Measuring Democracy through Election Outcomes

Cross-national measures of democracy are widely used to track the development and spread of democracy around the world and to study the causes and correlates of democratization. Most of the best-known democracy indexes have a component on election outcomes. In many measures, election outcomes make a significant contribution to a country's overall rating, and in some, the outcomes are even decisive. However, in the first empirical test of this relationship, using data from 165 African multiparty elections in 26 countries, this article demonstrates that election outcomes are not consistently related to democracy and that the assumptions behind such a relationship are problematic. Therefore, election outcomes are a flawed shortcut to measuring democracy.