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This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.

This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.

Published 2021-06-23

A widespread and popular belief posits that humans possess a cognitive capacity that is limited to keeping track of and maintaining stable relationships with approximately 150 people. This influential number, ‘Dunbar's number’, originates from an extrapolation of a regression line describing the relationship between relative neocortex size and group size in primates. Here, we test if there is statistical support for this idea. Our analyses on complementary datasets using different methods yield wildly different numbers. Bayesian and generalized least-squares phylogenetic methods generate approximations of average group sizes between 69–109 and 16–42, respectively. However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) imply that specifying any one number is futile. A cognitive limit on human group size cannot be derived in this manner.

In this paper, I draw on knowledge from several disciplines to explicate the potential evolutionary significance of health effects of religiosity. I present three main observations. First, traditional methods of religious healers seldom rely on active remedies, but instead focus on lifestyle changes or spiritual healing practices that best can be described as placebo methods. Second, actual health effects of religiosity are thus mainly traceable to effects from a regulated lifestyle, social support networks, or placebo effects. Third, there are clear parallels between religious healing practices and currently identified methods that induce placebo effects. Physiological mechanisms identified to lie behind placebo effects activate the body's own coping strategies and healing responses. In combination, lifestyle, social support networks, and placebo effects thus produce both actual and perceived health effects of religiosity. This may have played an important role in the evolution and diffusion of religion through two main pathways. First, any real positive health effects of religiosity would have provided a direct biological advantage. Second, any perceived health effects, both positive and negative, would further have provided a unique selling point for religiosity' per se. Actual and perceived health effects of religiosity may therefore have played an underestimated role during the evolution of religiosity through both biological and cultural pathways.

Objectives: This article presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. Methods: The approach is a sorting algorithm through repeated pairwise investigations of states in a set of variables and identifying what states in the variables occur before states in all other variables. We illustrate the proposed method by analyzing a set of variables from version 7.1 of the V-Dem data set (Coppedge etal. 2017. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project; Pemstein etal. 2017. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Working Paper No. 21). With a large set of indicators measured over many years, the method makes it possible to identify and compare long, complex sequences across many variables. Results: This affords an opportunity, for example, to disentangle the sequential requisites of failing and successful sequences in democratization, or if requisites are different during different time periods. Conclusions: For policy purposes, this is instrumental: Which components of democracy occur earlier and which later? Which components of democracy are therefore the ideal targets for democracy promotion at different stages?

För några miljoner år sedan tillverkade våra förfäder de första stenverktygen. Sedan hände märkligt lite på två och en halv miljoner år. Det är först de senaste tusentals åren som den teknologiska utvecklingen tagit ett rejält språng. Vi har skapat städer, skrivit symfonier, byggt månraketer, internet och Nya Söderstadion samtidigt som höjdpunkten på den kulturella utvecklingen i övriga djurriket fortfarande är att använda två stenar för att knäcka nötter. Vad var det som hände? I Det kulturella djuret får du ta del av den senaste forskningen om hjärnan, inlärning och den informationshantering som är unik för människan, och med vilken vi förändrat både världen och oss själva. På vägen får du också lära dig en hel del om övriga djurriket: Är kråkor verkligen smartare än femåringar? Har encelliga toffeldjur ett minne? Och vad är likheten mellan en myrstack och en mänsklig hjärna? Framför allt får du lära dig allt om den biologiska och kulturella evolution som gjort oss till dem vi är idag.

This paper presents a new approach for studying temporal sequences across ordinal variables. It involves three complementary approaches (frequency tables, transitional graphs, and dependency tables), as well as an established adaptation based on Bayesian dynamical systems, inferring a general system of change. The frequency tables count pairs of values in two variables and transitional graphs depict changes, showing which variable tends to attain high values first. The dependency tables investigate which values of one variable are prerequisites for values in another, as a more direct test of causal hypotheses. We illustrate the proposed approaches by analyzing the V-Dem dataset, and show that changes in electoral democracy are preceded by changes in freedom of expression and access to alternative information.

Primates display a remarkable diversity of types of social organization—a diversity that, according to the socioecological model of social evolution, is ultimately determined by ecological factors limiting female fitness and the number of matings limiting male fitness. The foremost ecological determinants of female sociality are the degree to which food resources are defendable, either alone or in a group, and the level of protection from predators gained from being part of a group. Further factors that have been proposed are the presence of infanticide, coalitions, and dominance hierarchies; general population density and habitat saturation; whether competition is mainly intra‐ or intergroup; and which sex disperses. Male sociality is instead mainly determined by the spatiotemporal spacing of mating opportunities with females. Some researchers have also proposed that cognitive abilities impose a limit on group size, since primate sociality demands competent navigation of social networks.

Över hela världen, och genom historien, återfinns religiösa inslag i den mänskliga kulturen. Kan det ha något att göra med evolutionen? Är religiösa föreställningar kanske bara en biprodukt av Homo sapiens avancerade kognitiva förmågor? Eller kan allt detta till och med ha haft betydelse för vår evolutionära historia?

Tunisien är det enda landet som hittills lyckats ta den arabiska våren vidare till demokrati. Varför lyckades de när andra misslyckades? Genom nya analysverktyg kan vi visa hur viktiga kvinnors rättigheter är, skriver forskarna Josefine Pernes och Patrik Lindenfors.

Den här artikeln har en historia. Från början skrevs den på uppdrag av Forskning & Framsteg, Sveriges främsta populärvetenskapliga tidskrift. Men eftersom den beskri-ver analyser som går på tvärs med andras forskares verk-samhet uppstod det diskussioner. Tidskriften kom därför fram till att det vore bättre om en neutral journalist skrev artikeln än jag, som är part i målet. Artikeln handlar näm-ligen om ny forskning vid min arbetsplats: Centrum för evolutionär kulturforskning vid Stockholms universitet. Ett klokt redaktionellt beslut av Forskning & Framsteg, tveklöst. Men det vore synd om texten hamnade i pap-perskorgen. Här kommer därför en (partisk) skildring av ny forskning kring djurs tänkande.

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. It argues that both men's and women's liberal rights are essential conditions for democratisation to take place: providing both women and men rights reduces an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression and enabling the formation of women's organising – historically important to spark protests in initial phases of democratisation. This argument is tested empirically using data that cover 173 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through novel sequence analysis methods, the results suggest that in order to gain electoral democracy a country first needs to furnish civil liberties to both women and men.

This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism. Cooperation is one of life’s fundamental principles. We are all made of parts – genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or ‘memes’. Our societies too are made of parts – us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process? From the smallest component parts of our bodies and minds to our complicated societies, everywhere cooperation is the organizing principle. Often this cooperation has emerged because the constituting parts have benefited from the interactions, but not seldom the cooperating units appear to lose on the interaction. How then to explain cooperation? How can we understand our intricate societies where we regularly provide small and large favors for people we are unrelated to, know, or even never expect to meet again? Where does the idea come from that it is right to risk one’s life for country, religion or freedom? The answers seem to reside in the two processes that have shaped humanity: biological and cultural evolution.

This paper presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. The approach involves repeated pairwise investigations of states in a set of variables and identifying what states in the variables that occur before states in all other variables. We illustrate the proposed method by analyzing a set of variables from version 6 of the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2015a, b). With a large set of indicators measured over many years, the method makes it possible to explore long, complex sequences across many variables in quantitative datasets. This affords an opportunity, for example, to disentangle the sequential requisites of failing and successful sequences in democratization. For policy purposes this is instrumental: Which components of democracy are most exogenous and least endogenous and therefore the ideal targets for democracy promotion at different stages?

We present formal evolutionary models for the origins and persistence of the practice of Female Genital Modification (FGMo). We then test the implications of these models using normative cross-cultural data on FGMo in Africa and Bayesian phylogenetic methods that explicitly model adaptive evolution. Empirical evidence provides some support for the findings of our evolutionary models that the de novo origins of the FGMo practice should be associated with social stratification, and that social stratification should place selective pressures on the adoption of FGMo; these results, however, are tempered by the finding that FGMo has arisen in many cultures that have no social stratification, and that forces operating orthogonally to stratification appear to play a more important role in the cross-cultural distribution of FGMo. To explain these cases, one must consider cultural evolutionary explanations in conjunction with behavioral ecological ones. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for policies designed to end the practice of FGMo.

We present formal evolutionary models for the origins and persistence of the practice of Female Genital Modification (FGMo). We then test the implications of these models using normative cross-cultural data on FGMo in Africa and Bayesian phylogenetic methods that explicitly model adaptive evolution. Empirical evidence provides some support for the findings of our evolutionary models that the de novo origins of the FGMo practice should be associated with social stratification, and that social stratification should place selective pressures on the adoption of FGMo; these results, however, are tempered by the finding that FGMo has arisen in many cultures that have no social stratification, and that forces operating orthogonally to stratification appear to play a more important role in the cross-cultural distribution of FGMo. To explain these cases, one must consider cultural evolutionary explanations in conjunction with behavioral ecological ones. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for policies designed to end the practice of FGMo.