When using a descriptive word- e.g. 'fat'- we may either list all the people (this is called the 'extension' of fat) who we think are fat or else we may specify the 'internal logic' of the term- e.g. 'fat means means weighing more than is healthy for you' or 'fat means having a bigger belly than people would find aesthetically pleasing'. Here the 'intension' of fat is represented either as something medical or as something aesthetic.
The problem with 'intensions' is that they may be 'epistemic'- i.e. as our knowledge grows and our 'Structural Causal Models' improve the 'extension' of the term changes. We may classify somebody we previously thought of as 'fat' as 'exactly the right size or weight' based on improved knowledge. Sadly, we may also discover we are as fat as fuck and are doomed to die very soon.
The 'intensional fallacy' arises when we use 'epistemic' descriptors as if they obeyed Leibniz's law of identity which permits us to replace one word with another while preserving truth content.
Suppose, all the objects which are the 'extension' of a term can be 'well ordered'- i.e. they can be identified in advance and they can be ranked relative to each other- then we can establish a 'metric'- i.e. a way of uniquely calculating the distance between any two objects covered by the same intension. We can do this with 'natural' numbers but not 'real numbers'. More generally anything which has the type of 'naturality' covered by Yoneda's lemma (which, to oversimplify things greatly, says a thing is fully characterized by its interactions) would have some associated 'natural' metric. This means that if there is a category or set all of whose members obey the same general law then, in some sense, we are talking about something as natural as the natural numbers. We can use mathematical or logical methods without ending up committing the 'intensional fallacy'- i.e. babbling nonsense.
Is Democracy 'natural'? Are there general Laws which apply to this form of Government? Is Political Science a 'nomothetic' rather than an 'ideographic' field? If it is we can take the same approach to politics as engineers take to improving the production process.
Sadly, Democracy isn't natural. It is arbitrary. Like 'fat', though it is easy to arbitrarily assign the label, there is no definition or Law which all would accept in this regard. There may be egregious cases where this is not so- everybody may agree I am fat- but that does not mean the thing is not arbitrary. After all, if I were paying your salary, you might find it worthwhile to praise my physique.
The Our World in Data website has an article by Bastian Herre titled 'Democracy data: how do researchers measure democracy?' Can it point to any 'natural' or non-arbitrary criteria for the decisions researchers make?
Measuring the state of democracy across the world helps us understand the extent to which people have political rights and freedoms.
No. Measuring political rights and freedoms gives us that information in a rough and ready manner. The problem is that we can't be sure that under exigent circumstances, those rights and freedoms will prevail. After all a right is a contingent asset or claim to an immunity. We may believe it exists and then discover we have been defrauded.
Rights depend on the provision of remedies. If remedies are bound to disappear because they are incentive incompatibly, then rights will be meaningless. The 'state of Democracy' is irrelevant. It is obvious that Ukrainian democracy is not in good shape because it is fighting a war against a ruthless enemy. But that's why we think, all things considered, Ukraine is more democratic now than ever before. Systems or institutions matter less than the spirit and capability of the people.
But measuring how democratic a country is, comes with many challenges.
But those who engage in this waste of time are already severely challenged. That's why they have nothing better to do.
People do not always agree on what characteristics define a democracy. These characteristics — such as whether an election was free and fair — even once defined, are difficult to assess.
There is no 'natural' or non-arbitrary definition or method of assessment. All we can do is look at what happened in the past or what is happening elsewhere and extrapolate trends we think exist.
The judgement of experts is to some degree subjective and they may disagree; either about a specific characteristic, or how several characteristics can be reduced into a single measure of democracy.
'Experts' in this field are as stupid as shit. If they were any good, they'd have been paid a lot of money to do something useful which is genuinely scientific or of economic value.
So how do researchers address these challenges and identify which countries are democratic and undemocratic? In our work on Democracy, we provide data from eight leading approaches of measuring democracy:
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) by the V-Dem project1
Regimes of the World (RoW) by Lührmann et al. (2018)2, which use V-Dem data
Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) by Skaaning et al. (2015)3
Boix-Miller-Rosato by Boix et al. (2013, BMR)4
Polity by the Center for Systemic Peace5
Freedom House’s (FH) Freedom in the World6
Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) by the Bertelsmann Foundation7
Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index
So, these are either Scandinavian or Cold War era indices with a particular ideological bent.
These approaches all measure democracy (or a closely related aspect), they cover many countries and years, and are commonly used by researchers and policymakers.
Shit ones- sure.
Reassuringly, the approaches typically agree about big differences in countries’ political institutions: they readily distinguish between highly democratic countries, such as Chile and Norway, and highly undemocratic countries, such as North Korea and Saudi Arabia.
Norway is a Constitutional Monarchy with a huge Sovereign Wealth Fund. In some respects it is more like Saudi Arabia than Chile. The latter country probably won't pass a Constitution which favours the indigenous people whereas the Saudis are unlikely to give the foreign born majority residents anything approaching equality. What can't be denied is that the Saudi government is of an indigenous type. There is no reason to believe that indigenous Saudi people want what some distant country with a different history has.
But they do not always agree. They come to different assessments about which of the two highly democratic countries – Chile and Norway – is more democratic, and whether Chile is more or less democratic than it was ten years ago. At times they come to strikingly different conclusions about countries that are neither highly democratic nor highly undemocratic, such as Nigeria today or the United States in the 19th century.
So these metrics or ranking systems are not 'robust'. To be honest, they are rubbish. If you are going to do 'clickbait' why not rank world leaders on the basis of their skill in fellatio?
Why do these measures sometimes reach such different conclusions?
Because the thing is stooooopid. Norway is not democratic. A Black Norwegian homosexual has no chance of becoming the Head of State as things currently stand.
In this article I summarize the key similarities and differences of these approaches.
How is democracy characterized?
In this and the following tables I summarize how each approach defines and scores democracy, and what coverage each approach provides.
We see that the approaches share a basic principle of democracy: a democracy is an electoral political system in which citizens get to participate in free and fair elections.
Britain is not a democracy. Royals aren't allowed to vote or to stand for office.
The approaches also mostly agree that democracies are liberal political systems, in which citizens have additional civil rights and are protected from the state by constraining it.
But monarchies and Empires could be more liberal than democracies. There is nothing to prevent a Democracy dispensing with Liberalism or the Rule of Law. Indeed, it may have to do so to survive. All we can say is that Democratic leaders were elected to office though they may decide to turn themselves into Dictators or else seek to ensure that they are succeeded by their sons or daughters.
Some approaches stop there, and stick to these narrower conceptions of democracy. Others characterize democracy in broader terms, and also see it as a participatory and deliberative (citizens engage in elections, civil society, and public discourse) as well as an effective (governments can act on citizens’ behalf) political system.
Why stop there? Why not have an even broader conception of democracy as inspiring citizens to fondle each other incessantly?
Varieties of Democracy — true to its name — offers both narrow and broader characterizations, by separately adding liberal, participatory, deliberative, as well as egalitarian (economic and social resources are equally distributed) political institutions to electoral democracy.
If you are going to babble nonsense why not do so in a broader and broader fashion? Is not fraternity an aspect of Democracy? Should we not measure how often citizens of a state hug and fondle each other? Moreover, is it customary to request your dinner guest to suckle from a lactating member of your household so as to establish fraternal ties based on sharing a particular mother's milk?
How is democracy characterized?
In the same manner as the word 'fat' or 'sexy' or 'likely to be good at fellatio'.
Varieties of Democracy Narrow and broader: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, or egalitarian democracy
Regimes of the World Narrow: electoral or liberal democracy
Lexical Index Narrow: electoral (or liberal) democracy
Boix-Miller-Rosato Narrow: electoral democracy
Polity Narrow: electoral and liberal democracy
Freedom House Narrow: electoral or liberal democracy
Bertelsmann Transformation Index Broad: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and effective democracy
Economist Intelligence Unit Broad: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and effective democracy
So none of these would be able to distinguish Dynastic India from a country where no PM has ever been the child of a previous PM.
The approaches also differ in how they score democracy.
V-Dem treats democracy as a spectrum, with some countries being scored as more democratic than others.
If there is a 'spectrum' then there is a 'metric'. The assumption is that there is a 'well-ordering' of the underlying set or class. Yet no such thing can obtain for the descriptor- 'Democracy'. Why? The thing is Kripkean and rigid unless you are taking into account things like Dynasticism which V-Dem aren't. Once you admit that exigent circumstances can alter behaviour, all you are in fact looking at is changes in exigent or other such circumstances. You are saying nothing about the type or quality of the regime.
Other approaches instead treat democracy as a binary, and classify a country as either a democracy or not.
Again, if exigent circumstances can change classification, then it is exigent and other circumstances which is being remarked on. It is easy to say 'of course, if only everybody understood what our beloved leader is trying to do, we could revert to the ideal type of democracy- except we needn't bother because voting would simply be a waste of time coz everybody actually knows our beloved leader's wonderfulness.'
A final group does both, using a spectrum of countries being more or less democratic, and setting thresholds above which a country is considered a democracy overall.
So, exigent or favourable circumstances still determines classification.
Approaches that classify countries into democracies and non-democracies further differ in whether all countries that are not democracies are considered autocracies or authoritarian regimes, or whether there are some countries that do not clearly belong in either group.
If a country bans a political movement or party- e.g. ISIS- is it authoritarian? Why bother answering the question? Only if some cost of benefit is associated with not being a Democracy would it matter. But Biden's Summit for Democracy brought neither any benefit nor imposed any cost. It was bullshit. Pakistan's Imran Khan spurned his invitation. But that's not what brought him down- however much his supporters would like to claim otherwise.
And while Freedom in the World identifies which countries are electoral democracies in recent years, its main classification distinguishes between free, partly-free, and not-free countries (which many treat as a proxy for liberal democracy).
So this either suits American foreign policy or a woke pressure group seeking to mischievously influence it. But America's influence is declining. It will have to revert to realpolitik and stop doing (in Obama's immortal phrase) 'stupid shit'.
What differences are captured?
How the approaches score democracy affects what differences in democracy they can capture.
They can't distinguish zombie Dynasticism- e.g Manmohan pretending to run the country when it was Sonia alone who had power- from Democracy.
Classifications tend to be coarser, and therefore cover big to medium differences in democracy: they reduce the complexity of political systems a lot and distinguish between broad types, such as the democracies of Chile and Norway
Though Chile and Norway are not alike. Come to think of it Norway may have been worse to indigenous Sami people.
on the one hand, and the non-democracies of North Korea and Saudi Arabia, on the other.
The Crown Prince is popular. But if the North Korean leader dies, millions will be weeping and wailing in the streets- if they know what is good for them.
The fine-grained spectrums of other approaches meanwhile reduce political systems’ complexity a bit less, and capture both big and small differences in democracy, such as the difference in democratic quality between the democracies Chile and Norway, and the difference between autocracies North Korea and Saudi Arabia.
Fuck off! People want to emigrate to Saudi Arabia. They want to run the fuck away from North Korea.
Spectrums can also better capture small changes within political systems over time, towards or away from democracy.
No. There is no underlying 'Hilbert Space' with properties of connectivity etc. A separate point, to do with Index numbers, has to do with 'Laspeyres bias'- i.e. place a higher value on past preferences or outcomes. This underestimates the beneficial effects of new technology or the superiority over time of substitutes. In the case of 'Democracy' some richer, White, countries may have convinced themselves that they are not fat and not undemocratic and have a leader who would probably be very good at performing fellatio. But what was true in the past may not be true of the future. We don't really know if Scandinavian polities might not abruptly turn on their Muslim or coloured population. What happens under exigent circumstances is what determines the ethos of a people or a polity. Let us hope we are not put to the test though Climate Change means that not even the most geographically favoured country can afford to be complacent about its past or its future.
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