Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

Pemstein, Daniel; Meserve, Stephen A.; Melton, James Van Horn

doi:10.1093/pan/mpq020

Cited by 373 publications

(279 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Treier & Jackman (2008), finally, in one of the few efforts to furnish the point estimates of democracy with confidence intervals reflecting measurement uncertainty (cf. Pemstein et al 2010), suffer from the Polity data's limitations in terms of its minimalist conception of democracy, unjustified aggregation rules, and nontransparent coding scheme.…”

Section: The V-dem Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

et al. 2016

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a VDem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: .0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. Jan Teorell also wishes to acknowledge support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence, which made it possible for him to work on this paper. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. 2 AbstractThis paper presents a new measure of electoral democracy, or "polyarchy", for a global sample of 173 countries from 1900 to the present based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, enabling us to address several deficiencies in extant measures of electoral democracy, such as Freedom House and Polity. The V-Dem data derive from expert polls of more than 2,600 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of "Elected officials", "Free and fair elections", "Freedom of expression", "Associational autonomy" and "Inclusive citizenship" separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl's (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework, and can both show how well indicators match components as well as how components map the overall index. We also find that characteristics of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators, nor differences between these ratings and existing measures such as FH and Polity, with which they are strongly correlated. Finally, we provide systematic measures of uncertainty (or measurement error) at every level. We showcase the usefulness of the new measure for understanding developments of electoral democracy over time, for comparing countries at a particular time point, and for understanding its relationship to economic modernization through disaggregation.3

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Section: The V-dem Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

et al. 2016

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“…Figure 5 displays the bivariate descriptive pattern at country-year level, comparing the V-Dem polyarchy index to the Polity and Freedom House ratings, as well as the BUnified Democracy Scores^(UDS). The latter is based on just about every pertinent measure of electoral democracy (except V-Dem) covering multiple countries and years (Pemstein et al 2010). Convergence is the overall pattern.…”

Section: Comparing Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on 40 specific indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset (Coppedge et al 2018a), we provide nuanced measures of each of the core Binstitutional guarantees^in Dahl's (1971Dahl's ( , 1989Dahl's ( , 1998 conceptualization, across a global set of 182 countries from 1900 to 2017, 1 and a combined index of polyarchy with point estimates as well as measures of uncertainty. Table 1 lists the advantages of this polyarchy index over existing graded measures with similar coverage, such as Freedom House (FH), Polity (Marshall et al 2014), and the UDS (Pemstein et al 2010). First, by measuring Dahl's (1998, p. 85) five components of BElected Officials,^BFree and Fair Elections,^BFreedom of Expression and Alternative Sources of Information,^BAssociational Autonomy,^and BInclusive Citizenship,^this is the first complete measure of Dahl's polyarchy since Coppedge and Reinicke (1990), which covered only one year.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

et al. 2018

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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 Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark 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.

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“…In addition, it can reduce the impact of idiosyncratic measurement errors associated with individual indicators. The use of multiple indicators for the same phenomenon also facilitates an assessment of how precise the point estimates are through the construction of confidence levels (see Fariss, 2014;Pemstein et al, 2010). This integrative approach is used (in full or in part) to construct several of the democracy measures (see Table 1).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The remaining measures included in the overview presented in Table 1 build on more than one kind of data source. The Democracy Barometer dataset (Merkel et al, 2016), the Unified Democracy Scores (Pemstein, Meserve, & Melton, 2010), and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (Kaufman & Kray, 2017) do not provide original data collection but use extant indicators based on all four kinds of data sources. The Varieties of Democracy (Coppedge et al, 2017b) dataset relies on all types of data apart from representative surveys, and the Democracy Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit (2007) only excludes in-house coded data.…”

Section: Extant Democracy Measures: What Kinds Of Data Are Used?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Different Types of Data and the Validity of Democracy Measures

Skaaning

2018

PaG

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Different measures of democracy rely on different types of data. Some exclusively rely on observational data, others rely on judgement-based data in the form of in-house coded indicators or expert surveys. A third set of democracy measures combines information from indicators based on different types of data, some of them also data from representative surveys of the mass public. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these different types of data for the measurement of electoral and liberal democracy. The discussion is based on the premise that the main priorities must be to establish a high degree of concept-measure consistency, i.e. indicators capture relevant aspects of the core concept of interest in a precise and unbiased manner, and to provide high coverage. The basic argument of the article is that no type of data is superior to others in all respects. The article draws on examples from extant datasets to illustrate the tradeoffs and it offers suggestions about how to reduce some of the potential drawbacks.

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Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

Cited by 373 publications

References 26 publications

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

Different Types of Data and the Validity of Democracy Measures

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