Measuring Democracy examines three widely used democracy indexes: those produced by Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy (V‑Dem). This HillStudy explains how these indexes work, how each index evaluates the state of democracy in Canada, how they differ from each other and some possible limitations of their approaches.
The paper shows that democracy is a broad and varied concept that is not easily defined. Efforts to measure democracy therefore involve necessarily subjective decisions about how to define democracy, how to find evidence of it on the ground and how to compile that evidence into a numerical score.
Different measurement choices produce different results. Canada tends to rank closer to the top in some indexes than in others, although it ranks consistently well relative to most other countries. The countries that tend to be ranked highest – and, to a lesser extent, lowest – are not the same for each index. For example, in 2023, no country ranked in the top three of each index. However, this variation should not be overstated: there is loose agreement across the three indexes as to which countries are most and least democratic.
This HillStudy also shows that political scientists and other observers have identified possible limitations with each index. Notably, the most methodologically sophisticated of the indexes–V-Dem’s – is highly transparent in some regards but opaque in others.
While it may not be possible to achieve a perfect measure of democracy, democracy indexes nonetheless provide benchmarks that allow for relatively rigorous comparisons of the state of democracy from one year to the next, both globally and at the individual country level.
Read the full text of the HillStudy: Measuring Democracy
By Zachariah Black and BJ Siekierski, Library of Parliament
Categories: Economics and finance, Executive summary, Law, justice and rights