democratic democracy index

Xavier Marquez, a political science professor in New Zealand, used allourideas in his class “Dictatorships and Revolutions” to produce a crowdsourced ranking of which countries are the most democratic.  He then compared the results to more established rankings like the one from Freedom House, and the results were pretty interesting; you should read about them on his blog (and here’s an update with even more data).  The general pattern is that the allourideas rankings match the Freedom House ranking reasonably well (and are of course much easier to generate), but the cases where the two do not match are quite interesting.  For example, Kiribati is apparently much more democratic than people think and Armenia is apparently much less democratic than people think.

I think his blog post also shows some of the cool things that you can do with the data files from allourideas. Feel free to help out his project by casting some votes in the widget below.