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I visited a class entitled “Dictators and Democracies” taught by Devashree Gupta at Carleton College in Northfield Minnesota in which students presented a topic they chose and compared its usage to a country’s democracy score.
Each form of government has its own perks. Here I will analyze generally positive things and the correlation it has with democracies. Perks could include economic stability, environmental stewardship, and corruption.
To begin we need to know what the democracy score, used for comparison throughout this paper. Otherwise known as the democracy index, the democracy score as I'll be referring to it is a list compiled and updated by the UK that generally defines the level of freedom and other aspects of democracy. To learn the specifics of this system of which I don't have time to go into here I suggest "The Economist Intelligence Unit’s index of democracy By Laza Kekic, director, country forecasting services, Economist Intelligence Unit." It also includes a list of the scores by rank (of which the US is 17th if you are wondering.)
When analyzing economic stability you need to account for the growth of economic stability instead of the level of stability. So, judging by the amount of stability from which data site I do not remember you can clearly see the correlation between the democracy score and stability score as you’d expect. If you were to look at the data in what I view as a more accurate way, amount of two point jump in the stability score over a period of ten years, the results would be more varied. The level of stability is hard to measure because although the number of power shifts would demonstrate instability in many countries it would not be accurate for election based countries. Overall there is definitely a correlation and presumed causation between the stability and government of a country.
Another topic was environmental stewardship which was measured by the amount of land and water protected by the government. This proved to have more outlying scores. There were landlocked countries with 100% of the protected water that didn’t represent the data well and was unfair to the countries with a lot of coastlines. There were also countries that were surrounded by water and thus weren’t included in the data as they unfairly skewed the data. With those accounted for there still wasn’t enough evidence to conclude correlation in this measurement of environmental standards and democracy.
Finally, governmental corruption was a topic of research, which happened to be presented by my sister. Governmental corruption was measured in three ways, police, bribery and political corruption. Many of these are largely based on assumptions as police wouldn’t typically report there own corruption and it is largely based in secrecy. This data was also unreliable as places in North Korea scored extremely low as it was self-reported. The data showed a slight upward trend (the data had to be inverted to demonstrate the same trend in each aspect, in the same way, so upwards is less bribery) according to the democracy score. This could also easily be seen as untrustworthy as the self-reported aspect of it was largely not accurate.
In the end, much of the correlating results were as one would expect of the democratic countries of the world. Most correlations showed a positive trend of democracy score. It could be argued that the bias of students in a democratic nation and reporters estimating stability scores might affect the data. Maybe we have our biases for a reason. Or maybe democracy really is a positive force in today’s society.