International Studies Quarterly
Probabilistic Democracy
2025-10-17
Democracy is an important concept that is difficult to measure, and existing measures have well-known weaknesses. We define democracy narrowly, as electoral accountability, and estimate the probability of democracy using a structural model and data from 1945 to 2008. We allow for strategic voting and find evidence that voters are intimidated into supporting authoritarian leaders. Ratification of the Convention Against Torture by the country in question emboldens voters, while ratification by third parties, close relations with the USA and the incumbent’s military experience increase voter intimidation. Our estimated democracy scores are highly correlated with other measures frequently used in political science and come with important advantages, including conceptual clarity, replicability, out-of-sample score prediction, flexibility with respect to the variables and specifications used in the estimation model, estimates of uncertainty, and avoiding potential expert bias.