Project topic : Explore data on democracy

The visualizations proposed in this project are about democracy. Democracy is broadly understood to mean ‘rule by the people’.

In practice, it is often defined as people choosing their leaders in free and fair elections.

Other definitions go beyond this. For example, some of them see democracy as people having additional individual rights and being protected from the state.

Democracy gives citizens the right to influence important decisions over their own lives and allows them to hold their leaders accountable.

But it can have other benefits too: democratic countries seem better governed than autocracies, seem to grow faster, and foster more peaceful conduct within and between them.

Many data are availiable on how democracy has spread across countries, how it differs between them, and whether we are moving towards a more democratic world. Moreover, the world has become much more democratic over the last two centuries. Based on data from Regimes of the World, we can identify that a much larger share of countries are now democracies.

Several questions can be adressed :

Countries that are democracies and autocracies in the World (from 1789 to 2022)

A map which colours the countries based on an electoral democracy index

how do researchers measure democracy ?

Data Sources

Data published by: Our World in Data, Bastian Herre. Retrieved: 2023-03-02

Links: http://v-dem.net/vdemds.html and https://ourworldindata.org/democracy

This dataset provides information on democracy and human rights, using data from the Varieties of Democracy project, and the Regimes of the World classification by Lührmann et al. (2018).

Figure 1

For my first figure, I am going to create a percent stacked barchart that plots for each year between 1798 and 2022 the percentage of closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies and liberal democracies (based on the criteria of the classification by Lührmann et al. (2018) and the assessment by V-Dem’s experts http://v-dem.net/vdemds.html). Years are on the x axis and percentages on the y axis. I will create a six column tibble with these data.

Figure 2

For my second figure, I am going to create two bar plots that captures to which extent political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed. It ranges from 0 to 1 (most democratic). Colors are choosen depending on regions. On the x axis, there is the percentage of the total population reprensented by the country, and on the y axis, there is the value of the democratic index.

Figure 3

For the third figure, I will display a chloropheth map based on the expert assessments and index by V-Dem. It captures to which extent political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed. Values of the index for each country are displayed on a map, with a colour palette depending on the index, for two reference years (1960 and 2022).

A left join will be performed to merge the data base of the map with the dataset of democratic index.

Figure 4

The scores capture the average extent to which citizens are satisfied with democracy in their own country. Higher scores indicate more satisfaction, positive scores indicate higher-than-average satisfaction across countries and years.

Figure 5

People living in democracies and autocracies, World Political regimes are based on the criteria of the classification by Lührmann et al. (2018) and the assessment by V-Dem’s experts.

Figure 6

This figure addresses the question of the age of electoral democracies. We provide a bar plot based on the number of electoral democracies by age (World, 2022). Our data is based on the classification by Lührmann et al. (2018) and the data by V-Dem.

Electoral democracies are understood here as political systems that hold meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.

Figure 7

Human rights index vs. electoral democracy index, 2022 Based on the expert assessments and indices by V-Dem, ranging from 0 to 1 (most rights/most democratic).

A linear regression (OLS) is performed to underline the relationship beteween human rights and political regime.

Figure 8

Child mortality rate vs. electoral democracy, 2021 The child mortality rate is the number of children who die before reaching the age of five, per 1,000 live births. Electoral democracy is based on the expert assessments and index by V-Dem, ranging from 0 to 1 (most democratic).