The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index

Source: R/data_documentation.R

A dataset containing the country-year version of the democracy index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2006-2022. From the report "Democracy Index 2022: Frontline democracy and the battle for Ukraine", available at https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index.

eiu

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 2505 rows and 7 columns.

Source

The Economist Intelligence Unit. Democracy Index 2022: Frontline democracy and the battle for Ukraine. Tech. rep. The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2023. https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index.

Details

eiu_country

Country name as in the original tables.

eiu

Democracy index, ranging from 0 (least democratic) to to 10 (most democratic). The report says that the index "is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture" which form "one interrelated whole".

Standard descriptive variables (generated by this package)

extended_country_name

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.

GWn

Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code, from the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.

cown

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.

in_GW_system

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.