A dataset containing all (or nearly all) extant democracy indexes.
democracy
An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 28492 rows and 86 columns.
This dataset contains most democracy indexes in use today in a single panel (country-year) file. It attempts to be as comprehensive as possible, incorporating rarely used democracy indexes not easily available in country-year format.
The measurement of democracy is complicated and controversial. This dataset makes few judgments about what counts as a measure of democracy, as long as it has been used in scholarly work. It thus includes dichotomous, trichotomous, ordinal, and continuous indices; indices that focus primarily on the "competition" and indices that focus on the "participation" dimension of democracy; "thick" indices that attempt to measure a wide variety of characteristics plausibly attributed to democracy; and "minimalist" indexes that restrict themselves to the bare minimum of competition. Four broad families of democracy measures can be distinguished:
These are indexes designed to distinguish between democracy and
non-democracy. Most of them follow a fairly minimalist conception of
democracy, focused on political competition while giving little weight to
the extent of the suffrage or thicker civil or economic rights. These
include the Boix, Miller, and Rosato (2012) indicator of democracy
(bmr_democracy, bmr_democracy_omitteddata, and
bmr_democracy_femalesuffrage); the Bernhard, Nordstrom and Reenock index
of democracy (bnr and bnr_extended), originally developed for
event history analysis (Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock 2001); Renske
Doorenspleet's indicator of democracy (doorenspleet), based on the
Polity III data and a measure of the extent of suffrage (Doorenspleet
2000); Freedom House's list of electoral democracies (fh_electoral);
the Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2013) extension of the PACL (Przeworski,
Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi) democracy/dictatorship dataset (pacl);
Jay Ulfelder's indicator of democracy (ulfelder_democracy and
ulfelder_democracy_extended), based on a recoding of the Polity IV data
(Ulfelder 2012); a calculated measure of democracy from the PIPE
(Prezeworski et al 2010) dataset (PIPE_democracy - use with care as it
may be incorrectly calculated) and a number of dichotomous
democracy/non-democracy indicators (gwf_democracy,
gwf_democracy_extended, kailitz_binary, magaloni_democracy,
magaloni_democracy_extended, svolik_democracy, utip_dichotomous,
utip_dichotomous_strict, reign, wth_democ1, and
wth_democrobust) from datasets concerned with the identification of
authoritarian regime types (Bell 2016; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014;
Svolik 2012, Wahman, Teorell, and Hadenius 2013, Kailitz 2013). These are
all highly but not perfectly correlated with one another, with correlation
coefficients ranging from 0.69 (magaloni_democracy_extended and
doorenspleet) to 0.95 (reign_democracy and
gwf_democracy_extended_strict)
Of these, only Doorenspleet's and Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock's
measures give special weight to the extent of suffrage in determining
whether a country is democratic; not surprisingly, they display the lowest
correlation with the other dichotomous indicators of democracy. All of
these indexes have world-wide spatial scope, though they differ greatly in
temporal coverage. doorenspleet, bmr_democracy, reign, and
the "extended" versions of magaloni_democracy, gwf_democracy, and
ulfelder_democracy have the widest temporal scope, going all the way back
to the 19th century and in some cases beyond.
Trichotomous indexes of democracy distinguish explicitly a "hybrid" or
"semi-democratic" category. These include the measure of democracy in
Central America developed by Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney (blm, see
Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney 2005), the trichotomous measure of democracy
in Latin America by Mainwaring, Brinks, and Perez Linan
(mainwaring), the "Political Regime Change" dataset (prc,
omitting the code for "transition" in the original dataset) described in
Gasiorowski 1996 and extended in Reich 2002; and a couple of measures taken
from datasets of autocratic regimes that explicitly distinguish between
full democracies, electoral or multiparty autocracies, and other
autocracies (utip_trichotomous, kailitz_tri). Both blm
and mainwaring are regional indexes developed by scholars with
Latin-American expertise; the rest have world-wide scope. These correlate
with each other at levels ranging from 0.70 (kailitz_tri and blm) to
0.9 (blm and mainwaring).
These indexes distinguish more than three "degrees" of democracy, but they
are not explicitly continuous. They include Freedom House's 14 category
freedom index (fh_total_reversed); the 7 category Lexical Index of
Democracy (lexical_index, from Skaaning, Gerring, Bartusevicius
2015); a 5 category indicator of democracy used by the Political
Instability Task Force based on the parcomp and exrec
variables of the Polity dataset (pitf, described in Goldstone et al
2010); the Polity IV polity2 variable; a calculated variable from
Przeworski 2010 (PIPE_regime - use with care, as it may be incorrectly
calculated) Coppedge and Reinicke's Polyarchy index
(polyarchy_original_contestation and
polyarchy_original_polyarchy, from Coppedge and Reinicke 1991). Of
these, the Polyarchy measures are specialist measures that only cover 357
country-years, but the rest have worldwide scope, polity and
lexical_index go all the way back to the beginning of the 19th
century.
Most of these indexes are meant to capture "thicker" conceptions of
democracy. The Freedom House measure puts some emphasis on civil and
political rights; Polity and PITF focus on differences in "authority
patterns" (though they tend to downplay the scope of participation);
Polyarchy tries to operationalize both the participation and contestation
dimensions of Dahl's "Polyarchy" concept; and LIED tries to incorporate the
degree of suffrage using measures originally collected for the PIPE dataset
(Prezeworski et al 2010). They correlate with one another at levels ranging
from 0.81 (lexical_index and pitf) to 0.94 (polity2
and pitf).
These indexes conceptualize democracy as a continuous quantity, and usually
in "thicker" ways. They include Arat's measure of democracy
(pmm_arat, from Arat 1991); Bollen's index of democracy
(pmm_bollen, from Bollen 2001); the World Governance Indicator's
Index of voice and Acocuntability (wgi_democracy); Axel Hadenius'
index of democracy, from Hadenius 1992 (pmm_hadenius); Munck's
measure of democracy (pmm_munck); several variants of the
Participation-Enhanced Polity Scores (e.g., PEPS1v, from Moon et al
2006); the calculated inclusion and contestation dimensions from Coppedge,
Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008) (polyarchy_inclusion_dimension and
polyarchy_contestation_dimension); several indexes from V-dem (e.g.
v2x_polyarchy); the posterior means and medians for the three
releases of the Unified Democracy scores (uds_*, Pemstein, Meserve, and
Melton 2010) and Vanahnen's index of democratization
(vanhanen_democratization). Of these, the Unified democracy indexes,
the V-Dem indexes, and the Polyarchy dimensions are themselves latent
variable indexes.
Vanhanen and PEPS give special weight to participation in the measurement of democracy; the WGI index combines a very wide variety of indicators of democracy. Only Vanahanen, the V-dem measure, and PEPS have long temporal coverage; the WGI Voice and Accountability index has broad spatial coverage but is only available for a short time series. Arat and Bollen go back only until the 1950s, though they do have reasonable spatial coverage.
Correlations vary from a low of 0.26 (Munck and the WGI, 126 country-year overlap, nonsignificant) to over 0.97 for various for V-Dem indexes. The lowest correlations are typically with the WGI measure of democracy.
The state system is complicated, and not always amenable to presentation in tabular form. Countries change name, split, get absorbed into larger units, and are not always obviously independent. This dataset basically follows the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states (Gleditsch and Ward 1999, updated by Gleditsch to 2013), supplemented by Gleditsch's tentative list of microstates (available at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html). The Gleditsch and Ward list is very similar, but not identical, to the Correlates of War list of independent states that is commonly used in Political Science and International Relations research; in particular, the treatment of Germany, Yemen, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, and a few other countries and their successor states differs between them.
I have included two different codes for each country-year: the Gleditsch
and Ward country code (GWn), and the COW code (cown), as well
as an indicator of whether the country year is considered to be "in the
international system" by Gleditsch and Ward (in_GW_system). Since
the Gleditsch and Ward "international system" begins with the Congress of
Vienna in 1816, country-years before 1816 are by definition not "in
system," even though this does not mean that these states were not
independent then. Care should thus be taken with the "in system" indicator
for years before 1816.
It is worth noting that while most measures of democracy are produced only
for sovereign countries, a number of measures have also been produced,
either explicitly (the V-dem project, Freedom House) or not (sometimes
researchers do not agree on whether a country-year represents a "sovereign"
state), for non-sovereign territories. In fact in this dataset about 6415
country-years in or after 1816 are not "in system" (most of them from the
V-dem indexes of democracy); these are easily excluded by filtering the
dataset using the boolean in_GW_system indicator (or a logical
expression that filters data points that are not in system after 1816 but
includes those before 1816).
All countries are measured as of 31 December of the given year, as is the conventional rule. Some datasets do not use this rule (e.g., Freedom House, Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014), and others sometimes contain more than one data point per year (e.g., the Political Regime Change dataset); I have tried my best to transform their coding so that all datapoints conform to convention, but some errors may remain.
Wherever possible, I have used the original sources for these measures of democracy and put them in the right panel format myself. For details, see the democracyData package. There are three exceptions.
First, in a few cases I have relied on the replication data for Pemstein,
Meserve, and Melton (2010), which contains data I have not been able to
find elsewhere. These variables are marked pmm_*, and they are not
always perfectly correlated with the original data (where available). For
example, fh_pmm includes data for 1981, whereas
fh_total_reversed conventionally does not; and there are a number of
divergences between PMM's pmm_prc data and the prc dataset
available from Reich 2002 that seem to have something to do with the
treatment of country-years that include transition periods. A more extended
discussion of the differences between the PMM replication data and the
original data sources is available in a package vignette; see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data") for details.)
Second, I have constructed the PIPE_democracy, PIPE_regime, and
pitf* variables following the instructions in the source, but have
not found the data ready-made. This is probably unproblematic in the case
of pitf -- the instructions are very clear -- but less so in the
case of przeworski, where the instructions are less clear and it is
difficult to produce a test that indicates whether the variable is properly
constructed. It is also worth noting that the Polity data is occasionally
revised, so that the pitf variable described and used in Goldstone
et al 2010 is probably different from the pitf variable here for a
small number of country-years. (Similarly, pmm_polity and
polity2 differ in a few instances due to revisions of the Polity
data between 2010 and today.)
Third, on at least one occasion I have recalculated an index from its
original sources in different ways (see the utip_dichotomous,
utip_dichotomous_strict, and utip_trichotomous variables),
since the original data does not provide an unambiguous measure.
The name of the country in the Gleditsch-Ward system of states, or the official name of the entity (for non-sovereign entities and states not in the Gleditsch and Ward system of states) or else a common name for disputed cases that do not have an official name (e.g., Western Sahara, Hyderabad). The Gleditsch and Ward scheme sometimes indicates the common name of the country and (in parentheses) the name of an earlier incarnation of the state: thus, they have Germany (Prussia), Russia (Soviet Union), Madagascar (Malagasy), etc. For details, see Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413. The list can be found at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html.
Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code, from the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.
The Correlates of War numeric country code, 2016 version. This differs from Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code in a few cases. See http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/state-system-membership for the full list.
The Polity IV country code, 2017 version. This differs from Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code and COW in a few cases. See http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscrdata.html for the full list.
Whether the state is "in system" (that is, is
independent and sovereign), according to Gleditsch and Ward, for this
particular date. Matches at the end of the year; so, for example South
Vietnam 1975 is FALSE because, according to Gleditsch and Ward, the
country ended on April 1975 (being absorbed by North Vietnam). It is also
TRUE for dates beyond 2012 for countries that did not end by then,
depsite the fact that the Gleditsch and Ward list has not been updated
since.
The calendar year. Democracy measurements conventionally reflect the situation in the country as of the last day of the year.
The Anckar-Fredriksson 2018 measure of democracy,
as a numeric value. Up to 2010 this should be identical to
bmr_democracy_omitteddata. 0 = non-democracy, 1 = democracy.
Democracy score from Arat 1991. Taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. Min = 29, max = 109, n = 3873.
Trichotomous measure of regime type from Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney 2005. 0 = authoritarian, 0.5 = semidemocratic, 1 = democratic. Available only for five Latin American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) from 1900 to 2000.
Same as previous but taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. 0 = authoritarian, 0.5 = semidemocratic, 1 = democratic. Available only for five Latin American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) from 1946 to 2000 in this version. Included here in order to replicate the original model from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2011.
Dichotomous measure of regime type from Boix, Miller, and 2012, version 3.0. 1 = democracy, 0 = non-democracy. N = 16987.
Dichotomous measure of regime type from
Boix, Miller, and 2012, version 3.0. 1 = democracy, 0 = non-democracy. This
is the same measure as bmr_democracy, except it records an NA for
countries occupied during an international war (e.g., the Netherlands
1940-44) or experiencing state collapse during a civil war (e.g., Lebanon
1976-89). The democracy variable instead fills in these years as
continuations of the same regime type. N = 16762.
According to the BMR version 3.0
codebook, this is the same measure as bmr_democracy, except that it also
requires that at least half of adult women have the right to vote. 30
countries change values.
Dichotomous indicator of democracy from the Bernhard, Nordstrom & Reenock 2001.
Dichotomous indicator of democracy from the Bernhard, Nordstrom & Reenock 2001. This version indicator has been put in country-year format, extending to 1913, with the help of the Correlates of War panel of independent states; independent countries (not microstates) in this panel that were not included in the original dataset are assumed to be non-democratic for the period. See democracyData for more information about the additional country-years generated in this way.
0-100 index of democracy from Bollen 2001. Taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013.
Dichotomous index of democracy from Doorenspleet 2000. 1 = authoritarian, 2 = democracy. Omits periods of interruption.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's democracy index.
Voice and Accountability index from the World Governance Indicators. Taken from http://www.govindicators.org.
Average civil liberties + political rights score (reversed so higher values are more democratic) from Freedom House. 2018. "Freedom in the World." Original data available at http://www.freedomhouse.org. Goes from 0 (least democratic) to 13 (most democratic). In this version, the index does not include a value for 1981. This is based on the latest Freedom House data going all the way to 2017.
Same as previous but taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. Goes from 1 (least democratic) to 7 (most democratic). In this version the index stops at 2008. It also includes a value for 1981. For more on the differences between this variable and the current FH Freedom in the World index, see democracyData.
An indicator of whether a country is an "electoral democracy" in Freedom House's estimation (1 = yes, 0 - no). Original data available at http://www.freedomhouse.org. Available only from 1989. This is based on the latest Freedom House electoral democracies list going all the way to 2016.
Dichotmous democracy/autocracy indicator from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014. 0 = autocracy, 1 = democracy.
Dichotmous democracy/autocracy indicator from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014. 0 = autocracy, 1 = democracy. Extended beyond 1945 using Geddes, Wright, and Frantz's case variable, which encodes information about the first year of the regime. For more detail on the resulting additional country-years, see democracyData.
0-10 index of democracy from Hadenius 1992. Taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. Higher values are more democratic.
Dichotomous democracy indicator from Kailitz 2013. 0 = autocracy (all types including electoral autocracy), 1 = liberal democracy.
Trichotomous democracy indicator from Kailitz 2013. 0 = autocracy (all types except electoral autocracy), 1 = electoral autocracy, 2 = liberal democracy.
0-6 Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy from Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevicius 2015. This is from V3 of the dataset, updated to 2015. 0 = nonelectoral, 1 = one- or no- party elections, 2 = limited competition multiparty elections for legislature only, 3 = Limited competition multiparty elections for both executive and legislature, 4 = Competitive elections for executive and legislative, limited suffrage, 5 = Male democracy, 6 = Electoral democracy.
Dichotomous democracy indicator from Magaloni, Chu, and Min 2013. 0 = autocracy (all types including multiparty autocracy), 1 = democracy.
Dichotomous democracy indicator from
Magaloni, Chu, and Min 2013. 0 = autocracy (all types including multiparty
autocracy), 1 = democracy. Extended beyond 1950 using the
duration_nr variable of the original dataset, which encodes
information about the first year of each regime. For more detail on the
resulting additional country-years, see
democracyData.
Trichotomous democracy indicator from Mainwaring, Brinks, and Perez Linan 2008. 0 = non-democracy, 0.5 = hybrid, 1 = democracy.
Same as previous but taken from Pemstein, Meserve,
and Melton 2013. In this version the indicator goes only to 1945, and it is
missing some country-years. -1 = non-democracy, 0 = hybrid, 1 = democracy.
For more on the differences between this variable and the original
Mainwaring et al data, see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data"). Included in
order to replicate the original PMM 2010 model.
0-1 index of democracy from Munck 2009. Taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. Only available for 342 country-years. Higher values are more democratic.
Dichotomous measure of democracy from Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2010. 1= democracy, 0 = non-democracy.
Same as previous but taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and
Melton 2013. This is missing a couple of countries in the original dataset;
for more detail on the missing cases, see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data").
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 1, polity score adjusted using IDEA Votes/Voting age population. From Moon et al. (2006).
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 2, polity score adjusted using IDEA Votes/Voting age population. From Moon et al. (2006).
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 1, polity score adjusted using Vanhanen votes/two-thirds of Vanhanen population. From Moon et al. (2006).
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 2, polity score adjusted using Vanhanen votes/two-thirds of Vanhanen population. From Moon et al. (2006).
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 1, polity score adjusted using (mostly)IDEA votes/Voting age population, with participation coded zero for noncompetitive elections. From Moon et al. (2006).
Participation-Enhanced Polity Score 2, polity score adjusted using (mostly)IDEA votes/Voting age population, with participation coded zero for noncompetitive elections. From Moon et al. (2006).
A five category indicator of democracy described in Goldstone
et al 2010. Can be:
0-Full autocracy (exrec < 7, parcomp !=0 and parcomp < 3)
1-Partial autocracy (exrec < 7, parcomp = 0 or parcomp > 2)
2-Partial democracy with factionalism (exrec > 6, parcomp = 3)
3-Partial democracy (exrec > 6, parcomp = 0 or parcomp = 4 or
parcomp = 5 but exrec != 8)
4-Full democracy (exrec = 8, parcomp = 5). See Goldstone et al. 2010
for full details.
A simplification of the pitf indicator of
democracy described in Taylor and Ulfelder 2015. A country is a democracy
(1) "if its chief executive is chosen in competitive elections (exrec
equal to 7 or 8) and political competition is not suppressed (parcomp
equal to 0 or parcomp greater than 2)" Otherwise it is a non-democracy
(0).
Annual polity index, excluding special codes for interruption, interregnum, and transition (-88,-77,-66). Higher values are more democratic. From Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers 2015.
Annual polity2 index, interpolating values for interruption, interregnum, and transition periods. Higher values are more democratic. From Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers 2015.
Same as previous, but taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and
Melton 2013. In this version the indicator only goes to 1945, and it
differs from polity2 in a few cases. For more detail on the
differences, see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data"). Included only
in order to be able to replicate the PMM 2011 model.
0-10 index of democracy from Coppedge
and Reinicke 1991. Revised in 2003-2006. This has been reversed so that
higher values are more democratic; the original index was scored so that 0
was less democratic. The codebook for the dataset suggests using
polyarchy_original_contestation instead, a more reliable version of
the polyarchy scale with fewer categories. Includes a value for Western
Sahara in 2000, which has been assigned COW code 605; Western Sahara is not
coded by any other dataset in this compilation, and is not considered an
independent state by either Gleditsch and Ward or the Correlates of War
project. Exclude if necessary.
Same as polyarchy_reversed but taken from
Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013. Note that there are 22 discrepancies
between polyarchy_reversed and polyarchy_pmm; these appear to
be due to transcription error in PMM's replication dataset.
pmm_polyarchy also misses 4 country-years in
polyarchy_original_polyarchy. For more detail on the differences,
see vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data"). Included
only in order to be able to replicate the PMM 2011 model.
1-9 index of contestation from the revised version of Coppedge and Reinicke. 1991. Revised in 2003-2006. Includes a value for Western Sahara in 2000, which has been assigned code 605; Western Sahara is not coded by any other dataset in this compilation, and is not considered an independent state by either Gleditsch and Ward or the Correlates of War project. Meaning of the scale is as follows: 9 Meaningful fair elections are held, there is full freedom for political organization and expression, and there is no preferential presentation of official views in the media. 8 Meaningful fair elections are held and there is full freedom for political organization and expression, but there is preferential presentation of official views in the media. 7 Meaningful fair elections are held and there is full freedom for political organization, but some public dissent is suppressed and there is preferential presentation of official views in the media. 6 Meaningful fair elections are held, but some independent political organizations are banned, some public dissent is suppressed, and there is preferential presentation of official views in the media. 5 Elections are marred by fraud or coercion, some independent political organizations are banned, some public dissent is suppressed, and there is preferential presentation of official views in the media. 4 Like score 5 except that there is less contestation in one or two of the following respects: no meaningful elections are held, only nonpolitical organizations are allowed to be independent, or alternatives to the official media are very limited. 3 No meaningful elections are held, only nonpolitical organizations are allowed to be independent, some public dissent is suppressed, and alternatives to the official media are very limited. 2 Like score 3 except that there is less contestation in one or two of the following respects: all organizations are banned or controlled by the government or official party, all public dissent is suppressed, or there is no public alternative to official information. 1 No meaningful elections are held, all organizations are banned or controlled by the government or official party, all public dissent is suppressed, and there is no public alternative to official information.
The contestation dimension
(CONTEST) in the dataset described in Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado
2008.
The inclusion dimension (INCLUS) in
the dataset described in Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado 2008.
Trichotomous index of democracy from Gasiorowski 1996. Available
in updated form in Reich 2002. 1= Authoritarian, 3 = semidemocratic, 4 =
democratic. Transitional categories coded NA.
Same as previous but taken from Pemstein, Meserve, and
Melton 2013. In this version the indicator only goes to 1945. It also
differs from the original data in a few cases (including the fact that it
includes the transition category, coded NA in prc). For more detail on
the differences, see For more detail on the differences, see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data"). Included only
in order to be able to replicate the PMM 2011 model.
Calculated regime type variable from the PIPE dataset.
Przeworski et al. 2013. This variable is not found in the downloadable
dataset; it is calculated according to the instructions in the codebook.
The documentation gives the following instructions:
"0 if electoral_age (a variable in the original dataset) is missing.
There are two distinct reasons why it may be missing: either elections are
not held regularly or they are held but the winner does not complete a term
in office or makes an autocoup. Elections are considered not to be held if
(1) there is a constitution that specifies the length of term of the chief
executive (or the legislature) and this period is exceeded by more than one
year, except for war years, (2) there is no constitution or the
constitution does not provide for elections and no elections are held
during this period.
1 if electoral_age is not missing and opposition = 0 (a
variable in the original dataset) (or republic_age is missing).
These are regimes in which elections are held regularly and the winners (or
their constitutional successors) complete electoral terms but either
elections are uncontested or there is one party and independents or parties
are banned and everyone runs as independent. Note that if everyone runs as
independents it is possible for the incumbent government to lose an
election, as in Swaziland in 1993. It is also possible for the incumbent to
lose if the regime had no opposition up to some time when a competitive
election occurred but the winner did not complete a term, as in Honduras in
1852. Finally, incumbents can lose when regime = 1 if the election
was competitive but at the end of the year the opposition was suppressed,
as in Panama in 1968.
2 if republic_age (a variable in the original dataset) is not
missing, that is if electoral_age is not missing and
opposition = 1 (there is some minimal opposition), but no strong
alternation has ocurred (power has not changed hands).
3 if democracy_age (democracy_age is not found in the
original dataset) is not missing, that is, the country has elections, there
is opposition, and a strong alternation -- a change in parties controlling
the government -- has occurred."
A measure of democracy from Bell 2016, obtained by coding all presidential and parliamentary democracies as 1, all other regimes as 0.
The continuous Support Vector Machine democracy index from Grundler and Krieger 2018.
The continuous Support Vector Machine democracy index from Grundler and Krieger 2016.
The dichotomous Support Vector Machine democracy index from Grundler and Krieger 2018.
Dichotomous indicator of democracy from Svolik 2012. 0 = authoritarian, 1 = democracy.
Dichotomous indicator of democracy from Ulfelder 2012. 0 = authoritarian, 1 = democracy.
Dichotomous indicator of democracy from Ulfelder 2012. 0 = authoritarian, 1 = democracy, extended back in time using the regime duration information in the dataset. For more details on the additional country-years coded this way, see democracyData
Calculated dichotomous index of democracy from data in the UTIP dataset of political regimes (Hsu 2008). 1 if the regime is a social democracy, conservative democracy, or one party democracy, 0 otherwise. The category of "one party democracy" is not well documented.
Stricter version of the calculated dichotomous index of democracy from data in the UTIP dataset of political regimes (Hsu 2008). 1 if the regime is a social democracy or a conservative democracy, 0 otherwise. This excludes "one party democracies" from the democracy category.
Calculated trichotomous index of democracy from data in the UTIP dataset of political regimes (Hsu 2008). 2 if the regime is a social democracy or conservative democracy, 1 if the regime is a one party democracy, 0 otherwise. The category of "one party democracy" is not well documented.
Additive polyarchy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Deliberative democracy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Egalitarian democracy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Egalitarian democracy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Multiplicative polyarchy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Participatory democracy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Continuous polyarchy index from V-dem version 7.1, Coppedge et al 2017.Higher values are more democratic.
Index of competition from Vanhanen 2012. From Vanahnen's documentation: "The smaller parties' share of the votes cast in parliamentary or presidential elections, or both, is used to indicate the degree of competition. It is calculated by subtracting the percentage of votes won by the largest party from 100. If the largest party gets, for example, 40 percent of the votes, the share of the smaller parties is 60 percent. If data on the distribution of votes are not available, the value of this variable is calculated on the basis of the distribution of seats in parliament. The distribution of seats is used also in cases in which it seems to indicate power relations more realistically than the distribution of votes." Its maximum value is 70. See the full documentation for Vanhanen's dataset for details.
Index of participation from Vanhanen 2012. From Vanahnen's documentation: "The percentage of the population which actually voted in the same elections is used to measure the degree of participation (= Participation). This percentage is calculated from the total population, not from the adult or enfranchized population." It is zero by construction in cases where no popular elections exist. May be modified by referenda. See the full documentation of Vanhanen's dataset for details.
Index of democratization from Vanhanen
2012. Higher values are more democratic. Constructed multiplicatively from
vanhanen_participation and vanhanen_competition.
Same as vanhanen_democratization but taken from
Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton. 2013. There are some small differences
between this variable and vanhanen_democratization. For more detail on
the differences, see
vignette("Differences_between_PMM_and_original_data"). Included only
in order to be able to replicate the PMM 2011 model exactly.
Dichotomous measure of democracy from Wahman, Teorell,
and Hadenius 2013, obtaining by coding 1 all democracies according to the
regime1ny variable, 0 all other regimes.
Dichotomous measure of democracy from Wahman,
Teorell, and Hadenius 2013, obtaining by coding 1 all democracies according
to the regimenyrobust variable, 0 all other regimes.
Anckar, Carsten and C. Fredriksson. 2018. "Classifying political regimes 1800-2016: a typology and a new dataset". European Political Science. DOI: 10.1057/s41304-018-0149-8. Data and codebook available at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0149-8.
Arat, Zehra F. 1991. Democracy and human rights in developing countries. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Bernhard, Michael Timothy Nordstrom, and Christopher Reenock, "Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation and Democratic Breakdown," Journal of Politics 63:3 (2001), pp. 775-803. Data and coding description available at http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bernhard/content/data/data.htm
Bell 2016. The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN). OEF research. Data available at http://oefresearch.org/datasets/reign
Boix, Carles, Michael Miller, and Sebastian Rosato. 2012. A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800-2007. Comparative Political Studies 46 (12): 1523-1554. Original data available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/FJLMKT
Bollen, Kenneth A. 2001. "Cross-National Indicators of Liberal Democracy, 1950-1990." 2nd ICPSR version. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1998. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2001. Original data available at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/02532.xml.
Bowman, Kirk, Fabrice Lehoucq, and James Mahoney. 2005. Measuring Political Democracy: Case Expertise, Data Adequacy, and Central America. Comparative Political Studies 38 (8): 939-970. http://cps.sagepub.com/content/38/8/939. Data available at http://www.blmdemocracy.gatech.edu/.
Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Jennifer Gandhi, and James Raymond Vreeland. 2010. "Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited." Public Choice. 143(1):67-101. Original data available at https://sites.google.com/site/joseantoniocheibub/datasets/democracy-and-dictatorship-revisited.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning, and Jan Teorell, with David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Jeffrey Staton, Brigitte Zimmerman, Frida Andersson, Valeriya Mechkova, Farhad Miri. 2017. V-Dem Codebook v7.1. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Original data available at https://v-dem.net/en/data/.
Coppedge, Michael, Angel Alvarez and Claudia Maldonado. 2008 "Two Persistent Dimensions of Democracy: Contestation and Inclusiveness".The Journal of Politics 70(03), pp. 632-647. DOI: 10.1017/S0022381608080663. Original data available at https://www3.nd.edu/~mcoppedg/crd/datacrd.htm.
Coppedge, Michael and Wolfgang H. Reinicke. 1991. Measuring Polyarchy. In On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants, ed. Alex Inkeles. New Brunswuck, NJ: Transaction pp. 47-68. Original data available at https://www3.nd.edu/~mcoppedg/crd/datacrd.htm.
Doorenspleet, Renske. 2000. Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization. World Politics 52 (03): 384-406. DOI: 10.1017/S0043887100016580. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0043887100016580.
Freedom House. 2018. "Freedom in the World." Original data available at http://www.freedomhouse.org.
Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1996. "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset." Comparative Political Studies 29(4):469-483.
Geddes, Barbara, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz. 2014. Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set. Perspectives on Politics 12 (1): 313-331. Original data available at http://dictators.la.psu.edu/.
Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413. The list can be found at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html
Goldstone, Jack, Robert Bates, David Epstein, Ted Gurr, Michael Lustik, Monty Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark Woodward. 2010. A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability. American Journal of Political Science 54 (1): 190-208. DOI:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00426.x
Grundler, K. and T. Krieger. 2018. "Machine Learning Indices, Political Institutions, and Economic Development". Report. CESifo Group Munich, 2018. https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6930.pdf.
Grundler, K. and T. Krieger. 2016. "Democracy and growth: Evidence from a machine learning indicator". European Journal of Political Economy 45, pp. 85-107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2016.05.005.
Hadenius, Axel. 1992. Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hadenius, Axel & Jan Teorell. 2007. "Pathways from Authoritarianism", Journal of Democracy 18(1): 143-156.
Hsu, Sara "The Effect of Political Regimes on Inequality, 1963-2002," UTIP Working Paper No. 53 (2008), http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/papers/utip_53.pdf. Data available for download at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/data/.
Kailitz, Steffen. 2013. Classifying political regimes revisited: legitimation and durability. Democratization 20 (1): 39-60. Original data available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2013.738861.
Mainwaring, Scott, Daniel Brinks, and Anibal Perez Linan. 2008. "Political Regimes in Latin America, 1900-2007." Original data available from http://kellogg.nd.edu/scottmainwaring/Political_Regimes.pdf.
Magaloni, Beatriz, Jonathan Chu, and Eric Min. 2013. Autocracies of the World, 1950-2012 (Version 1.0). Dataset, Stanford University. Original data and codebook available at http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/research/autocracies_of_the_world_dataset/
Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr, and Keith Jaggers. 2012. "Polity IV: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2012." Updated to 2015. Original data available from http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
Moon, Bruce E., Jennifer Harvey Birdsall, Sylvia Ceisluk, Lauren M. Garlett, Joshua J. Hermias, Elizabeth Mendenhall, Patrick D. Schmid, and Wai Hong Wong (2006) "Voting Counts: Participation in the Measurement of Democracy" Studies in Comparative International Development 42, 2 (Summer, 2006). The complete dataset is available here: http://www.lehigh.edu/~bm05/democracy/Obtain_data.htm.
Munck, Gerardo L. 2009. Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pemstein, Daniel, Stephen Meserve, and James Melton. 2010. Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type. Political Analysis 18 (4): 426-449.
Pemstein, Daniel, Stephen A. Meserve, and James Melton. 2013. "Replication data for: Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type." In: Harvard Dataverse. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/PMM
Przeworski, Adam et al. 2013. Political Institutions and Political Events (PIPE) Data Set. Department of Politics, New York University. https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/adam-przeworski/home/data
Reich, G. 2002. Categorizing Political Regimes: New Data for Old Problems. Democratization 9 (4): 1-24. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/714000289.
Skaaning, Svend-Erik, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevicius. 2015. A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy. Comparative Political Studies 48 (12): 1491-1525. Original data available from http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/skaaning.
Svolik, Milan. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Original data available from http://campuspress.yale.edu/svolik/the-politics-of-authoritarian-rule/.
Taylor, Sean J. and Ulfelder, Jay, A Measurement Error Model of Dichotomous Democracy Status (May 20, 2015). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2726962 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2726962
The Economist Intelligence Unit. 2018. Democracy Index 2017: Free Speech under Attack.
Ulfelder, Jay. 2012. "Democracy/Autocracy Data Set." In: Harvard Dataverse. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/18836.
Vanhanen, Tatu. 2012. "FSD1289 Measures of Democracy 1810-2012." Original data available from http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/data/catalogue/FSD1289/meF1289e.html
Wahman, Michael, Jan Teorell, and Axel Hadenius. 2013. Authoritarian regime types revisited: updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics 19 (1): 19-34.
Other democracy: extended_uds,
uds_2014