Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Which Countries Are Democratic?

I looked at the PDF which was used in classifying the level of democracy in each country. For the most part, they have developed an okay system for measuring democracy in countries, but it's problems are similar to suffered from all statistical analysis. The proxies used tend to rely of subjective input more then mathematical input, which could profoundly shape a study. Despite this the questions for determining the score of each category are well thought up. Their problem is that they value the questions either at 1 or 0 and there is little in between, which can skew results.

1 comment:

Shamira Gelbman said...

These are very good points of criticism -- are there any countries you think are ranked inappropriately as a result of these methodological issues?