Replication Data for: The Politics of (De)Liberalization: Studying Partisan Effects Using Mixed-Effects Models

Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms. We then develop a framework of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what conditions par-ties matter. We test our (and rival) propositions with a new dataset on (de)liberalization reforms in 23 democracies since 1973 covering several policy areas. Methodologically, we argue that existing quantitative studies are problematic: They rely on time-series cross-section models using country-year observations; but governments do not change annually, so that the number of observations is artificially inflated, resulting in incorrect estimates. We propose mixed-effects models instead, with country-year observations nested in cabi-nets, which are nested in countries and years. The results show under what conditions par-ties matter for (de)liberalization. More generally, the paper argues that mixed-effects mod-els should become the new standard for studying partisan influences.