Measures of democracy are regularly employed in the statistical analysis of economic, political, and social policy. This paper reviews the measures" setup, strength, and weaknesses across the three most prominent democracy datasets: PolityIV, Freedom House, and Varieties of Democracy. The measures developed by the Varieties of Democracy project outperform Polity2 and Freedom House Index with respect to the underlying definition and measurement scale, as well as the theoretical justification of the aggregation procedure. The three indices display a high level of agreement for those observations included in all three datasets. The most substantial differences between the indices lie in the indices’ coverage, i.e. in their non-missing observations (in Polity2 coding, for example, years during which a country is occupied by foreign powers constitute missing values), the availability of disaggregate data and the above mentioned key areas. This paper clarifies when to proceed with caution, but for the most part advocates the use of Varieties of Democracy in the statistical analysis of democracy.

中文翻译：

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如何（不）衡量民主

民主衡量标准经常用于经济、政治和社会政策的统计分析。本文回顾了三个最突出的民主数据集：PolityIV、Freedom House 和 Varieties of Democracy 的“措施”设置、优势和劣势。Varieties of Democracy 项目开发的措施在潜在的基础上优于 Polity2 和自由之家指数定义和测量尺度，以及聚合程序的理论依据。三个指数显示出对所有三个数据集中包含的那些观察结果的高度一致性。指数之间最显着的差异在于指数的覆盖范围，即他们的非缺失观察（例如在 Polity2 编码中，一个国家被外国占领的年份构成缺失值）、分类数据的可用性和上述关键领域。本文阐明了何时谨慎行事，但在很大程度上主张在民主的统计分析中使用民主的多样性。