James Melton, Steve Meserve, and I are pleased to announce that an
updated version of the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) dataset is now
available at http://www.unified-democracy-scores.org/. The current
release extends case coverage through 2008, incorporates recent updates
to constituent measures, and adds two recently developed measures of
democracy to our framework.
The UDS, which we introduce in a recent Political Analysis <a
href="http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/08/26/pan.mpq020.full.html?ijkey=3BdlpJbUIjswu7q&keytype=ref">article</a>,
leverage the efforts of a variety of experts to provide a composite
scale of democracy, accompanied by estimates of measurement uncertainty.
The scores are available for virtually every country in the world from
1946 through 2008. The UDS are estimated using a Bayesian statistical
measurement model and, therefore, can be used to make probabilistic
statements about other useful quantities, such as the difference in
democracy levels between two countries in a given year. Furthermore, the
modeling process produces a number of estimates that make possible the
direct comparison of the pre-existing scales upon which the UDS are
based. Specifically, the model provides estimates of each rater's
reliability, estimates of the extant measures' score cutoffs, all
normalized to a single latent scale, and estimates of democracy experts'
perceptions of individual democracy ratings along the same underlying
scale. These estimates are all available on the UDS website.
Best,
Dan Pemstein
--
Daniel Pemstein
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
Vanderbilt University
PMB 407712
2301 Vanderbilt Place
Nashville, TN 37240-7712
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 615-891-0304
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