Ideology - Partisanship Alignment and Quality of Democracy: A Correlational Study

This paper identifies whether a correlation exists between the extent to which a democracy is programmatic and the quality of its democracy. In order to achieve the objective, the research will: 1. Develop an indicator for the Programmatic Score of democracies. 2. Assess if there exists a significant correlational relationship between the programmatic score of countries and their respective quality of democracy. This paper devises the Programmatic Score of democracies as an indicator of the extent to which voters vote based on their ideology, instead of other factors such as socio- economic and racial status. To achieve objective 1, the paper uses Wave 7 of the World Value Survey to determine the proportion of the voting population that votes for the party and the ideological composition of the voters of the party. To achieve objective 2, the paper determines the quality of democracy to be Freedom House’s Freedom Score of the country, with countries rated 70 or above characterized as democracies.