Measuring democracy

So where does all this leave us when we think about how to measure the level of democracy in the world? One of the most widely used and widely accepted measures of democracy is a substantive one called ‘Polity IV’. This provides an annual measure of democracy and autocracy for 184 countries from 1800 to the present day, giving it the longest time-series and the most number of countries of any of the measures of democracy used in political science. It is comprised of five separate measures which, when combined, capture whether the substance of democracy is present or absent within a system. 

The five measures it uses are: 

1. Competitiveness of executive recruitment. 

2. Openness of executive recruitment. 

3. Constraints on the executive. 

4. Regulation of political participations. 

5. Competitiveness of political participation. 

(For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase ‘the executive’, this refers to the government in a political system. So in a presidential system, the executive is the president, while in a parliamentary system the executive is the prime minister and their cabinet). This measure gives a score somewhere between -10 and +10 for each country where -10 means a country is as autocratic as possible while +10 means a country is as democratic as possible. However, to make it a little easier when it comes to measuring whether a country is democratic or not, many scholars have used the cut-off point of +6. So, if a country has a polity score of +6 or higher, we can consider it to be a democracy. 

Using this measure, we can observe the evolution of the number of democracies in the world between 1800 and the present day. Figure 2.1 shows the rise in the number of democratic countries over time. It shows not only the increase in the number of countries in the world as a result of the decline of empires and the rise of new nation-states, but crucially it also shows an uneven pattern. The growth of democracies really began in 1900 but then fell back again in 1939/1940 with the onset of the Second World War and the rise of Fascism. Yet this was followed by an explosion in the number of democracies in the 1960s which has carried on until the present day. Based on this graph we can say that it is a mistake to assume democracy was the dominant form of political organisation prior to this very recent history. Rather, for most of modern political history the world was governed by other forms of political organisation, such as monarchies, dictatorships or communist and single-party states. It is only in recent years that the majority of the world’s countries are now democracies and that the majority of the people in the world live in a democracy. It is also significant to note that this trend emerges even when using Polity IV’s very substantive definition of democracy.

The rise of democracy. 

Data source: Polity IV, Center for Systemic Peace; www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm

the other trend we can observe from this graph is that democracy has developed in several waves. Samuel Huntington (1993) spoke of three waves of democratisation. The first wave began in the nineteenth century and lasted until 1919, after the First World War. This was when many of the older west European and North American democracies emerged. However, the growth in democracies stalled and shrank during the interwar period, prior to the second wave of democracy which began after the Second World War in 1945. During the second wave, many states were rebuilt or emerged along democratic lines. However, it is also important to note that parts of central, eastern and southern Europe became authoritarian systems at that time. The third wave of democracy then began in the 1960s and runs up until the present day. This wave began with the decolonisation of countries in Africa and the Middle East and includes the rise of democracy in southern Europe and Latin America as well as the emergence of new democracies in central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the USSR. The nature of these waves can be seen more clearly when we look at the average polity scores for all countries in different regions of the world.

Reference:

Hix, S., and M. Whiting. 2012. Introduction to political science. University of London.