Vanhanen Index
The Index of Democratization ( ID , also Vanhanen Index ) was designed by the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen . Data are currently available for 187 countries between 1810 and 2000.
Basics
Vanhanen defines democracy as "a political system in which ideologically and socially diverse groups are legally entitled to compete for political power, and in which the institutional rulers are elected and accountable to the people". Against this background, Vanhanen uses the two key categories of Robert Alan Dahl's concept of polyarchy - participation and competition - as a measure of the degree of democratization of a state.
calculation
The Vanhanen Index (ID) is calculated by multiplying the unweighted degree of participation (P) by the degree of competition (W) and then dividing the product by 100:
The degree of participation (P) is determined based on the number of voters in the last election divided by the total population multiplied by 100. To determine the degree of competition (W), the percentage of votes of the strongest party in the last election for the national parliament is subtracted from 100.
Threshold values apply to both the degree of participation and the degree of competition and the democratization index itself. For example, a country is only classified as a democracy if its P-value is at least 20, its W-value at least 30 and consequently its ID value is at least 6.0.
literature
- Manfred G. Schmidt : Democracy Theories. An introduction. 5th edition. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 3-531-17310-3 , pp. 374-378.
- Tatu Vanhanen : A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998. In: Journal of Peace Research. 37/2, 2000, pp. 251-265.
- Tatu Vanhanen: Democratization. A Comparative Analysis of 170 Countries. Routledge, London 2003, ISBN 0-415-31860-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from: Schmidt: Democracy Theories. P. 375.