Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900\u20132017

Jan Teorell,Svend-Erik Skaaning,Staffan Lindberg,Michael Coppedge

doi:10.1007/s12116-018-9268-z

Abstract

This paper presents a new measure polyarchy for a global sample of 182 countries from 1900 to 2017 based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, deriving from an expert survey of more than 3000 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of Elected Officials, Clean Elections, Associational Autonomy, Inclusive Citizenship, and Freedom of Expression and Alternative Sources of Information separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl’s (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework. The paper describes how the five polyarchy components were measured and provides the rationale for how to aggregate them to the polyarchy scale. We find that personal characteristics or ideological predilections of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators. We also find strong correlations with other existing measures of electoral democracy, but also decisive differences where we believe the evidence supports the polyarchy index having higher face validity.

Highlights

Most scholars agree on the concept of democracy, which has informed empirical social science since Dahl (1971) coined the termed Bpolyarchy,^ combining fair elections under universal suffrage with political liberties and alternative sources of information that enhance the democratic qualities of elections (e.g., Collier and Levitsky 1997; Møller and Skaaning 2010)
Drawing on the large literature on attempts to measure electoral democracy (e.g., Coppedge et al 2011; Hadenius and Teorell 2005; Munck 2009; Munck and Verkuilen 2002), we argue that no extant measure fulfills all of the five essential criteria: (1) capturing all institutions in Dahl’s concept of polyarchy; (2) providing disaggregated data allowing for analyses of dimensionality and inquiries into what lower-level changes account for the shifts in higher-level indices; (3) covering a global sample of countries across long swathes of time; (4) using transparent data generating processes and aggregation rules; and (5) providing estimates of measurement uncertainty
Several of the most diverging cases for Polity are presented and discussed already in Fig. 1. (Colombia ranks 12th in terms of how far it falls below the diagonal, so it is not highlighted in Fig. 6.) But for Freedom House, there is an additional conspicuous pattern: several of the countries where FH is significantly larger than polyarchy are relatively small states, such as Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Montenegro, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands

Summary

Introduction

Most scholars agree on the concept of democracy, which has informed empirical social science since Dahl (1971) coined the termed Bpolyarchy,^ combining fair elections under universal suffrage with political liberties and alternative sources of information that enhance the democratic qualities of elections (e.g., Collier and Levitsky 1997; Møller and Skaaning 2010).

Results

Conclusion