The Emergence of Democracy: A Comparative Study of 119 States, 1850–1979. By Tatu Vanhanen. (Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1984. Pp. 168. Price unavailable; paper.)

Determinants of Government Expenditures: New Evidence From Disaggregative Data

“…Table 1 gives least-squares estimates of regression coefficients in equation (1) for four country groups: all countries, top 30 democracies, LDCs, and a sub-sample of small LDCs (population less than 20 million), using per capita expenditures on defense as the dependent variable. The use of the top 30 democracies is based on an index of democratization developed by Vanhanen ( 1983). This index is calculated by multiplying the share (in percentage) of the smaller parties and independents of the votes cast in parliamentary and/or presidential elections (referred to as competition) and the degree (in percentage) of electoral participation and by dividing the result by 100.…”

Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice and Policy

“…76 There is the further problem that rights scales are being used for measures of democracy and democracy scales for measures of human rights thereby conflating and confusing two concepts that overlap only partially. 77 Finally, while the minorities at risk project measures discrimination against minorities, little work to date has appeared on measuring general levels of discrimination in such areas as health and education.…”

Australian welfare state expenditure revisited: Some implications for change

“…In the model presented here, Vanhanen's index of democratization (Vanhanen, 1984) is used as a predictor of transfers expenditure. This index combines two measures particularly propitious for assessing the impact on governments of popular participation: the share of votes cast for the smaller parties and the percentage of the population voting.…”