Indexes of democracy

The nat­ural way to rule is al­most taken for granted, at least in the so-called West­ern world. Yet a glimpse at the 193 UN mem­bers shows a thornier pic­ture, with dif­fer­ent forms of dic­ta­tor­ships and au­toc­ra­cies, “benev­o­lent” or cruel, co­ex­ist­ing with new-born democ­ra­cies. Even if we may not agree that force of na­ture will turn na­tions to­wards democ­racy, we kind of ac­cept that short of war­rant­ing par­adise, it en­com­passes a set of prin­ci­ples that helps at­tain our max­i­mum re­al­i­sa­tion as human be­ings.

In­dexes of Democ­racy offer as­sess­ments on the mat­ter, and, among the many avail­able, three stand out in pop­u­lar­ity: Free­dom in the world, by Free­dom In­ter­na­tional, a think tank based in Wash­ing­ton DC; Democ­racy index, by the Econ­o­mist In­tel­li­gence Unit from Lon­don; and Va­ri­eties of Democ­ra­cies index-V-Dem, by the Swedish Uni­ver­sity of Gothen­burg. Since they have given them­selves the “re­spon­si­bil­ity” of al­lo­cat­ing de­mo­c­ra­tic cre­den­tials, the trick­i­ness comes with who makes the rat­ings ac­count­able? And how bul­let­proof are they against po­lit­i­cal med­dling? Pre­cisely be­cause these rat­ings have such pub­lic no­to­ri­ety, they would in­evitably be tar­geted by gov­ern­ments aim­ing to boost their de­mo­c­ra­tic image. So, what mech­a­nisms, if any, do they have to pre­vent this?

There is at least one way to find this out, i.e. to test the in­dexes against ac­tual ob­serv­able facts. As part of a team of econ­o­mists, this au­thor has been fol­low­ing the ex­tent to which Span­ish re­pres­sion of po­lit­i­cal ac­tivism is being mir­rored in the rank­ings them­selves, es­pe­cially after the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence ref­er­en­dum of Oc­to­ber 2017.

We have fo­cused our analy­sis on the V-Dem index, ar­guably the one with the most ro­bust method­ol­ogy, as a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the lot. V-Dem, in­deed, down­graded Spain’s 2018 rank­ing from 22 the pre­vi­ous year to 35. This seemed to fit well enough with Madrid’s breach of in­ter­na­tional de­mo­c­ra­tic stan­dards and basic human rights, as re­ported by dif­fer­ent ac­tors, such as Amnesty In­ter­na­tional, the UN, or court rul­ings in Bel­gium, Ger­many or the UK. Yet, as­tound­ingly, the 2019 index ranked Spain in a jaw-drop­ping 9th po­si­tion, which was only fine-tuned by a more mod­er­ate 13th for 2020. Fur­ther­more, the V-Dem “ex­perts” then re­stated Spain’s rat­ings for the years 2017 and 2018 to make them look as if the drop in those years had never hap­pened (!). To il­lus­trate this in­con­gruity, in that same pe­riod, Poland and Hun­gary, Eu­rope’s “bêtes noires” – al­though nei­ther has Spain’s record of po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers – were down­ranked from a high­est 50th to a low­est 89th.

To sort this para­dox out, we con­ducted a stim­u­lat­ing e-cor­re­spon­dence with the V-Dem team. Al­beit the ex­change was friendly and under fair play, the con­clu­sions we drew are noth­ing but de­press­ing. Put bluntly, those re­spon­si­ble for the V-Dem index do not have a clue why Spain jumped from 35th to 9th po­si­tion in a con­text of po­lit­i­cal re­pres­sion, nor even why its rat­ing for the years 2017 and 2018 was re­stated long after the facts. Com­plex and so­phis­ti­cated as their method­ol­ogy is, it has no clear mech­a­nism (other than “trust”) to en­sure its ex­perts’ opin­ions and coun­try coders’ as­sess­ments are: 1-un­bi­ased; 2-fact-based and; 3-sub­ject to cri­te­ria ho­mo­ge­neous enough to en­able time-se­ries analy­sis or cross-coun­try com­par­i­son.

There­fore, at the very best, these rat­ings rep­re­sent no more than some glo­ri­fied guess­work under the cloak of sci­ence; at worst, they are ex­posed to being pup­pets sub­ject to the in­ter­fer­ence of gov­ern­ments, and, given the media at­ten­tion they re­ceive today, it would be rather naive to think oth­er­wise.