A Quick Method for Extending the Unified Democracy Scores

Abstract

I propose a simple and computationally undemanding method for extending Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton (2010)'s Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) from 2015 all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century (and in some cases to the late 18th century), adding information from several democracy datasets not included in their original paper or subsequent releases. The resulting scores are easy to recalculate by individual users depending on the purpose of the research, and come with smaller measurement uncertainty than the original UD scores. I use this method to produce an "extended UDS" dataset that covers 24111 country-years for 224 states and several non-state territories, including all of the country years in the updated Gleditsch and Ward panel of independent states since the Congress of Vienna (Gleditsch and Ward, 1999), all microstates in Kristian Gleditsch's list of microstates, and several unrecognized defacto states.

Keywords: democracy, democracy measurement, latent variable democracy indexes, democracy data