RCE: Visualizing the Results, Part 2

In the last post, I presented some basic facts about the data you gathered to show that it was generally reliable. Your data was highly correlated with existing professional measures of democracy, and there were few cases of countries where the judgment of POLS209 was too different from that of other well-known datasets on democracy (including V-Dem and Freedom House).

In this post, I’ll show you a few comparisons with the incarceration rate data gathered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to try to answer the general question of whether there’s any correlation between how democratic a country is, and how much it incarcerates people.

The first graph I want to show you is a simple scatter plot of the incarceration rates per country against the POLS209 measure of democracy. The prison data is defined as “Persons Held in Prisons, Penal Institutions or Correctional Institutions. It refers to persons held on a specified day and it should exclude non-criminal prisoners held for administrative purposes, for example, persons held pending investigation into their immigration status or foreign citizens without a legal right to stay.”

Here’s the figure:

As we can see, whether a country is democratic or not seems to have little impact on its incarceration rate (though more democratic countries seem to have slightly lower incarceration rates) Some countries on the democratic end of the scale score quite poorly in at least some years, while some countries on the non-democratic end of the scale score reasonably well. What might be going on here?

The same pattern is visible if we use the V-Dem “Polyarchy” scores (which have much longer coverage than the POLS209 democracy scores) instead of your measures:

The broad pattern is even clearer here - there appears to be no correlation between the level of democracy on the V-Dem measure and the incarceration rate (though the USA does stand out as a very striking outlier, with an incarceration rate far above most other countries). Why might that be the case?

More graphs and analysis later.