the latter. By testing this argument using a newly constructed language-in-education barometer, I find a significant and robust relationship between political institutions and minority language recognition. Adapted from the source document.

This paper shows that political institutions matter in explaining defaults on external and domestic debt obligations. We explore a large number of political and macroeconomic variables using a non-parametric technique to predict safety from default. The advantage of this technique is that it is able to identify patterns in the data that are not captured in standard probit analysis. We find that political factors matter, and do so in different ways for democratic and non-democratic regimes, and for domestic and external debt. In democracies, a parliamentary system or sufficient checks and balances almost guarantee the absence of default on external debt when economic fundamentals or liquidity are sufficiently strong. In dictatorships, high stability and tenure play a similar role for default on domestic debt. Adapted from the source document.