Rethinking Democratic Indices in the Era of Democratic Erosion

The election of would-be authoritarian leaders in prominent countries around the world underscores the importance of cross-national indexes of the quality of democracy. Ex- cellent ones exist, but they are constructed in ways that sometimes involve arbitrary weightings of components of democracy. For example, dimensions of democracy such as press freedoms, free and fair elections, and civility of political discourse are im- plicitly treated as equally important components of democracy, or they are weighted with arbitrary numerical values. Yet political theorists, social scientists, and indeed the general public weigh these dimensions quite differently. In this paper, we illustrate how new expert assessments, gathered by Bright Line Watch (BLW), of the importance of distinct aspects of democracy can be used to improve these indexes. We first use Bayesian techniques to generate importance ratings from BLW’s expert ratings. We map BLW items to the indicators of Varieties of Democracy dataset (V-Dem), and recalculate V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) for the year 2018. We then illustrate the deviations in the countries’ EDI values and rankings. We conclude by outlining additional information that would allow researchers to come closer to an ideal index of electoral democracy.