The duty invites you once again to the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, we are interested in what defines our democracies.
The media and many academic researchers claim that democracy is in decline and even in danger. Symptoms include authoritarian tendencies, the rise of the far right in several countries, the popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, and increasing restrictions on rights, particularly those of women and LGBTQ+ people in several countries. The fact remains that before crying wolf, we should agree on what democracy is, what its essential elements are, and how to measure it.
In the 1970s, two initiatives appeared concurrently. Freedom in the World presented, in 1973, a first ranking of countries on the basis of their respect for individual freedoms, while the Polity index, which appeared in 1974, placed more emphasis on elections and governance. It was not until the 2000s that new indices appeared. In 2006, the journal The Economist proposed its own index, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) index, also focused on individual freedoms, then Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) proposed in 2014 measures of several types of democracy — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, egalitarian —, asserting that there was not just one valid model.
Freedom House and The Economist place a strong emphasis on freedom, seen as the very essence of democracy. The vision is that of neoliberal democracy where the government must intervene as little as possible in the lives of citizens. In this universe, compulsory voting is an attack on democracy. The Polity and V-Dem indices have instead placed emphasis on the electoral process which should allow citizens to freely choose their leaders and on the presence of controls on elected officials. Added to this, for V-Dem, are freedom of expression and association and, for liberal democracy, respect for the rule of law.
How do we measure democracy? Experts are brought in to code a set of indicators. These generally refer to rights (de jure) rather than their practical implementation (de facto). If we want to measure the political equality of women, for example, we examine whether they have the right to stand for election on the same basis as men (de jure) and not whether they actually do it (de facto).
Most countries formally give equal rights to women, but in practice, if we look for example at the proportion of women in parliament, Canada and the United States, with a proportion of 30% of elected women, rank 65th respectively.e and at 72e ranking of countries. They are downgraded by countries like Bolivia, Mexico, Senegal, Moldova or the United Arab Emirates which all have more than 40% of women in parliament. However, V-Dem gives Canada and the United States a perfect score for women’s political participation and the EIU index gives a perfect score as soon as the proportion exceeds 20%. The indices tend to give more importance to the participation of women in NGOs than in places of power.
A distinction can also be made between the measurement of facts and that of perceptions. The indices use the concept of “free and fair” elections, a perception assessed by experts. More factual measures of electoral democracy might focus on voter turnout or the fairness of the voting system. In this regard, Canada is among the “dunces”, along with most countries with a British parliamentary tradition, given the significant disproportion between seats in Parliament and votes.
How important is it? Research shows that if we use only factual measures, we do not see a decline in democracy. On the other hand, experts’ perceptions of the same country sometimes vary substantially, leading to the hypothesis that the “ambient academic and media climate” and the fact that they do not reside in the country they are evaluating lead them to evaluate the most criticized countries more negatively.
Finally, we tend to think that these measures are the result of free, scientific, neutral, and disinterested academic research. However, the organizations that produce the indices are primarily funded by the United States Department of State and the European Union, and they have clearly stated political objectives, namely to spread democracy—a liberal conception of democracy—around the world. In short, the measures can be “contaminated” both by funding and by the objectives pursued.
Why is this problematic? On the one hand, we see that the measures do not distinguish between Western countries and that the latter serve as a model to which other countries are compared, without taking into account the historical and cultural origins of certain practices. However, the indices are used by Western countries and international organizations to decide on development aid for the countries concerned.
When citizens are asked how satisfied they are with democracy, the situation changes. Canada is among the highest ranked in 2021, along with countries such as Morocco, Kazakhstan and El Salvador, among others. On the other hand, Chile, considered a star of democracy in South America, is near the bottom, along with several Latin American countries and with both Ukraine and Russia.
If we analyzed the gap between these perceptions and expert indices, we could probably better understand what, in the functioning of democracy, makes people more or less satisfied. Rights or reality? Elections or adequate representation? Freedom or equality? And we could possibly better understand the reasons for the rise of the extreme right.
Organizations that produce measures of democracy have been primarily concerned with assessing the extent to which non-Western countries conform to Western standards. It remains unclear why people in countries that are considered exemplary are often dissatisfied with democracy as it is practiced.