1. Comments on v-dem project and its results
Heikki Patomäki
Department of Political and Economic Studies
University of Helsinki

2. Uncertainties and problems with data
“It is important to emphasize that problems identified with extant indices are not easily solved, and some of the issues we raise vis-à-vis other projects might also be raised in the context of the V-Dem project.”
The problem: ”Measuring an abstract and contested concept such as democracy is hard.”
Measuring an abstract and contested concept is, however, also political; and all too often the understanding of democracy has been ethnocentric along the lines of “the United States is the premier democratic country of the modern world” (Huntington 1991: 29-30).
Recognising different properties and models of democracy is a step forward.
But democracy is a process, not a model  various criteria of democratisation.
Democracy concerns also contestations about the meaning of democracy.

3. Strengths of the V-dem project
Involves scholars from all over the world.
Involves a systematic research component.
Is methodologically sophisticated.
Builds on the experiences of earlier similar projects.
Develops a multidimensional account of democracy
seven properties of democracy
e.g. egalitarian democracy index: Nordic countries are the most democratic

4. Indeterminacy of research results
Stories concerning e.g. connections between particular structures or institutions & democracy are “plausible but hard to prove”.
There are many impediments to falsifiability such as high level of abstraction and aggregation of institutional qualities.
“Ambiguously framed and hard to operationalize, institutional theories seem to explain everything, or nothing.”
Should we see these as problems that can be solved by better operationalisations and technical means, or do they require fundamental rethinking?
If social systems are open and evolving (changing), we should not expect to find any constant conjunctions; at best only contrastive demi- regularities that are likely to disappear when the context changes.

5. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Democracy concerns social relations, and especially power relations
social beings are also internally related
relations form open wholes (processual mechanisms, structures, fields)
Reification: the thingification of historical social relations.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking an abstract theory, concept or belief for the concrete reality.
Democracy is an abstract, contested and changing concept; once measured, however, it becomes first reified and then, in one’s mind, a concrete thing that exists in the same way as e.g. a stick (its length can be measured unambiguously).
Each measurement of a model of “democracy” is an uncertain social construction, however, laden with partially hidden ideologies and metaphors.
Even if we can identify contrastive and probabilistic demi-regularities among such measurements, they are at best indicative of tendencies generated by particular geo-historical and relational wholes.

6. How to explain economic growth?
V-DEM: Strong political parties are good for economic growth.
What kind of economic policy generates growth?; is there a correlation between party strength and particular economic policy?
Soviet Union – Sweden – United States from : strong political parties
a key claim: there has been a secular increase of strong party states through time
The main line of explanation: long time horizons and capacity to implement rational policies  more investments and less inflation  more growth.
Mere investment and accumulation of abstract capital (in the sense of neoclassical production function) hardly explains growth.
The context has changed drastically in the ”Western world” too: e.g. the temporal horizon of ”strong parties” has become much shorter; and the states themselves have been transformed, not least due to European integration and globalisation
Colin Crouch: ”post-democratic parties”
Growth and investments have declined across the board, but what explains this?

7. Conclusions
V-DEM PROJECT is ambitious, but the question is: is it too ambitious – in a rather old-fashioned positivist sense?
Similar projects have failed in the past; why should this one succeed?
The simplest explanation of the failure of the past projects: social sciences study open and geo-historically changing relational wholes; there are no transhistorical constant conjunctions.
Attempts to measure and create indexes may perhaps be inevitable, but they also tend to evoke reification & the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
For example, what a ”strong party” is and means depends on the geo- historical context and tends to be changing due to both intrinsic and extrinsic causes; moreover, there is no simple theory of economic growth – not even any consensus about what economic growth means and should mean
growth of GDP  economic growth  economic wealth or well-being (this is another possible fallacy of misplaced concreteness)