Institutionalized democracy - Governance & partnership - Development outcomes - African Development Indicators
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Democracy is conceived as three essential, interdependent elements. One is the presence of institutions and procedures through which citizens can express effective preferences about alternative policies and leaders. Second is the existence of institutionalized constraints on the exercise of power by the executive. Third is the guarantee of civil liberties to all citizens in their daily lives and in acts of political participation. Other aspects of plural democracy, such as the rule of law, systems of checks and balances, freedom of the press, and so on are means to, or specific manifestations of, these general principles. We do not include coded data on civil liberties. The Democracy indicator is an additive eleven-point scale (0-10). The operational indicator of democracy is derived from codings of the competitiveness of political participation using the following weights: Polity IV Project: Dataset Users’ Manual 14
Authority Coding Scale Weight
Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment (XRCOMP):
(3) Election +2
(2) Transitional +1
Openness of Executive Recruitment (XROPEN):only if XRCOMP is Election (3) or Transitional (2)
(3) Dual/election +1
(4) Election +1
Constraint on Chief Executive (XCONST):
(7) Executive parity or subordination +4
(6) Intermediate category +3
(5) Substantial limitations +2
(4) Intermediate category +1
Competitiveness of Political Participation (PARCOMP):
(5) Competitive +3
(4) Transitional +2
(3) Factional +1
This "institutional democracy" indicator follows a logic similar to that underlying the Polity I analyses. There is no "necessary condition" for characterizing a political system as democratic, rather democracy is treated as a variable. Polity IV Project, Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2006, annual, cross-national, time-series and polity-case formats coding democratic and autocratic "patterns of authority" and regime changes in all independent countries with total population greater than 500,000 in 2006 (162 countries in 2006; SPSS and Excel data; PDF codebook). Note: Individual Polity IV Country Reports can be examined by checking the website http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity06.htm; changes made during the most recent update (2006) are listed in an Excel file in http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm Source: Center for Systemic Peace with reference to the Polity IV Web site at www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm
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