Systematic and people-oriented
methods for strategy, improvement and innovation
Analytical tools to study the evolution of democracy
April 18th 2022, by Michael Ohler
What this study is about
For the previous two studies, I have been curious: I wanted to learn what could be done with the data avaiable from the State of Democracy website. In this report, I want to develop tools to better explore this rich dataset.
I am also performing a brief demonstration on the basis of selected indicators and on the examples of Africa as a continent and Brazil as a country. The ultimate goal is to put tools like these at the disposal of the public so everyone can explore status and evolution of democracy in an interactive “app”.
1 The evolution of democracy
1.1 Share of people living under democracy, a hybrid regime or an authoritarian regime
As the following figure shows, the 15 years between the mid-1980ies and the year 2000 have seen a significant increase in the share of people living in a democracy. This evolution has stagnated since:
Figure 1.1: Evolution of the share of the world population living under different regimes. Notice: for this graph we have removed from the dataset the few entries with an NA as regime status name.
1.2 Global evolution of the attributes of democracy
For the following graph, we have built a function that displays the evolution of selected indicators and their child-indicators. This function weighs the indicators of each country by their population. We start with the top-level attributes:
Figure 1.2: Attributes of democracy, together with the sub-attributes.
This chart is hard to read and it is close to impossible to extract useful insights. We re-arrange the same chart:
Figure 1.3: Attributes of democracy, together with the sub-attributes.
That looks easier to use. For example, we spot that media integrity, civil liberties, civil society participation and clean elections have all degraded recently.
With that, we drill down one level into fundamental rights:
Figure 1.4: Sub-attributes of fundamental rights, together with indices
Again, it is straightforward to spot, for example, how basic welfare has improved at an impressive rate since 1975.
With that, we further explore civil liberties:
Figure 1.5: Indices for civil liberties, together with the sub-indices.
Again we are able to see, for example, how freedom from internal conflicts has significantly degraded since the mid-1990ies.
1.3 Regional evolution of the attributes of democracy - example of Africa
We can use the previous tool to explore the evolution in one region. We choose Africa:
tab <- t[t$ID_region_name == "Africa", ]Figure 1.6: Africa: Attributes of democracy, together with the sub-attributes.
Figure 1.7: Africa: Sub-attributes of fundamental rights, together with indices
Figure 1.8: Africa: Indices for civil liberties, together with the sub-indices.
2 Evolution of attributes for one country
We have also translated the previous tool for the analysis of one country:
Figure 2.1: Germany: Attributes of democracy, together with the sub-attributes.
Figure 2.2: Sub-attributes of fundamental rights, together with indices
Figure 2.3: Indices for civil liberties, together with the sub-indices.