Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper proposes a new index for democracy using which we can go beyond the dichotomous definition of democracies. Using the index, we assess countries as partial democracies and study the relationship between the depth of democracy and the extent of conflict in a country.

The essence of democracy is captured by the famous quote by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, “the government of the people, by the people and for the people”. But what is a democracy? The classification of Nations as democracies (or not) has been problematic. The challenges are manifold and the current measures of democracy are riddled with measurement issues due to their treatment of ordinal data and scaling and aggregation techniques used to arrive at the final index. These issues in the existing indexes make time series comparisons difficult.

We propose a new index of democracy based on the Alkire and Foster (2011) methodology, which overcomes some of the limitations of the existing indexes. The proposed index is able to distinguish between countries and categorize them as democracies, partial democracies and non-democracies and assesses their performance on the basis of both the existence of laws promoting democracy in the constitution as well as the actual implementation of the laws. We assess democracy in a country along five dimensions:  (i) Rule of Law, (ii) Participation, (iii) Competition, (iv) Political Effectiveness and (v) Political and Civil Rights. We use a relatively recent robust cross-country dataset on democracy from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project with more than 350 indicators for 173 countries and spanning the time period from 1900 to present. The index is able to incorporate both cardinal and ordinal variables and thus avoids ambiguous rankings due to the cardinalization of ordinal variables (Mitra, 2013). Since, we use the mechanism of cut-offs in each dimension as used in the poverty measurement literature, we can focus on the dimensions of achievements in democracy for nations. Also, since the index involves counting of each country’s achievements in the dimensions of democracy and comparison with a cut-off, the assessment is transparent and explicit in nature.

The relationship between democracy and conflict has been widely studied. While many empirical studies find that the extent of inter-state conflict is lesser between two democracies (Dixon 1994; Bremer 2008; Gibler 2007), the negative impact of democracy on internal conflict is less agreed upon and many studies report an inverted U-shaped relationship. Consolidated democracies have been found to have less conflict than semi-democracies (Hegre, 2014) and internal conflicts have been found to be less lethal in democracies (Gleditsch, Hegre & Strand, 2009).

Using the proposed index, we arrive at an evaluation of countries as partial democracies and then assess the relationship between the degree of democracy in a country and the extent of conflict present. We believe that our proposed index is a more accurate measure of depth of democracy in a country and hence better reflects the relationship between democracy and conflict in a country.