Rethinking Democracy Indexes in the Era of Democracy Erosion

• In Event: Democracy and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

Observers are alarmed by the erosion of democracy around the world. Anecdotal evidence of the erosion of democracy in particular countries is strong, and has been described by leading scholars. But existing systematic measures, including include Polity IV, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World, the Varieties of Democracy, and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, suffer from several shortcomings. One essential shortcoming is that in the way organizations produce widely cited general indexes of the status or quality of democracy. These indices do not consider the relative importance of discrete indicators. For example, dimensions of democracy such as press freedoms, free and fair elections, and civility of political discourse are implicitly treated as equally important components of democracy, or they are weighted with arbitrary numerical values. Yet political theorists, social scientists, and indeed the general public weigh these dimensions quite differently. Free and fair elections are considered a sine qua non of democracy, whereas civil discourse is helpful but not essential. We apply statistical measurement models to draw on measures of the importance of distinct dimensions of democracy (from expert surveys conducted by Bright Line Watch) in the United States in order to re-aggregate the data from the Varieties of Democracy project to create an index of democracy that is composed of indicators weighted based on the perceptions of importance by the local populace, rather than taking the indices as combinations of indicators with an a priori specified weighting scheme.

Authors

• Susan C. Stokes, University of Chicago

• Simon D. Jackman, University of Sydney

• Shawn Treier, Australian National University

• Ipek Cinar, University of Chicago