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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

04/04/24 06:22 AM IST

Global Democracy indices

In News
  • V-Dem Institute’s recent democracy index termed India “one of the worst autocratisers”— it had already ceased to be a democracy on this index in 2018.
Global democracy Indices
  • The V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg has published its annual assessment of 202 countries since 1789.
  • Since 1973, the U.S.-based Freedom House has come up with its assessment of civil liberties and political rights.
  • The Economic Intelligence Unit assesses the electoral, liberal, participatory and effective nature of democracies since 2006.
  • Others include: the Lexical Index, Boix-Miller-Rosato coding, Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Worldwide Governance Indicators, and International IDEA’s Global State of Democracies report.
There are four broad types of data that these indices use:
  • Observational data (OD) — data on observable facts, such as voter turnout rates
  • ‘In-house’ coding, where researchers assess country-specific information using academic material, newspapers, etc.
  • Expert surveys, where selected experts from a country provide a subjective evaluation
  • Representative surveys, where a selected group of citizens offer judgments
Methodology
  • There are many approaches to measuring democracy, some using facts, some judgment and some a mix of both.
  • The Lexical Index, for instance, relies on observational data in addition to evaluation by in-house researchers based on academic research.
  • V-Dem, on the other hand, uses aggregate expert judgments from a pool of 3,500 scholars and almost 30 million data points.
  • The model “algorithmically estimates both the degree to which an expert is reliable relative to other experts, and the degree to which their perception differs from other experts to come up with the most accurate values for every parameter.
Democracy measurement
  • Each index asks and responds to a different question evaluating the health of democracy.
  • All agree that democracy is a political system in which citizens get to participate in free and fair elections (electoral democracy).
  • Democracies are also liberal societies, which invest in the civic rights of citizens and offer them protections. Indices like V-Dem’s, Economist Intelligence Unit and the Bertelsmann Transformation Index assess other dimensions as well: Is the democracy ‘participatory’, are citizen groups and civil society organisations functional?
  • Are decisions made deliberately, in the best interest of all people, rather than through coercion or minority group interests? Is it egalitarian — are economic and social resources distributed equally
  • Some use only two indicators while others have more than 400; the weightage assigned and aggregation model followed also fluctuates across projects.
  • V-Dem’s researchers code a series of indicators for 12 areas across media, civil society, political parties, judiciary, and civil liberties; each area is assigned five experts. EIU relies on regular citizen surveys to rank 60 indicators.
  • Together, these indices “comprise a combination of quantitative assessments like the distribution of seats in the national legislature among political parties, and qualitative judgements like whether safeguards against corruption are effective.
  • The EIU rank goes from 0 to 10; V-Dem’s goes from 0 to 1.
  • Others also classify the degree of democracy— say, from an autocracy to anocracy to democracy in Polity’s Index; or ‘not free’ to ‘electoral democracy’ in Freedom House’s ranking (India is a “partially free democracy”).
  • The V-Dem Institute sorts countries into four regime types: Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy.
Limitations
  • The first and the most frequently cited criticism: there is a degree of subjectivity that tugs at the indices’ credibility and precision.
  • Regardless of the scholarly pool and aggregation model used, evaluations are still based on the judgement of researchers and coders, rather than discernible, tangible characteristics.
  • V-Dem’s “egalitarian” indicator, for instance, assesses the equality of social groups in the political arena — an equivocal question in comparison to say, how many political parties are present in the country.
  • Another concern is over the scope of countries included in these indices.
  • Only some — such as Freedom House and Lexical Index —- survey non-independent and microstates. Smaller countries may thus be overlooked in certain cases.
Source- The Hindu

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