A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998

Abstract

Democracy has been defined and measured in various ways. This article argues that combining two basic dimensions of democracy - competition and participation - can yield a theoretically satisfactory measurement of democracy that employs three measures: degree of electoral competition, degree of electoral participation and a combined index of democratization. These variables have been used in the author's previous comparative studies of democracy. The new dataset combines previous data and extends these to cover the period 1810-1998. That dataset includes 187 contemporary and former independent states from the year 1810 or from the year of independence. In the dataset, original electoral and other political data needed to calculate the values of Competition and Participation variables are given and documented separately for each country. The values of the three variables are calculated and given for each year over the period of comparison. Finally, the new dataset is compared with the Polity98 measures of democracy and the combined Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties.

Corruption and political stability: Does the youth bulge matter?

“…To measure democracy, we follow Dahl's (1971) discussion of democracy and use the Vanhanen index of democracy 11 . The two main components of the Vanhanen index of democracy are political competition and political participation (Vanhanen, 2000). Unlike other measures of democracy, it is based on objective information.…”

Environmentalism, democracy, and pollution control

“…17 The relative weight on aggregate social welfare in (13) adjusted by two factors: γ represents the (exogenous) expected democratic participation rate in the next (implicitly modeled) upcoming election, and µ is the (exogenous) expected degree of political competition in this election. We thus follow Dahl [10] and Vanhanen [60], who regard both political participation and political competition as necessary requirements for democracy.…”

Instrumental Variables in the Long Run

“…The cross section increases to 125 countries in later years. To supplement the panel data analysis, we also use the Political Rights Index (PRI) from Freedom House and the Vanhanen Index of Democratization, which measures democracy in independent countries from 1810-1998 (Vanhanen, 2000).…”