Which countries are democratic?

Here's the source for one of the maps we saw in class today -- the one with the most restrictive definition of what makes a country a democracy. As the blog author who produced it notes, it's based on data from the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2006 "Index of Democracy," available here in pdf format.

As that last link explains, the EIU index is based on 5 criteria: electoral process; functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties. Here's how the US stacks up (all scores are out of 10):

• electoral process: 8.75
• functioning of government: 7.86
• political participation: 7.22
• political culture: 8.75
• civil liberties: 8.53
• OVERALL: 8.22

Out of 167 countries, the US ranks 17th, right around the middle of the "full democracies" pack. Sweden comes in 1st, with an overall score of 9.88. South Africa, which ranks 29th, is the most highly-ranked country classified as a "flawed democracy." Maybe unsurprisingly, it does pretty well on electoral process and civil liberties (remember that its long constitution includes a very extensive list of citizen protections) -- it ties with the US on the former and outpaces it on the latter. It loses most of its points on the functioning of its government, political participation, and political culture.

The more commonly referenced index, the annual Freedom House Survey, produces somewhat different results, as we saw in this other map:

Check out the Freedom House country report on the United States, which goes into some detail explaining the US's record on freedom. You can select from the full country report list to see why they got their scores and how they compare to each other.