Vanhanen, Tatu. "A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998". Journal of Peace Research, Vol.37, No.2 (2000): 251-265.

Vanhanen, Tatu. "A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998". Journal of Peace Research, Vol.37, No.2 (2000): 251-265.

• The author defines 'democracy' for the purposes of this article as, "a political system in which ideologically and socially different groups are legally entitled to compete for political power, and in which institutional power-holders are elected by the people and are responsible to the people" (252).
• One of the larger projects to study democracy has been the polity project, created by Ted Robert Gurr in the 1970s to capture the relative autocracy or democracy of states for the past 200 years. It measures democracy on a scale from -10 to +10 based on competitiveness and checks and balances on the executive (252).
• The 'Democracy Index' invented by the author is strongly correlated with this measurement, but has the major advantage of containing many fewer variables (258-259).
• The author, based on similar methods in her previous research, measures democracy in terms of 'competitiveness', the difference between the largest party and all others, and 'participation', based on the voter turnout of that state from total population (253).
• In states without clear elections, where political parties are banned, or where elections are indirect, the participation rates and/or competitiveness rates are assumed to be zero. On the other hand, in cases where no political parties exist despite being allowed, the competitiveness rate is assumed to be 30%, rather than zero (254).
• A major downside of this system is the lack of specification available in the variable of participation, as to incorporate changes in the franchise, it does not distinguish adults from children; this makes older states look democratic and makes younger states, like those in Asia, Africa, or anywhere before 1950, look less democratic (255).
• The author supports her method of studying democracy because it involves only two variables, and they can be calculated using quantitative data, unlike the multi-variable studies dependent on judgement calls used by many other indices of democracy (256).
• The author's system for measuring democracy does not take into account civil and political liberties, which the author views as a necessary precondition of strong voter turnout and competitive elections (256).
• Comparison to other indices of democracy show that the author's measurement is good at making major distinctions between democracy and non-democratic states without necessitating many variables, but often disagrees with other indices over marginal and nuanced cases, such as Iran or Lebanon (260-261).