Measuring civil liberty: an assessment of standards-based data sets

Skaaning, Svend-Erik

doi:10.4067/s0718-090x2009000300003

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…Staying true to his widely accepted concept thus necessitates employing a core set of indicators capturing overall media freedom (Behmer 2009), such as active state censorship of print/broadcast media, media self-censorship, and harassment of journalists. In addition, it requires freedom of discussion in society at large, for both men and women (Skaaning 2009), and four indicators of media content to capture Dahl's (1971Dahl's ( , 1989Dahl's ( , 1998) Balternative sources of information^: whether the media is biased against opposition parties and candidates, whether major print and broadcast outlets routinely criticize the government, and whether they represent a wide range of political perspectives, as well as general repression of cultural and academic expressions of political dissent. As argued above, one could question whether these really belong to a mostly electoral conception of democracy.…”

Section: Formative Indicators: Elected Officialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

et al. 2018

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This paper presents a new measure polyarchy for a global sample of 182 countries from 1900 to 2017 based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, deriving from an expert survey of more than 3000 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of Elected Officials, Clean Elections, Associational Autonomy, Inclusive Citizenship, and Freedom of Expression and Alternative Sources of Information separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl's (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework. The paper describes how the five polyarchy components were measured and provides the rationale for how to aggregate them to the polyarchy scale. We find Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark that personal characteristics or ideological predilections of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators. We also find strong correlations with other existing measures of electoral democracy, but also decisive differences where we believe the evidence supports the polyarchy index having higher face validity.

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Section: Formative Indicators: Elected Officialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

et al. 2018

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“…A core set of indicators captures media freedom (Behmer 2009) such as active state censorship of print/broadcast media, media selfcensorship, and harassment of journalists. In addition, there should be freedom of discussion in society at large, for both men and women (Skaaning 2009). 17 Also included in this index are four indicators more geared towards measuring content rather than government restrictions.…”

Section: E Freedom Of Expressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Electoral Democracy with V-Dem Data: Introducing a New Polyarchy Index

et al. 2016

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Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to the conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a VDem Institute at University of Gothenburg that comprises almost ten staff members, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers, 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest-ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: .0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. Jan Teorell also wishes to acknowledge support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence, which made it possible for him to work on this paper. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. 2 AbstractThis paper presents a new measure of electoral democracy, or "polyarchy", for a global sample of 173 countries from 1900 to the present based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, enabling us to address several deficiencies in extant measures of electoral democracy, such as Freedom House and Polity. The V-Dem data derive from expert polls of more than 2,600 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of "Elected officials", "Free and fair elections", "Freedom of expression", "Associational autonomy" and "Inclusive citizenship" separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl's (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework, and can both show how well indicators match components as well as how components map the overall index. We also find that characteristics of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators, nor differences between these ratings and existing measures such as FH and Polity, with which they are strongly correlated. Finally, we provide systematic measures of uncertainty (or measurement error) at every level. We showcase the usefulness of the new measure for understanding developments of electoral democracy over time, for comparing countries at a particular time point, and for understanding its relationship to economic modernization through disaggregation.3

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“…Many of the selected indicators are expected to cluster in meaningful ways and to tap into a limited number of overarching concepts. These expectations rest on theoretical grounds and the findings of previous dimensionality analyses of these and related indicators, which show that many of them are highly correlated and reflect common latent attributes (see, e.g., Skaaning 2009;Møller andSkaaning 2014a, 2014b;Teorell et al 2016). An independent assessment of empirical dimensionality was implemented by correlating the indicators selected to capture the respective subattributes (or subcomponents in relation to Civil Liberties and social rights) and run BFAs of the same groups of indicators.…”

Section: Aggregation Of Indicators Into Gsod Indicesmentioning

confidence: 99%