Speaker：Yuko KASUYA [Keio University/ V-Dem East Asia Regional Center]
　　　　 　Kota MORI [V-Dem East Asia Regional Center]

Date：January 18, 2022／15:00‐16:40 (JST)

Location：Zoom

Target:：Open to the public

Abstract：Democracy is one of the most scrutinized concepts in the social sciences. Over the last several decades, many cross-national measures for democracy have been developed. Although many scholars have scrutinized these measures' characteristics, an examination of their content validity (to what extent they accurately measure the concept they propose to measure) is still largely missing. In this presentation, we report our ongoing project that examines the validity of major democracy indices, including those commonly known as the Freedom House, LIED (Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy), Polity, and V-Dem's EDI (Electoral Democracy Index) and LDI (Liberal Democracy Index). Toward this goal, we first provide an overview of the historical development of major cross-national measures and their conceptions of democracy. We then perform two types of validity analysis. The first concerns the validity of the democracy thresholds. We use binary democracy indices (BMR, CGV, GWF) as benchmarks to examine the conventional democracy cutoffs of Freedom House, Polity, and EDI. Our analysis shows that their conventional cutoffs are set at levels that are higher than the minimal (procedural) notion of democracy. Additionally, we calculate a democracy cutoff for LDI using the same benchmarks. Our second analysis empirically assesses the content validity of major democracy indices, namely, the Freedom House, LIED, and Polity. To this end, we utilize V-Dem's base variables as proxies that represent various aspects of regime characteristics and examine if the indices' components are associated with their intended features through regression and machine learning analyses.