One constant about large comparative cross-national data analysis in political science is that it will include a measure of level of democracy as proxied by “Polity scores”:http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm or “Freedom House scores”:http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15. Almost as inevitably, there will be some sort of complaint about the “quality of these data”:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00308.x/full, but they will almost certainly remain in the analysis due to the lack of an available alternative. For a while, this has been a pretty steady state of affairs, in no large part because of the massive undertaking that coming up with an alternative coding system for measuring democracy entails.
However, those unhappy with the current state of affairs will be interested to learn that a new democracy coding project is indeed now underway. Here is a description of the project:
A team of 13 scholars is creating a dataset that measures democracy in a highly disaggregated manner from 1900 to the present in all countries of the world. The 100-plus indicators aim to capture multiple dimensions of democracy (electoral, liberal, participatory, egalitarian) and multiple components of democracy (to name only a few—elections, executive and legislative autonomy and constraint, judicial independence, media, civil society, civil liberties). Indicators will be coded by multiple country experts or draw on existing data.
The project has a “website”:https://v-dem.net/DemoComp/ with additional information, and there is also an “article about the methodology behind the project”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8286733&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1537592711000880 in the current issue of “Perspectives on Politics”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PPS. Here’s the abstract of the article:
In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized as _historical, multidimensional, disaggregated_, and _transparent_. We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.
I am sure that in the future many of the readers of The Monkey Cage will be called upon to serve as country experts, and it is worth noting that for now the project is in its initial stages, and therefore it will likely be awhile before any data is available. However, I did received an email today from one of the project’s directors asking for recommendations for experts on Albania. If you feel that you could servce as a country expert on Albania for the project, please contact “Professor Kelly McMann”:http://politicalscience.case.edu/faculty/mcmann/ of Case Western Reserve University directly.