Comparative and International Politics Working Group Seminar

Measuring Democracy in Subnational Units Worldwide: A New Method (co-authored paper with Michael Coppedge, Matthew Sisk, and Kelly McMann)

Presentation by:
Patrick McQuestion (peace studies and political science)
Kellogg Doctoral Student Affiliate

Scholars have documented that democracy does not exist evenly within countries throughout the world and explained why. Increasingly, studies have demonstrated that this subnational variation in democracy affects other aspects of politics and society, including state capacity, democratization, violence, and environmental degradation. Further progress in studying subnational democracy, however, is limited by the absence of cross-national, time-series data that rely on a thick conceptualization and operationalization of democracy and cover all subnational units of many countries. Current datasets of subnational unit democracy are limited to a small number of countries. Moreover, most studies rely on a thin conceptualization of democracy, measured with indicators such as electoral margins of victory, effective numbers of candidates, or voter turnout. We offer a method to generate cross-national time-series data of democracy in subnational units that relies on a thick conceptualization and operationalization of democracy. We combine expert data from elections and civil liberties surveys in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and geocoded observational data. From these, our method generates country-year average levels of how free and fair subnational elections are and how well civil liberties are protected in subnational units of a country, thus capturing not only the electoral, but also the broader, liberal conceptualization of democracy. We pilot the method for Colombian municipalities, generating democracy data for 1,125 municipalities for each year from 2000 to 2023. We conduct three validation tests of these data and our method. We also demonstrate the utility of the data by investigating the impact of Colombia’s 2016 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP on democracy in its rural municipalities. Our method can be applied to other countries, so it offers the promise of generating cross-national time-series data of democracy in subnational units in many countries of the world. This will enable us to test the generalizability of conclusions from earlier subnational democracy research and to expand the questions we can answer.