 I'm Salvatore Babona, and today's lecture is measuring the quality of the world's democracies. Headline figures suggest that there are around 100 democracies in the world, or about half the world's countries. But how good are they, the democracies and the figures? If the health of the world's best democracies is anything to go by, the health of the rest can't be very good. There are only two systematic sources for cross-national data on democracy, and neither of them is beyond reproach, just as perhaps no democracy is itself beyond reproach. An off-sighted figure is that there are just under 100 democracies in the world, though it's not clear exactly what this means. The number comes from the Center for Systemic Peace Policy for Research Project. This project produces graphs like the one you see here, charting the number of democracies from the year 1800 up to 2014. Democracies here are charted in blue. You can see that at the beginning there was only one democracy, and until the 1840s the polity project considered that there was only one real democracy in the world, the United States. And then many more democracies, first in Latin America, and then Europe and the rest of the world, joining the blue line here to bring us up to somewhere in the mid-90s is the number of democracies in the 2010s. But you'll see there are also two other lines in this graph, anocracies and autocracies. Autocracies are easy enough to understand. Those are countries where there's one person rule, dictatorships of one kind or another. But what are anocracies? It's an odd word. Etymologically it should mean no rule at all. The polity four project uses anocracy to mean something between a dictatorship and a democracy. In other words, those countries that are labeled with the black line in this graph have some aspects of democracy, but not all aspects of democracy. The line between some aspects of democracy and all aspects of democracy is very difficult to draw. As you can see, the biggest rise after the 1980s was not just in the number of democracies which rose dramatically, but also in the number of anocracies, countries that were difficult to determine whether or not they were truly democratic. The polity four project is sponsored by the Center for Systemic Peace, which is a non-government organization based in northern Virginia, of obscure provenance and funding. It was founded by the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, and its current director is listed on its website. But there is virtually no information on the website or in its publications about the people involved, the funding it receives, and how it does the work it does. The polity four group is, to be fair, well respected within the political science community, but that doesn't mean that outside a narrow community of experts we should trust what it does. They do this characterization of democracies that shows pretty much the usual suspects. Full democracies are those of North America, Western Europe, with the curious exception of France, Japan, and Australia, New Zealand, and interestingly, Mongolia, which receives the top democracy rating of the policy four project for all of the last decade. Then there are a range of democracies that are not full democracies, most of Latin America, Southern Africa, and Eastern Europe, and South Asia. And then various levels of anocracy, closed anocracy, and autocracy. Those ratings that you see from a negative 10 to positive 10, one person rule to full democracy, are based on a score that is derived from expert ratings. The polity project rates both democracy and autocracy on two separate scales, 0 to 10. Democracy is considered positively, so 0 to 10 on the basis of having regular elections, constitutional restraints on power, and guarantees of civil liberty. Autocracy is rated 0 to 10 on the basis of how leaders are recruited, political participation in that process and constraints placed on leaders' authorities. The final polity score is simply the democracy score minus the autocracy score. So a country that has a rating of 0 for democracy, and a rating of 10 for autocracy, would get a total rating in the system of negative 10, full autocracy. On the other hand, a country that has a rating of 10 for democracy, perfect democracy, but 0 for autocracy, no aspects of autocracy, would get a rating of perfect positive 10, full democracy. On this scale, from negative 10 to positive 10, polity uses a cutoff of 5 points for democracy. Anything more than 5 points on the scale is a democracy. Anything less than 5 points is not. Curiously, all 5 of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and as well as the countries that are culturally closest to them, score a full positive 10 points. Most of us who live in the Anglo-Saxon countries can imagine at least some points on which our own democracies fall short of an ideal perfect 10. Nonetheless, the polity rating gives perfect 10s to all of these countries. Those coatings are based on at least 4 coders per country applying a standard code book. So the polity methodology documents do say how codes are assigned and the procedures that are used in resolving disputes between coders, but it doesn't give information on who the coders are. And we have to question how much expertise they really have. Many people may be experts on democracy in the United States or France, but how many people are experts on democracy in Mongolia or Cambodia or Paraguay? There are some 200 countries in the world to be ranked in every one of 215 years going back to the year 1800. That's a huge ratings problem, and it's hard to imagine that you could find four people who have expertise on levels of democracy in Paraguay in 1848, who have real expertise on that. Never mind, even if you could find them, the sheer number of people would have to be involved. Now, the polity project seems to use a core group of something like 20 or so people to rate it, to do its democracy ratings. The idea that they could collectively have sufficient expertise, that four people could give ratings on every country in the world is just fantastical. In fact, I would suggest that it's very likely that when the so-called experts have to judge a level of democracy in less well-covered countries, in the smaller, more less visited countries of the world, I suspect that they rely heavily on internet sources, and perhaps even on Wikipedia, simply turning to find out what's going on in the country from press reports, Wikipedia, and other online sources. Now, I have no direct evidence that they're in fact doing that. I simply look at my own expertise and the fact that I would have to go to press reports on the internet to find out what's going on in most countries, and I myself am an expert on the international data infrastructure. The simple fact is there is no depth of expertise available in Northern Virginia or available to the scholars in the networks of the people in Northern Virginia that could possibly result in valid democracy ratings for 200 countries. The second main source of data on democracy is the Freedom House Freedom in the World data set, which says there are 125 democracies. Freedom House is another NGO based in Northern Virginia. Freedom House does not have its origins in political science academia, like Politi 4 does. Freedom House has its origins in the United States think tank sector, and Freedom House is very closely connected to the United States government and US establishment NGOs. Freedom House gauges a number of electoral democracies using a simple rating, again derived from experts on its panel of experts, many of whom do not even have PhDs. Freedom House to its credit gives a full list of its experts on its website, and a quick glance shows you that most of its experts are junior analysts who are hired to work for a few years at Freedom House straight out of graduate school. The number of electoral democracies, however, is not primarily what Freedom House measures. Freedom House primarily measures the vaguer concept of freedom. It does not give a numerical score for democracy, electoral democracy is merely one of the ingredients that goes into its numerical freedom score. It characterizes the countries of the world as either free, partly free, or not free. And as you can see at a glance, most of the countries that are free are also the countries that are rated as democracies by the Politi 4 data set. As with Politi 4, expert coders are used to rate countries, though this time to rate countries on political rights and civil liberties rather than on democracy and authoritarianism. Political rights are scored from a low of 7 to a high of 1 based on multiple indicators. One is the best score, a perfect political rights. So liberties are also scored from a low of 7 to a high of 1 based on multiple indicators. The indicators are listed here on the slide. And the two scores are averaged. Countries are labeled free if the average score is between 1 and 2.5. So if a country scored a 1 for political rights and a 2 for civil liberties, that country would have a score of 1.5 and be considered free. Partly free from 3 to 5.0 and not free from 5.5 to 7. Obviously there's no real meaning to free versus partly free or partly free versus not free except in the sense that on the freedom house indices, you know, closer to 1 is certainly freer than 7. But exactly where the cutoff should be to call a country free is an arbitrary decision made by freedom house itself. By freedom house's reckoning, the world has been getting steadily less free over the last 10 years. Now, we might question exactly what that means and the robustness of freedom house's ratings. But whatever they're measuring, it is becoming less good over time. This chart from Freedom House's 2016 report shows the number of countries that have improving freedom scores versus the number of countries that have declining freedom scores in each particular year. Now obviously freedom scores bounce up and down quite a bit. But as you can see, since 2006, in every single year, there have been more countries that went down on the freedom index than went up. So 10 years of declining average freedom suggests a pretty bad situation. And that does confirm the results from Politi4, which also show declining quality of democracy over the last 10 years. All sources, both quantitative and qualitative and including anecdotal evidence, seem to agree that the quality of the world's democracy has been declining in the 21st century. But no one really knows how much or why. In some countries, like Russia, it's very clear that the quality of democracy has declined. This is a photo of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the primary critic of Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia. Nemtsov was murdered last year in open air on the bridge that connects Red Square to the opposite side of the Moscow River. So this is one of the most secure areas of the entire country of Russia, just off to the side of Red Square, literally within sight of the Kremlin, the head of the Russian government administration on the top of the hill overlooking Red Square. Yet this murder has gone unsolved and the perpetrators have apparently gotten away scot-free. It seems impossible that a major political figure could be murdered on the edges of Red Square without the crime being observed or solved. The fact that in Russia, political critics are routinely murdered suggests that the quality of Russia's democracy is declining. But it's not just Russia, it's the quality of democracy in other former Soviet republics like Belarus and Ukraine. It's the quality of democracy in Western countries where political debate is no longer as robust as it used to be and governments are no longer responsive as they were. And it's a decline of democracy in very poor countries in places like Africa and Southeast Asia where leaders increasingly cling to power and refuse to accept regular rotation in office. Key takeaways. There are only two systematic cross-national rating systems for the quality of democracy, the polity for dataset and the freedom in the world dataset. Both produce estimates for unrealistically large numbers of countries and time points, calling their reliability and even their validity into question. Finally, the simple truth is that no one really knows how many democracies there are in the world nor how good they are. Yet we can form an impressionistic judgment that roughly half the world's countries seem to be democracies of some kind or other and the quality of those democracies seems to be declining in recent years. Thank you for watching. You can find more about me at my website salvaturbabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.