RCE: Visualizing the Results, Part V. Other Human Rights

RCE: Visualizing the Results. Other Human Rights

Xavier Marquez

9 June 2018

(This is probably my final post, unless you want me to do more work. With this and the other 4 posts, you should have enough to write a good essay. Asks questions if any of this is confusing).
So far, we have only discussed correlations between democracy and the protection of some very basic human rights (e.g., the right not to be tortured). But human rights are broader than that. Some of you may think that rights to equal education, health, and other forms of equality are important.

Fortunately, the Varieties of Democracy dataset contains a number of indicators measuring equality in the distribution of resources, including measures of universal welfare and equality of access to education and health. (Look in their codebook online for full descriptions of these measures).

Here is what these correlations look like with your measure of democracy:

As you can see, the correlations are mostly positive but not large: democracies on average provide more educational equality, health equality, more public goods, and more universalistic policy, but the overall indexes are all over the place.

We can repeat the exercise using the V-Dem measure of democracy, with similar results:

And here are some of the country by country results for the overall index of equal distribution of resources (as usual, upward-sloping lines mean that the more democratic the country becomes, the more equal the distribution of these health and education; the more universalistic policy; and more public goods are offered):

Most countries have relationships in the expected direction: more democracy has often meant more equality of these resources, though some of those lines are pretty flat, and a few go in the wrong direction (e.g., China, Cuba, where more democracy has meant more inequality– in the case of Cuba, this is because “more democracy” was before the current communist government).