A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy

Recent years have seen an efflorescence of work focused on the definition and operationalization of democracy. One debate concerns whether democracy is best measured by binary or graded scales. Critics of binary indices point out at that they are overly reductionist, while defenders counter that the different levels of graded measures are not associated with a specific set of conditions. Against this backdrop, we propose to operationalize electoral democracy as a series of necessary and sufficient conditions arrayed in an ordinal scale. The resulting “lexical” index of electoral democracy, based partly on new data, covers all independent countries of the world from 1800 to 2013. It incorporates binary coding of its subcomponents, which are aggregated into an ordinal scale using a cumulative logic. In this fashion, we arrive at an index that performs a classificatory function—each level identifies a unique and theoretically meaningful regime-type—as well as a discriminating function.