V-Dem indicators seem to take into account statements made by powerful politicians, not only their policies or other deeds. For example, I found this in one of their annual reports:
The V-Dem indicator of government attacks on the judiciary, which reveals government rhetoric calling into question the integrity of the judiciary, dropped precipitously in 2010, likely reflecting President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in which he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. President Donald Trump has sharply increased the pointedness of verbal attacks on the judiciary, referring to one of the judges who blocked his first executive order on immigration as a “so-called judge.” Public criticism of the judiciary can be a healthy part of maintaining the balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. Yet it can also be part of an unraveling of core checks on power. Coupled with the politicization of the judicial nominations process and the dismantling of super-majoritarian rules of appointing all Article Ill judges, supporters of democracy would be wise to pay close attention to executive -judicial relations in the United States.
My guess is that statements made by Trump were extreme outliers in how they betrayed little respect to democratic institutions, compared to statements made by earlier US presidents, and that affected their model.
I think that’s reasonable. It might not be fully reflective of lived reality for US citizens at the moment the statements are made, but it sure captures the beliefs and motives of powerful people, which is predictive of their future actions.
Indeed, one way to see the drop in 2017 is that it was able to predict a major blow to American democracy (Trump refusing to concede an election) 4 years in advance.
I’m not really sure this contradicts what I said very much. I agree the V-Dem evaluators were reacting to Trump’s comments, and this made them reduce their rating for America. I think they will react to Trump’s comments again in the future, and this will again make them likely reduce their rating for America. This will happen regardless of whether policy changes, and be poorly calibrated for actual importance—contra V-Dem, Trump getting elected was less important than the abolition of slavery. Since I think Siebe was interested in policy changes rather than commentary, this means V-Dem is a bad metric for him to look at.
Great question, and it is something I thought a little bit about.
My process was to ask “what are people really worried about from a Trump Presidency” and try to explicitly put that into questions.
One option is to think about the Presidency instrumentally. We can look at forecasts of object-level things that people care about, like unemployment, GPD/Capita, the murder rate, life expectancy and so on, and create markets for the 2028 value of these things conditional on different winners in the Presidential election.
We could also try to identify specific freedoms people care about—e.g. a market in whether anyone will be imprisoned for tweeting criticism of the government with no aggravating factors or the number of opposite-party state governors placed under house arrest, again conditional on the winner of the election.
What a lot of people seem to be most concerned about is the end of democracy. I think some of the most obvious metrics here—e.g. will elections be held in 2028, will the size of the electorate shrink dramatically—would be regarded as straw men by Trump-sceptics, though it could still be good to have markets for them just to prove this. We want something that captures whether there will be a ‘real’ (fair) election, without trusting partisan evaluations of said fairness, given both factions’ repeated willingness to accuse elections they lost of being stolen/rigged etc. When I think about the difference between elections in the US or other democracies, and those in dictatorships, one of the key differences is uncertainty: I really don’t know who will win the next UK election (though I favour Labour as more likely), but despite knowing little about its internal politics I’m pretty sure a CCP candidate will win in China.
This suggests a metric: whether the prediction markets in 2025 will be very confident that one party or other will win in 2028. Given the usual contestability of US elections, and the lack of specific information about the economy, candidates etc. that far out, if liquid markets showed >80% (or whatever threshold) for one party winning it seems like that is decent evidence that market participants believe the electoral game has structurally changed. So we have a second-order criteria we are forecasting:
Will the median prediction market show, on 2025-12-31, a >80% probability of victory for one party in the 2028 presidential election?
This is not a perfect metric: it would yield false positives for something like Singapore, where one party repeatedly won in (to my understanding) reasonably fair elections just because it was in fact viewed as much more competent than the other. But it seems like a reasonable metric for this specific US election.
I like the 1-year before more, because it takes time to accumulate power and overcome checks & balances.
I do think this has shortcomings, in that it’s hard to predict what would be attempted, and whether that would be successful. But I’m very much in favor of having multiple imperfect operationalisations and triangulate from those.
I like the 1-year before more, because it takes time to accumulate power and overcome checks & balances.
Yeah I before before starting this you’d want to look at historical landslide but fair elections and see how far in advance they were known. Things like UK Labour in 1997 or Nixon in 1972 / Obama in 2008. I don’t have a strong sense for the balance.
This is a good comment, but I think I’d always seen Singapore classed as a soft authoritarian state where elections aren’t really free and fair, because of things like state harassment of government critics, even though the votes are counted honestly and multiple parties can run?Though I don’t know enough about Singapore to give an example. I have a vague sense Botswana might be a purer example of an actual Liberal democracy where one party keeps winning because they have a good record in power. It’s also usually a safe bet the LDP will be in power in Japan, though they have occasionally lost.
V-Dem indicators seem to take into account statements made by powerful politicians, not only their policies or other deeds. For example, I found this in one of their annual reports:
My guess is that statements made by Trump were extreme outliers in how they betrayed little respect to democratic institutions, compared to statements made by earlier US presidents, and that affected their model.
I think that’s reasonable. It might not be fully reflective of lived reality for US citizens at the moment the statements are made, but it sure captures the beliefs and motives of powerful people, which is predictive of their future actions.
Indeed, one way to see the drop in 2017 is that it was able to predict a major blow to American democracy (Trump refusing to concede an election) 4 years in advance.
I’m not really sure this contradicts what I said very much. I agree the V-Dem evaluators were reacting to Trump’s comments, and this made them reduce their rating for America. I think they will react to Trump’s comments again in the future, and this will again make them likely reduce their rating for America. This will happen regardless of whether policy changes, and be poorly calibrated for actual importance—contra V-Dem, Trump getting elected was less important than the abolition of slavery. Since I think Siebe was interested in policy changes rather than commentary, this means V-Dem is a bad metric for him to look at.
I would be very interested to hear whether you have a preferred metric!
Great question, and it is something I thought a little bit about.
My process was to ask “what are people really worried about from a Trump Presidency” and try to explicitly put that into questions.
One option is to think about the Presidency instrumentally. We can look at forecasts of object-level things that people care about, like unemployment, GPD/Capita, the murder rate, life expectancy and so on, and create markets for the 2028 value of these things conditional on different winners in the Presidential election.
We could also try to identify specific freedoms people care about—e.g. a market in whether anyone will be imprisoned for tweeting criticism of the government with no aggravating factors or the number of opposite-party state governors placed under house arrest, again conditional on the winner of the election.
What a lot of people seem to be most concerned about is the end of democracy. I think some of the most obvious metrics here—e.g. will elections be held in 2028, will the size of the electorate shrink dramatically—would be regarded as straw men by Trump-sceptics, though it could still be good to have markets for them just to prove this. We want something that captures whether there will be a ‘real’ (fair) election, without trusting partisan evaluations of said fairness, given both factions’ repeated willingness to accuse elections they lost of being stolen/rigged etc. When I think about the difference between elections in the US or other democracies, and those in dictatorships, one of the key differences is uncertainty: I really don’t know who will win the next UK election (though I favour Labour as more likely), but despite knowing little about its internal politics I’m pretty sure a CCP candidate will win in China.
This suggests a metric: whether the prediction markets in 2025 will be very confident that one party or other will win in 2028. Given the usual contestability of US elections, and the lack of specific information about the economy, candidates etc. that far out, if liquid markets showed >80% (or whatever threshold) for one party winning it seems like that is decent evidence that market participants believe the electoral game has structurally changed. So we have a second-order criteria we are forecasting:
This is not a perfect metric: it would yield false positives for something like Singapore, where one party repeatedly won in (to my understanding) reasonably fair elections just because it was in fact viewed as much more competent than the other. But it seems like a reasonable metric for this specific US election.
Interestingly, someone came up with a similar operationalisation just now! (Or maybe this is you?): https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti#zdkmuetvo8c
I like the 1-year before more, because it takes time to accumulate power and overcome checks & balances.
I do think this has shortcomings, in that it’s hard to predict what would be attempted, and whether that would be successful. But I’m very much in favor of having multiple imperfect operationalisations and triangulate from those.
Yeah I before before starting this you’d want to look at historical landslide but fair elections and see how far in advance they were known. Things like UK Labour in 1997 or Nixon in 1972 / Obama in 2008. I don’t have a strong sense for the balance.
This is a good comment, but I think I’d always seen Singapore classed as a soft authoritarian state where elections aren’t really free and fair, because of things like state harassment of government critics, even though the votes are counted honestly and multiple parties can run?Though I don’t know enough about Singapore to give an example. I have a vague sense Botswana might be a purer example of an actual Liberal democracy where one party keeps winning because they have a good record in power. It’s also usually a safe bet the LDP will be in power in Japan, though they have occasionally lost.