The Irawadi Dynamic Model: When Economies Worsen and Trust Falls
Authors/Creators
Description
This working paper presents Version 14.0 of the Irawadi Dynamic Model (IDM), a conditional political typology framework for understanding the rise of national conservatism and authoritarian consolidation. The IDM treats political outcomes as emergent properties of the interaction between four distinct actor profiles (A1: Apolitical Discontented, A2: Progressive Left-Liberal, A3: National Conservative, A4: Authoritarian Paternalist) and two structural master variables: economic conditions (median household experience) and institutional trust (V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index).
Version 13.0 delivers three major upgrades: (1) geographic expansion from 37 to 53 countries using the Global Populism Dataset (1,081 country-year observations, 2000-2024), confirming that the institutional trust effect is larger and more significant globally than in the European sample; (2) formal threshold estimation via Hansen-style grid search, yielding the first quantitative content to the model's theoretical framework (τ_ITI = 0.787, τ_GDP = +11.6%); and (3) an updated Granger causality test confirming that past A3 electoral gains predict future institutional decline, strengthening the ratchet hypothesis.
Key findings include: institutional trust is the strongest within-country predictor of right-populist vote share (β = -85.7, p < 0.001, global panel); economic deterioration significantly predicts left-populist gains (p = 0.004), supporting a populist bifurcation hypothesis; cumulative institutional decline over three years is a more powerful predictor than current-period levels; out-of-sample forecast validation achieves r = 0.622 (p < 0.001) for 2020-2023 elections; and survey validation using European Social Survey Round 11 (n = 40,917) recovers the A1 and A3 profiles as predicted.
The paper includes full empirical analysis (regression, robustness tests, Granger causality, threshold estimation), historical validation (Weimar Germany, Post-Soviet Eastern Europe), policy implications, and an early-warning framework for democratic resilience monitoring. All prior findings from Versions 9.0-12.0 are retained, including median income interaction effects, ESS survey validation, executive corruption trajectories for A4, and cabinet data analysis.
V14 add more validation.
V14 also has been pre-registered: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/J8MG6
Files
The_Irawadi_Dynamic_Model_IDM_14_0.pdf
Additional details
Additional titles
- Alternative title (English)
- The Irawadi Dynamic Model: Why Democracy Can Be Broken
Related works
- Is new version of
- Working paper: 10.5281/zenodo.19197041 (DOI)
- Working paper: 10.5281/zenodo.19269148 (DOI)
Dates
- Issued
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2026-03-24
- Updated
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2026-03-28
- Updated
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2026-03-30
- Updated
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2026-04-07
- Updated
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2026-04-09
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