Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:27:41.899Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Democracy Cluster Classification Index

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Mihaiela Ristei Gugiu  and
Miguel Centellas
Mihaiela Ristei Gugiu*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University, 2189 Derby Hall, 154 N Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210
Miguel Centellas
Affiliation:
Croft Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, 335 Deupree Hall, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677 e-mail: [email protected]
*
e-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Utilizing hierarchical cluster analysis, a new measure of democracy, the DCC index, is proposed and constructed from five popular indices of democracy (Freedom House, Polity IV, Vanahanen's index of democratization, Cheibub et al.'s index of democracy and dictatorship, and the Cingranelli-Richards index of electoral self-determination). The DCC was used to classify the regime types for twenty-four countries in the Americas and thirty-nine countries in Europe over a thirty-year period. The results indicated that democracy is a latent class variable. Sensitivity and specificity analyses were conducted for the five existing democracy indices as well as the newly proposed Unified Democracy Scores index and a predicted DCC score. This analysis revealed significant problems with existing measures. Overall, the predicted DCC index attained the highest level of accuracy although one other index achieved high levels of accuracy in identifying nondemocracies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 334 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Authors' note: We thank P. Cristian Gugiu for his valuable analytical suggestions, Jose Antonio Cheibub for so generously making the data set “Dictatorship and Democracy Revisited” available to us, and the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which improved our article. Data to replicate the statistical analyses in this article are available at http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/20393. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

References

Adcock, Robert, and Collier, David. 2001. Measurement validity: A shared standard for qualitative and quantitative research. American Political Science Review 95(3): 529–46.Google Scholar
Altman, David, and Perez-Linan, Anibal. 2002. Assessing the quality of democracy: Freedom, competitiveness and participation in eighteen Latin American countries. Democratization 9(2): 85–100.Google Scholar
Altman, Douglas G., and Martin Bland, J. 1994. Diagnostic tests 1: Sensitivity and specificity. British Medical Journal 308: 1552.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alvarez, Michael, Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Limongi, Fernando, and Przeworski, Adam. 2011. Classifying political regimes. Studies in Comparative Political Development 31(2): 1–37.Google Scholar
Arat, Zehra F. 1991. Democracy and human rights in developing countries. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beetham, David. 2004. Freedom as the foundation. Journal of Democracy 15(4): 61–75.Google Scholar
Bermeo, Nancy. 2009. Does electoral democracy boost economic equality? Journal of Democracy 20(4): 21–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjelland, Ingvar, Dahl, Alv A., Haug, Tone Tangen, and Neckelmann, Dag. 2002. The validity of the hospital anxiety and depression scale: An updated literature review. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 52(2): 69–77.Google Scholar
Bogaards, Matthijs, and Boucek, Francoise. 2010. Dominant political parties and democracy: Concepts, measures, cases and comparisons. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bollen, Kenneth A. 2001. Cross-national indicators of liberal democracy, 1950–1990. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.Google Scholar
Bollen, Kenneth A. 1990. Political democracy: Conceptual and measurement traps. Studies in Comparative International Development 25(1): 7–24.Google Scholar
Bollen, Kenneth A., and Paxton, Pamela. 2000. Subjective measures of liberal democracy. Comparative Political Studies 33(1): 58–86.Google Scholar
Bowman, Kirk, Lehoucq, Fabrice, and Mahoney, James. 2005. Measuring political democracy: Case expertise, data adequacy, and Central America. Comparative Political Studies 38(8): 939–70.Google Scholar
Calinski, T., and Harabasz, J. 1974. A dendrite method for cluster analysis. Communications in Statistics 3(1): 1–27.Google Scholar
Carbone, Giovanni. 2009. The consequences of democratization. Journal of Democracy 20(2): 123–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Centellas, Miguel. 2011. Revisiting assessing the quality of democracy: Measuring democratic competititveness and participation in Latin America since the “Left Turn.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Gandhi, Jennifer, and Vreeland, James Raymond. 2009. Democracy and dictatorship revisited. http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cheibub/www/DD_page.html (accessed January 27, 2012).Google Scholar
Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Gandhi, Jennifer, and Vreeland, James Raymond. 2010. Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice 143 (1–2): 65–101.Google Scholar
Cingranelli, David L., and Richards, David L. 2011. The Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset. CIRI Human Rights Data Project. http://ciri.binghamton.edu/ (accessed January 27, 2012).Google Scholar
Collier, David, and Adcock, Robert. 1999. Democracy and dichotomies: A pragmatic approach to choices about concepts. Annual Review of Political Science 2: 537–65.Google Scholar
Collier, David, and Levitsky, Steven. 2009. Democracy: Conceptual hierarchies in comparative research. In Concepts and methods in the social sciences: The tradition of Giovanni Sartori, eds. Collier, David and Gerrings, John, 269–88. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Coppedge, Michael. 2001. Political Darwinism in Latin America's lost decade. In Political parties and democracy, eds. Diamond, Larry and Gunther, Richard, 173–205. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Coppedge, Michael, and Reinicke, Wolfgang H. 1991. Measuring polyarchy. In On measuring parties and democracy, ed. Inkeles, Alex, 47–68. New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction Press.Google Scholar
Coppedge, Michael, and Gerring, John. 2011. Conceptualizing and measuring democracy: A new approach. Perspectives on Politics 9(2): 247–67.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert. 1982. Dilemmas of pluralist democracy: Autonomy v. Control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Duda, Richard O., and Hart, Peter E. 1973. Pattern classification and scene analysis. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
European Commission. 2008. Enlargement. February 18, 2008. European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/countries/detailed-country-information/serbia/index_en.htm (accessed November 13, 2012).Google Scholar
Freedom House. 2011. Freedom in the World Country Ratings 1972–2011. www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/FIWAllScoresCountries1973-2011.xls (accessed December 14, 2011).Google Scholar
Friedman, Jerome, Hastie, Trevor, and Tibshirani, Robert. 2009. The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction. 2nd ed. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1996. An overview of the political regime change data set. Comparative Political Studies 29(4): 469–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Kenneth. 2007. Why dominant parties lose: Mexico's democratization in comparative perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gugiu, Mihaiela Ristei. 2012. EU enlargement and anticorruption: Lessons learned from the Romania case. Journal of European Integration 34(5): 429–46.Google Scholar
Gugiu, Mihaiela Ristei, and Centellas, Miguel. 2013. Replication data for: The Democracy Cluster Classification Index. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/20393, IQSS Dataverse Network [Distributor] V1 [Version] (accessed February 28, 2013).Google Scholar
Hadenius, Axel. 1992. Democracy and development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hadenius, Axel, and Teorell, Jan. 2007. Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 18(1): 143–56.Google Scholar
Hollis, Wendy. 1999. Democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe: The influence of the communist legacy in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Horton, N. J., and Kleinman, K. P. 2007. Much ado about nothing: A comparison of missing data methods and software to fit incomplete regression models. American Statistician 61(1): 79–90.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel. 1991. The third wave: Democracy in the late twentieth century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Richard A., and Wichern, Dean W. 1998. Applied multivariate statistical analysis. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Karatnycky, Adrian. 2005. Ukraine's orange revolution. Foreign Affairs 84(2): 35–52.Google Scholar
Lalkhen, Abdul Ghalliq, and McCluskey, Anthony. 2008. Clinical tests: Sensitivity and specificity. Continuing Education in Anaesthesia, Critical Care & Pain 8(6): 221–23.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A. 2002. The rise of competitive authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 13(2): 51–65.Google Scholar
Linz, Juan J., and Stepan, Alfred 1996. Problems of democratic consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour M. 2000. The indispensabiliy of political parties. Journal of Democracy 11(1): 48–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maravall, Jose Maria, and Przeworski, Adam 2003. Democracy and the rule of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, Monty G., Gurr, Ted Rebort, and Jaggers, Keith. 2011. INSCR Data Page. Polity IV Project. http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/p4manualv2009.pdf (accessed January 3, 2012).Google Scholar
Milligan, Glenn W. 1980. An examination of the effect of six types of error perturbation on fifteen clustering algorithms. Psychometrika 45(3): 325–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milligan, Glenn W., and Cooper, Martha C. 1988. A study of standardization of variables in cluster analysis. Journal of Classification 5(2): 181–204.Google Scholar
Milligan, Glenn W., and Cooper, Martha C. 1985. An examination of procedures for determining the number of clusters in a data set. Psychometrika 50(2): 159–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulaik, Stanley A. 2010. Foundations of factor analysis. 2nd ed. New York: Taylor and Francis Group.Google Scholar
Munck, Gerardo L., and Verkuilen, Jay. 2002. Conceptualizing and measuring democracy: Evaluating alternative indices. Comparative Political Studies 35(1): 5–34.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, Guillermo. 2004. Why the rule of law matters. Journal of Democracy 15(4): 32–46.Google Scholar
Pemstein, Daniel, Mesere, Stephen A., and Melton, James. 2010. Democratic compromise: A latent variable analysis of ten measures of regime type. Political Analysis 18(4): 426–49.Google Scholar
Pridham, Geoffrey. 2011. Ukraine, the European Union and the democracy question. Romanian Journal of European Affairs 11(4): 18–33.Google Scholar
Przeworski, Adam, Alvarez, Michael, Cheibub, Jose Antonio, and Limongi, Fernando. 2000. Democracy and development: Political regimes and economic well-being in the world, 1950–1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Reich, Gary. 2002. Categorizing political regimes: New data for old problems. Democratization 9(4): 1–24.Google Scholar
Ristei, Mihaiela. 2010. The politics of corruption: Political will and the rule of law in post-communist Romania. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 26(3): 341–62.Google Scholar
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich. 2004. Addressing inequality. Journal of Democracy 15(4): 76–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SAS Institute. 2010. SAS user's guide. 2nd ed. Cary, NC: SAS Institute.Google Scholar
SAS Institute. 2012a. Multiple imputation for missing data. SAS. http://support.sas.com/rnd/app/da/new/dami.html (accessed January 28, 2012).Google Scholar
SAS Institute. 2012b. The cluster procedure. SAS. http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/statug/63962/HTML/default/viewer.htm#statug_cluster_sect002.htm (accessed February 1, 2012).Google Scholar
Schmitter, Philippe, and Karl, Terry Lynn. 1991. What democracy is … and is not. Journal of Democracy 2(3): 75–88.Google Scholar
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1975. Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Smith, Peter H., and Zeigler, Melissa R. 2008. Liberal and illiberal democracy in Latin America. Latin American Politics & Society 50(1): 31–57.Google Scholar
Sorensen, Georg. 2008. Democracy and democratization: Process and prospect in a changing world. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Tabachnick, Barbara E., and Fidell, Linda S. 2001. Using multivariate statistics. 4th ed. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Tan, Pang-Ning, Steinbach, Michael, and Kumar, Vipin. 2006. Introduction to data mining. Boston: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Treier, Shawn, and Jackman, Simon. 2008. Democracy as a latent variable. American Journal of Political Science 52(1): 201–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vachudova, Milada Ana. 2005. Europe undivided: Democracy, leverage, and integration after communism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vanhanen, Tatu. 2000. A new dataset for measuring democracy, 1810–1998. Journal of Peace Research 37(2): 251–65.Google Scholar
Vanhanen, Tatu. 2003. Democratization: A comparative analysis of 170 countries. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Vanhanen, Tatu. 2011. FSD1289 measures of democracy 1810–2010. Finish Social Science Data Archive. http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/data/catalogue/FSD1289/meF1289e.html (accessed January 9, 2012).Google Scholar
Ward, Joe H. 1963. Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association 58(301): 236–44.Google Scholar
Weinstein, Susan, Obuchowski, Nancy A., and Lieber, Michael L. 2005. Fundamentals of clinical research for radiologists. American Journal of Roentgenology 184: 14–19.Google Scholar
Wong, Joseph, and Friedman, Edward. 2008. Political transitions in dominant party systems: Learning to lose. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Ristei Gugiu and Centellas supplementary material

Supplementary Material 1

Download Ristei Gugiu and Centellas supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 197.1 KB
Supplementary material: File

Ristei Gugiu and Centellas supplementary material

Supplementary Material 2

Download Ristei Gugiu and Centellas supplementary material(File)
File 55.5 KB