1. Defining, Measuring and Comparing Democracy
Introduce myself; have them introduce themselves; make chart with their names
Mary Manjikian
Twitter: Marymanjikian
Manjikian 2016

2. At the end of this class, you should be able to:
CRITIQUE, DISCUSS definitions of democracy
DESCRIBE issues in measuring and comparing democracies
ARGUE for or against the utility of measuring democracy
DEMONSTRATE Familiarity with some common datasets which present measures of democracy
At the end of this class, you should be able to:
Manjikian 2016

3. Download this presentation AFTER CLASS
Academia.edu: Mary Manjikian
Office Mix Gallery: Mary Manjikian
Download this presentation AFTER CLASS
Manjikian 2016

4. How might we rank these nations in terms of ‘democraticness’?
A short exercise
North Korea
The United States
Sweden
Russia
China
Cuba
Venezuela
France
Saudi Arabia
Iran
Japan
Manjikian 2016

5. STOP AND THINK: Why is this important?
Manjikian 2016

6. 1. look at trends over time
to speculate about whether all countries will eventually become democratic, whether there are trends which occur over time Coppedge et al. note: “without some way of analyzing regime types through time and across countries we have no way to make progress or regress on this vital matter – to explain it, to reveal its consequences or to affect its future course.” P0. 247
The "Polity Score" captures this regime authority spectrum on a 21-pont scale ranging from -10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy). The Polity scores can also be converted into regime categories in a suggested three part categorization of "autocracies" (-10 to -6), "anocracies" (-5 to +5 and three special values: -66, -77 and -88), and "democracies" (+6 to +10).
Manjikian 2016

7. Look at the TYPES of regimes which have arisen over time
Other questions: does democracy have a life cycle? Do democracies decay over time? Do autocracies?
At what point can we relax and decide that a democracy is stable?
Manjikian 2016

8. 2. judge effectiveness of democratization programs
-- comparing a nation’s ranking prior to and after carrying out a specific program (i.e. Teaching about democracy in schools, encouraging women to run for political office, carrying out programs to raise incomes in a nation)
Beetham refers to this as a ‘democratic audit’ --
Manjikian 2016

9. 3. Compare and Rank Nations (most to least democratic)
Polity Data-set
Manjikian 2016

10. 4. Find Relationships between other variables
(i.e. “What is the relationship between income in a region and that country’s democraticness”?)
Manjikian 2016

11. Part one: Defining Democracy
In order to make a DATASET, we need to figure out what we are measuring and how we are going to measure it; then we can assign a score to all nations; just like a scale tells you how much you weigh . . An index
Saward – says that democracy is about how RESPONSIVE the government is to the desires of the people, how well it reads those desires and puts them into actions.
Beetham says we need to look for signs of POPULAR CONTROL and POLITICAL EQUALITY.
Manjikian 2016

12. Basic Facts Defined as ‘rule by the people’
Greeks seen as inventors of Democracy (Direct Democracy)
All definitions assume that a nation is sovereign, self-governing
Debate about how to define, what elements to include
Debate about how to measure – i.e. Look at documents like constitution or what happens in practice?
Basic Facts
A definition of democracy can be criticized for being too narrow or for being too broad (including things like civilian control of the police, amount of corruption, electoral fraud, safety and security/absence of crime, land ownership, granting f political asylum, income inequality, etc.” Coppedge et al: This is “freedom,” not “democracy” – the terms are not interchangeable.
Value judgements: Coppedge et al – EIU index thinks that mandatory voting is problematic, considers it undemocratic (however, it enhances turnout)
Manjikian 2016

13. STOP AND THINK: What Institutions /practices indicate that a nation is a democracy?
CONTESTED CONCEPT:
To operationalize a concept, we define a procedure for mapping a label or values of a
variable onto observations in the real world. To measure a concept, we actually
perform this operational procedure. The result is an indicator. Indicators are not
Necessarily numerical variables (although some are) .
-Coppedge et al: These definitions tend to consider presence/absence of democratic institutions – vs. individual experience
Manjikian 2016

14. Democratic measures: COMPETITION
OPENNESS (who can run for office, be a party member)
REGULARITY OF ELECTORAL TURNOVER, STABILITY
POSITIVE RIGHTS (RIGHT TO )
STRONG CIVIL SOCIETY
ABSENCE OF RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
PRESENCE OF RULE OF LAW
Culture and History support positive rights, competition, openness
Democratic measures:
Manjikian 2016

15. Is it possible to measure democracy objectively
Is it possible to measure democracy objectively? To theorize about it objectively?
STOP AND THINK:
Most measures have a NORMATIVE AGENDA (democracy good; dictatorship bad; more democracy is better than less democracy; nations should aspire to become more democratic over time; A nation which is not a democracy is broken and should be fixed)
Manjikian 2016

16. Normative Agenda Every nation SHOULD aspire to be democratic.
A higher score is better.
US should be the model. Every country should be like US.
Every country should be STABLE.
Normative Agenda
Manjikian 2016

17. One more question: Should we measure DEGREES of democracy or is it absolute?
Several measures distinguish between democracy, dictatorship, some form of autocratic rule; hybrid rules (somewhat open; somewhat competitive; press is somewhat free; elections are somewhat corrupt)
Manjikian 2016

18. Some common measures of democracy: Freedom House
Freedom House Index: 7 components:
political rights (openness, competition, stability)
–Is there an electoral process? Is there pluralism and participation? Does government function regularly, efficiently?
Civil liberties: (civil society, rule of law, ‘culture’)
Do people have freedom of expression? Freedom of association? (civil society); Is there rule of law; personal autonomy and individual rights?
Some common measures of democracy: Freedom House
Manjikian 2016

19. Polity Data Set Looks for:
Competitiveness of participation (Are there multiple parties?)
Regulation of participation (How free are parties?)
Competitiveness of executive recruitment (Are there multiple candidates?)
Openness of executive recruitment (Can anyone run?)
Constraints on executive (Once elected, can the ruler do whatever he or she wants? rule of law; civilian control of military; constitution)
Scores range from -10 to positive 10
Polity Data Set
Ted Gurr, Founder.
Created in 1960’s: Assigns each nation a “score” from -10 to positive 10
Manjikian 2016

20. Democracy-Dictatorship Index
For a regime to be considered as a democracy by the DD scheme, it must meet the requirement of four rules below
The chief executive must be chosen by popular election or by a body that was itself popularly elected.
The legislature must be popularly elected.
There must be more than one party competing in the elections.
An alternation in power under electoral rules identical to the ones that brought the incumbent to office must have taken place.
Democracy-Dictatorship Index
Przeworski, 1988: problem with rule four – if it’s the first election, it would be classified as a dictatorship, with an asterisk indicating that there was a problem with this definition
Manjikian 2016

21. Przeworski’s D and D Map:
Manjikian 2016

22. Ordinal: Ranks countries from MOST to LEAST democratic. Polity Dataset
Ratio: Actual mathematical relationship (this country is TWICE AS democratic as this one)
Interval (Can arrange nations along a spectrum from very democratic to autocratic – not related to actual mathematical numbers); Freedom House
Dichotomous (quality of democracy is either present – 1 – or absent – 0); BNR Democracy Index
Index Variable: combines multiple scores into one overall AGGREGATE score
Types of variables
Ordinal: Utility, can see how a country’s rank has shifted over time; is it moving up or down? Comparisons between countries
Problem with interval: freedom house measure may end up with multiple countries that are not at all alike in the same category (i.e. Albania and Brazil)
Manjikian 2016

23. Part Three: Critiquing and Applying the concepts
Manjikian 2016

24. Methodological Critical (Ideological)
2 types of critique:
Manjikian 2016

25. Problems with question wording
Construct Validity
Problems with Coding
Problems with question wording
Methods critique
Coppedge et al note that questions may contain ambiguous words that end up forcing people who are assigning scores to make judgement calls: Look at page 250: Question like – “is the economy free of government domination?” Why might such a question be problematic? (Think about US bailout of industries in 2008, including financial sector; how does US currently interact with technology companies – seeking to regulate how they conduct cybersecurity; how they collect information on citizen activities, etc.)
Coppedge et al note that a coder might assign a score based on his or her impressions about, for example, how free the press is
Problem of INDICES – practice of combining many indicators into a single index score
Speak of concept VALIDITY – are you measuring what you think you are measuring? Is there a strong relationship between this data and the way in which people understand the concept?
Authors – we tend to conflate ideas of freedom, rights, liberties and democracy in many of these indicators.
Manjikian 2016

26. How useful is this really?
Polity dataset
Manjikian 2016

27. What things don’t appear in the data set? Racism, Sexism
Democraticness of institutions is not the same as individual’s experiences (individually or collectively) in that society – though related.
Rests on certain assumptions about what is important
i.e. Human rights report at state didn’t include gay rights until recently, so they didn’t appear in this dataset as well.
Rights of undocumented individuals in US, Western Europe, refugees, restrictions on who can acquire citizenship
Access: voter ID requirement
Culture affects how we think about, define and measure rights and democracy
Manjikian 2016

28. Additional Resources:
Polity dataset
Democracy and Dictatorship Dataset
Freedom house Dataset
BNR Dataset
Additional Resources:
Manjikian 2016