REC: Visualizing the Results, Part 1

(This post will be updated as new data – late submissions – come in. Another post analysing the correlation between our regime data and data on incarceration rates will appear later - check back on BB and the blog for more in the next week. Ask questions!!!).

(Last updated 2019-10-01 13:01:56)

Measures and basic correlations

We have now gathered enough data to start answering the research question you selected at the beginning of the term. You designed a classification system in tutorials, and individually gathered data on lots of countries (136 collected by 90 students to be exact). And so far, the quality of the data is truly excellent; a measure of democracy extracted from your answers correlates at 0.86 with the polyarchy index of the V-Dem (“Varieties of Democracy”) dataset (the gold standard in political science), which is really fabulous! (Remember correlation coefficients go from -1 to 1; higher numbers mean greater correlations; a correlation of .9 is huge, and a correlation of 0 means no relationship). Your data also correlates at 0.87 with Freedom House’s numbers, and at 0.78 with Polity IV, two other highly professional datasets used to measure democracy. Well done!

To construct the POLS209 measure of democracy, I simply added your answers to each question for each year and country and rescaled them to the 0-1 range. So each country gets a number for each year from 0 (no democracy) to 1 (full democracy). Sometimes a country was researched by more than one person; I then averaged the scores for each person.

In figure 1 below, you can see the correlations of the POLS209 measure of democracy with several other measures: the Freedom House index of freedom, the Polity IV measure of political institutions, and several of the V-Dem indexes of democracy (v2x_ variables):

This is not bad at all; as you can see, the correlations between professionally-collected measures of democracy are sometimes a bit higher (often a little above 0.9), but your correlations with these other measures are very high (indeed, higher than the correlation between some of these large-scale indexes and some of the more obscure measures of democracy out there). Professionals do not always agree about whether a country is democratic or not. These results are great!

More specifically, the POLS209 measure of democracy correlates best with “liberal” measures of democracy (the “polyarchy” measure of democracy, Freedom House), and least well with “egalitarian” measures of democracy (V-Dem’s measure of participatory [v2x_partip] and egalitarian democracy [v2x_egaldem]). So it’s clearly measuring something about the standard “liberal” conception of democracy.

Time trends

Most countries were classified by only one student, but some were rated at different time periods by two or more students. Some of you chose longer periods, others chose shorter periods of time, but most chose periods of at least 10 years (median 11 years, min 1 year, max 76), which gives us a reasonable amount of regime data (2113 country-years, including some transitions to democracy or to authoritarianism, since the periods chosen by you often overlapped for a given country).

The simplest thing to do with this data is simply to plot the results per country, showing the variation over time and space in the POLS209 “democracy score”. In the figure below, the coloured lines represent your measure of democracy, while the light grey broken lines represent the V-Dem “polyarchy” measure of liberal democracy. I’ve split your measure into three categories (democracy, hybrid, non-democracy) for ease of visualization:

As you can see, your measure is very close to V-Dem’s judgments in most cases; mostly you’re a bit more generous, but not much. Some notable disagreements I can see are Libya (where you claim the country became more authoritarian after Gaddhafi’s fall from power than V-dem judges), and Guinea, India, Kuwait, and Lebanon (where V-Dem thinks these countries were less democratic than you do).

The raw data (including justifications, by Username and country) for this post is available here. The processed dataset (including the measure of democracy I calculated) is available here. The first file may be useful if you want to peruse the justifications given for particular countries; the second may be useful if you want to do any further analysis (but you can probably ignore it unless you are technically adept).

I will be adding more analysis as the week goes on, but this should get you started.