[EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

Thu Jul 3 15:20:17 PDT 2014

Some soccer fans at FairVote are also fans of representative democracy.
Even as they get ready for the quarterfinals this weekend, they decided to
compare nations according to measures of their level of electoral democracy.

Spoiler alert: the US wouldn't even have advanced to the round of 16 based
on this measure.

Happy July 4th - -a good time to mull over how well we're measuring the
"consent of the governed."

- Rob Richie

##############

http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/blog/world-cup-of-democracy-goes-to-the-netherlands/

World Cup of Democracy Goes to the Netherlands
by Anthony Ramicone
<http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Anthony_Ramicone>, Nicholas
Golden <http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Nicholas_Golden>, Bogdan Popescu
<http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Bogdan_Popescu> // Published July 3,
2014

 [image: fifa]

The FIFA World Cup is underway in Brazil. And while that tournament will
eventually crown the best national soccer team in the world, we wondered
what it would look like if it was crowning the best democracy in the world.
With that in mind, we decided to put together an index that compares
democracies across countries and then apply it to this year’s World Cup
field.

In the end, the Netherlands came out on top, defeating Australia in a
fairly lopsided final. You can see how the whole tournament played out in
the graphic above. As to the United States, it didn’t even escape its
“group of death” in our Democracy World Cup and ranks 17th among the 32
nations overall.

But what does it mean to have the world’s best democracy (or at least the
best out of World Cup entrants)? Here is what went into our calculation:

*1) Turnout*

If a lot of people don’t bother to vote, your democracy is probably not
healthy. Political participation is at the root of representative
democracy, and voting is perhaps the most basic form of participation. Our
turnout metric is an average of the turnout of the last two nationwide
elections as a percentage of the voting age population, as reported by IDEA
<http://www.idea.int/vt/index.cfm>.

*2) Fair Representation of Political Views*

How likely is it that your vote will elect someone? Do political parties
receive a share of the power equal to their share of support? These
questions are at the heart of measuring fair representation, or
“proportionality” in political science terms. If, for example, one third of
the voters support a particular political party, they should not be
excluded from the system. To measure this, we use the Gallagher Index
<http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/Docts/ElectionIndices.pdf>,
which calculates the overall difference between how many votes that
different parties get and how many seats they receive in a country.

*3) Women’s Representation*

Is your democracy inclusive of underrepresented groups? While an ideal
calculation of this would include racial, ethnic, and religious measures,
what constitutes a minority is so varied across countries that it is too
difficult to encapsulate in a single metric. Instead, the percentage of
women in government serves as a good barometer for understanding how well a
democracy represents those who are traditionally excluded. In
particular, drawing
on the Inter-Parliamentary  Union <http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm>,
we use the percentage of women in the lower house of the legislature, since
almost every lower house is directly elected.

*4) Legitimacy*

Is your democracy a sham? It doesn’t matter how inclusive your legislative
chamber is or how many people show up to vote if your elections are rigged.
We use the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which measures
the robustness of democracies, as a multiplier in our calculation. This
ensures that superficial democracies, which look good on the surface, or
not rewarded.

You can find all of our sortable data and calculations here
<http://www.fairvote.org/assets/World-Cup-Democracy.xlsx> which allow you
to see which nations are best in each category. We hope that this serves as
a foundation for building an index that serves to compare democracies
around the world, not only measuring how free or fair they are but also how
successful they are at representing the people they serve.

Some might be surprised to see that the United States did not make it past
the group stage. Not even Tim Howard could save the US from its weak
turnout and poor representation of women in Congress. You can read more
about FairVote’s proposed reforms that would enhance women’s representation
<http://www.representation2020.com/> , increase voter turnout
<http://www.promoteourvote.com/> and improve fair representation
<http://www.fairvoting.us/>.

Stay tuned for our next edition of Dubious Democracy
<http://www.fairvote.org/assets/Uploads/DubiousDemocracy2010.pdf>, where we
have rated states in congressional elections. Historically we have done a
relative index, but the method presented here is a step towards an absolute
measure that will allow for more meaningful comparisons.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
*Social Media*: *FairVote Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>*   *FairVote Twitter
<https://twitter.com/fairvote>*  My Twitter <https://twitter.com/rob_richie>
*First Million Campaign*  Thank you for considering a tax-deductible
donation
<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2495/t/10346/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=5643>
to
support FairVote's Reform2020.com vision. (Combined Federal Campaign number
is 10132.)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20140703/12e1c0ca/attachment.html>