tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post3445525301368450804..comments2023-11-18T08:09:26.056+13:00Comments on Abandoned Footnotes: A Very Short Quantitative History of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Other Political Regimes, Part IXavier Marquezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-89679905411181882912012-02-21T06:01:26.975+13:002012-02-21T06:01:26.975+13:00Ugh, "less reliable the further back in time ...Ugh, "less reliable the further back in time we go" is what I meant to say.Xavier Marquezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-84525482351655433202012-02-21T06:00:33.413+13:002012-02-21T06:00:33.413+13:00In other words, what I'm trying to say is that...In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the post does not track democracy, but "executive selection via election in large electorates", a category that we can more easily track over time (because we don't have to assume that much about the extent of the electorates).Xavier Marquezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-59128245972821667592012-02-21T05:50:07.780+13:002012-02-21T05:50:07.780+13:00Hi Jay, I agree that Polity's observations are...Hi Jay, I agree that Polity's observations are less reliable. But that's in part why I'm not using the democracy/autocracy index - I prefer the component values. It is absurd to interpret the USA as a "10" in democracy before women had the right to vote, but it is not absurd to say that it had a large-group selection competitive regime. Ignore democ, use exrec; it gives a more fine-grained picture of what's going on. I think we can certainly make meaningful comparisons then, tracking the evolution of the extension of the suffrage separately (with, e.g., the dataset in Przeworski, which I hope he would make public, bt also by the evolution of the polcomp variable in polity).Xavier Marquezhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10099356104979121153noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35658622.post-34178279354173015182012-02-21T00:33:30.573+13:002012-02-21T00:33:30.573+13:00This is very useful, and I look forward to reading...This is very useful, and I look forward to reading Part II.<br /><br />The one thing undermining the value of the exercise, however, is the invalidity of Polity's observations for earlier years. There are three problems: 1) lack of information; 2) lack of coder resources to assess the information that does exist; and 3) Polity's bizarre decision to apply different standards to different times.<br /><br />To my mind, the last is the most damning, allowing the coders, for example, to give the USA a perfect 10 before women had the right to vote and when Jim Crow laws severely restricted the political rights of blacks in many states. That strange approach means we really shouldn't directly compare contemporary values to older ones. This is a serious but unacknowledged problem in many of the recent statistical studies of long-term trends in political development, and I'm not sure why it doesn't get more attention.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com