TY - JOUR
T1 - Re-examining thresholds of continuous democracy measures
AU - Kasuya, Yuko
AU - Mori, Kota
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [Grant number KAKENHI Grant 18H00816]. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers, Vanessa Boese, Charles Crabtree, Daniela Donno, Marisa Kellam, Holger Kern, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan Lindberg, Anna Lührmann, Matthew Wilson, and the participants of the V-Dem Institute’s lunch seminar series and the Japanese Society for Quantitative Political Science 2020 winter meeting for helpful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Scholars frequently dichotomize continuous measures of democracy by setting a regime cut-off. However, such cut-offs often lack theoretical or empirical justifications, making the resulting classifications difficult to interpret conceptually. We investigate this challenge involving three major continuous democracy measures: the Freedom House score (FH), the Polity score, and the Regime of the World (RoW) that is based on the V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index (EDI). We develop a framework to empirically derive thresholds using categorical democracy measures as benchmarks. Our analyses find that the cut-offs that yield the highest consistency with the classifications of BMR, CGV, and GWF are 3.5 for FH, 5 for Polity and 0.39 for EDI/RoW. These levels are lower than the conventional cut-offs, implying less demanding democratic standards. Consequently, the conventional cut-offs (2.5 for FH, 6 for Polity and 0.5 for EDI/RoW) endeavour to reflect more stringent standards of democracy than what these dichotomous measures employ.
AB - Scholars frequently dichotomize continuous measures of democracy by setting a regime cut-off. However, such cut-offs often lack theoretical or empirical justifications, making the resulting classifications difficult to interpret conceptually. We investigate this challenge involving three major continuous democracy measures: the Freedom House score (FH), the Polity score, and the Regime of the World (RoW) that is based on the V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index (EDI). We develop a framework to empirically derive thresholds using categorical democracy measures as benchmarks. Our analyses find that the cut-offs that yield the highest consistency with the classifications of BMR, CGV, and GWF are 3.5 for FH, 5 for Polity and 0.39 for EDI/RoW. These levels are lower than the conventional cut-offs, implying less demanding democratic standards. Consequently, the conventional cut-offs (2.5 for FH, 6 for Polity and 0.5 for EDI/RoW) endeavour to reflect more stringent standards of democracy than what these dichotomous measures employ.
KW - Democracy measures
KW - Freedom House
KW - V-Dem
KW - polity
KW - threshold
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U2 - 10.1080/13569775.2021.1993564
DO - 10.1080/13569775.2021.1993564
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85119263145
VL - 28
SP - 365
EP - 385
JO - Contemporary Politics
JF - Contemporary Politics
SN - 1356-9775
IS - 4
ER -