Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 03/2015

A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy

Henrikas Bartusevičius, Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring

June 2014

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

Recent years have seen an efflorescence of work focused on the definition and operationalization of democracy. One debate concerns the scale, i.e., whether democracy is best measured by binary or graded scales. Critics of binary indices point out at that they are overly reductionist; all features of a regime must be reduced to a single coding decision, producing binary sets that lack discriminating power. Defenders counter that the different levels of graded measures are not associated with a specific set of conditions, meaning that they are difficult to interpret. Against this backdrop, we propose to operationalize electoral democracy as a series of necessary-and sufficient conditions arrayed in an ordinal scale. The resulting “lexical” index of electoral democracy, based partly on new data collected by the authors, covers all independent countries of the world from 1800 to 2008. It incorporates binary coding of its sub-components based on factual characteristics of regimes and in this way reduces the problem of subjective judgments by coders for non-binary democracy indices. Binary codings are aggregated into an ordinal scale using a cumulative logic. In this fashion, we arrive at an index that performs a classificatory function – each level identifies a unique and theoretically meaningful regime type – as well as a discriminating function.