The Numerical Value of Democracy: League Tables, Scores and Trends

Abstract

Statistical data are today’s leading language—not just in public debates but also in academic studies of democracy. This chapter will therefore focus on the numerical value of democracy. The chapter will show that there is no real debate: there seems to be just one underlying agreed definition and only few measurements of democracy. The first part of this chapter will describe the main measures of democracy and show there is hardly any variation. Overall, the measurements of democracy in those quantitative studies mainly use one of the following two sources: the Polity IV Project and/or the Freedom House (FH). The second part of this chapter will focus on the underlying concepts of democracy, which form the foundation of these measurements. Although scholars acknowledge the contestability of the concept of democracy, the concept has not been contested in quantitative studies so far. The third part of this chapter will present some Global League Tables of Democracies, ranking the countries over a longer period. This part shows that a reverse wave away from democracy has not happened. Not yet, at least. It would be better to talk about ‘stagnation’, as not many dictatorships have democratized recently, while democracies have not yet collapsed.