This paper presents a new measure polyarchy for a global sample of 182 countries from 1900 to 2017 based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, deriving from an expert survey of more than 3000 country experts from around the world, with on average 5 experts rating each indicator. By measuring the five components of Elected Officials, Clean Elections, Associational Autonomy, Inclusive Citizenship, and Freedom of Expression and Alternative Sources of Information separately, we anchor this new index directly in Dahl’s (1971) extremely influential theoretical framework. The paper describes how the five polyarchy components were measured and provides the rationale for how to aggregate them to the polyarchy scale. We find that personal characteristics or ideological predilections of the V-Dem country experts do not systematically predict their ratings on our indicators. We also find strong correlations with other existing measures of electoral democracy, but also decisive differences where we believe the evidence supports the polyarchy index having higher face validity.

中文翻译：

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衡量全球的多头政治，1900-2017

本文基于民主多样性 (V-Dem) 数据，对 1900 年至 2017 年间 182 个国家的全球样本提出了一种新的衡量多头制度，该数据源自对来自世界各地的 3000 多名国家专家的专家调查，平均5 位专家对每个指标进行评级。通过分别衡量民选官员、廉洁选举、协会自治、包容性公民、言论自由和替代信息来源的五个组成部分，我们将这个新指数直接锚定在 Dahl (1971) 极具影响力的理论框架中。该论文描述了如何衡量五个多头结构组件，并提供了如何将它们聚合到多头结构规模的基本原理。我们发现 V-Dem 国家专家的个人特征或意识形态偏好并没有系统地预测他们对我们指标的评级。我们还发现与其他现有的选举民主措施有很强的相关性，但也发现了决定性的差异，我们认为证据支持多头政治指数具有更高的表面效度。