Here are two charts we will be looking at in lecture:
First, a chart of democracy (as measured by the Polity score, which is a basic measure of "political competition" - leaving aside a number of controversial things) vs. per capita income in 2001. (Click on "Gadget1," at the bottom, to view the bubble chart - embedding it does not seem to work).
A time-series chart of basically the same data (some indicators come from different sources) is available here (but ranging from 1800 until 2009 - the animation is quite cool).
Second, a chart of democracy vs. tenure in office for leaders in the period 1950-2001. (Click on "Gadget1" at the bottom to view the bubble chart - embedding does not seem to work).
What do you see?
I have been attempting to decipher graphs on Gapminder to see if measures of wellbeing can correlate with democracy. I looked specifically at infant mortality, life expectancy and literacy.
ReplyDeleteThese factors compared with the “Democracy score” didn’t show any definite trends. Life expectancy was predominantly but no means exclusively to those countries with the higher democracy score. Some states such as China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba had higher life expectancies, but were low on the democracy score. It seemed to be grouped more geographically with African states overwhelmingly having the lowest life expectancy.
Literacy was quite random. China had a high adult literacy rate of 93% but only scored 6 on the Democracy scale while India was higher on the democracy scale at 9 but only had an adult literacy rate of 66%. Initially suspected it was related to whether the states had high capacity or low capacity government. However, when I changed the democracy score axis to income per person there appeared to be a very strong correlation between the aspects of wellbeing I looked at and Income per person.
This essentially draws us back to the question we asked in the lecture today on whether the wealth of a state can be linked to democracy. This remains elusive. It appears that the states with the higher Income per person can be found at both extremes of the democracy score. This could be related to natural resources -the states with high income and the low democracy scores tend to be those with oil. Another aspect I have not yet looked at is the income distribution within the states and whether states which are considered less democratic but with high Income per capita have the income concentrated within a small minority of the population.
On the side, is there any reason why Australia has managed to get a -10 on the Democracy score in 2008. Perhaps there is still incomplete information? Nevertheless I was quite surprised to see it there!
Very interesting, Tamsin. There might be more of an association between democracy history and some of these measures; many of the low income African democracies had a long history of dictatorship - so their mean polity score is actually low (averaged over a long period). But the actual Gapminder site does not allow you to look at cumulative means - I had to do the graph of mean polity score and gdp on my own.
ReplyDeleteThe Australia -10 is probably a data error. I think the polity scores for 2008 have barely come out; there might be some problem there.
After looking at the graph of leadership tenure and democracy in class I thought I would investigate Kekkonen from Finland who was in power for a staggering 25 years and still managed to be among the most democratic countries on the graph. There is quite a mix of opinions about him on the internet with some claiming that his rule was in fact undemocratic.
ReplyDeleteHe was first elected in 1956 and was re-elected in 1961. In 1973 he was elected by emergency law by which he implied that, if he was not re-elected, the Soviets would not accept Finland's free trade agreement with the European Economic Community
In fact, throughout his time a president, Kekkonen did his best to keep his political rivals in check. Kekkonen’s rival party was kept in opposition despite good economic performance in elections. On a few more occasions the parliament was dissolved as political composition did not please Kekkonen. When he was re-elected for a fourth term he had effectively removed all opposition (The president was elected by an elected parliament, not directly). According to Wikipedia (no less) Only after Kekkonen’s term governments began to remain stable throughout the entire period between elections.
Since Kekkonen was in power there have been a number of constitutional changes in Finland. The President is now elected directly, can only be in power for two consecutive terms and is elected directly.
I find Kekkonen an interesting example to consider when we talk of democracy. Was Kekkonen just very good at using the system in which he worked or was there a problem with the democratic framework in Finland? Should Finland be at the extreme end of democracy? I find it odd that a leader who managed to have his level of control over the system can have a polity score of 10.
Very interesting points, Tamsin. The Polity data does have a number of odd features occasionally - George the Ist of Greece has a very high polity score, for example, which I find odd, as well as Jawara of Gambia. But the overall pattern of scores seems reasonable enough (Polity uses a fairly minimalist definition of democracy and autocracy).
ReplyDeleteAlso, you can look at a graph with a larger sample of countries for other interesting patterns:
ReplyDeletehttp://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApXMXc9uWFRvdE1KYWpNaGVEeEhka3BDUFZJRlMzMnc&hl=en