Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

By Daniel Pemstein, Stephen A. Meserve, J. Melton. Political Analysis, 2010

431 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. We make the UDS and associated parameter estimates freely available online and provide a detailed tutorial that demonstrates how to best use the UDS in applied work.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36e7c952e501c1290b6f70d1b12b40e95d581f82

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Citations in the corpus

Democracy and State Capacity: Complements or Substitutes? (2015, neutral): “The third measure of democracy comes from the March 2014 version of the Unified Democracy Scores (Pemstein et al. 2010), a composite measure of democracy constructed through a Bayesian latent variables analysis built upon ten existing scales.”
A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (2015, methodology): “Interval measures include the Index of Democracy produced by Vanhanen (2000), the Contestation and Inclusiveness indices produced by Coppedge, Alvarez, and Maldonado (2008), and the Unified Democracy Scores (“UDS”) produced by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010).”
The V–Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data (2015, neutral): “The first parameterization is typically called multi-rater ordinal probit (MROP) (Johnson & Albert 1999, Pemstein, Meserve & Melton 2010), 8 while the latter is an ordinal item response theory (O-IRT) setup (Clinton & Lewis 2008, Treier & Jackman 2008).”
Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive? (2019, methodology): “Indeed, the Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010) analysis of ten democracy measures suggests that those relying on specialists (e.g., the Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney (2005) measures of democracy in Central America) have lower error variance than those relying on generalists (e.g., Polity and…”
A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007 (2013, methodology): “The dichotomous measure used in Przeworski et al. (2000) (described in Alvarez et al.”