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

Thu Jul 3 16:04:51 PDT 2014

What's interesting is that there are very strong arguments that all of these things represent the strength of American democracy and our electoral system. The absurdity of a ranking putting Argentina and Russia ahead of the US may be evidence that the raters do not understand what their data means.

Bradley Smith
Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 3, 2014, at 6:59 PM, "Rob Richie" <rr at fairvote.org<mailto:rr at fairvote.org>> wrote:

Not to bore the list, but just briefly, the FairVote crew used four different measures. One is based on the Economist's "Democracy Index", which measures overall democratic health -- court system, press, etc. The US does pretty well there, ranking 7th among the nations, with countries like Algeria and Russia far behind. So good for us there, even if we're a good bit behind countries like Australia, Netherlands, and Switzerland.

But they did want to make this more heavily focused on elections. And there, Americans do have to face up to a few facts like:

- Voter turnout in the US is exceptionally low in internal norms

- Representation of women in Congress is very low, which we see as a window into other limitations in how well we represent the electorate.

- Congress can have an approval rating around 10%, yet more than 98% of House incumbents almost certainly be returned to office this November - returning us to the four elections from 1998 to 2004 where each year more than 98% of House incumbents won even in years like 2002 when more than half of states switched parties in gubernatorial elections. (Note that FairVote will be able to call winners for November 2016 in close to 90% of races just two days after this November's election using a methodology that is quite likely to be 100% accurate.)

- Republicans won 54% of seats in 2012 with 48% of votes, and likely would not lose control of the House this year without dropping below 45% of votes (and this can happen to the GOP in some states, like in NJ, where its assembly candidates won only 40% of seats with 50% of votes in 2013). So we don't do seats-to-votes very well for the major parties, and of course not all for emerging parties seeking to hold the major parties accountable.

On some of these electoral measures, generally less democratic nations like Russia and Argentina do a lot better than us. And we think that matters, even if we recognize the Economist measure as critically important.

Onward,
Rob

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org<mailto: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<http://Reform2020.com> vision. (Combined Federal Campaign number is 10132.)

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 6:25 PM, Ilya Shapiro <IShapiro at cato.org<mailto:IShapiro at cato.org>> wrote:
Um, Russia is tied with the US and Argentina is way ahead. Time to go back to the drawing board on that ridiculous measurement.

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________________________________
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu>] On Behalf Of Rob Richie
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2014 6:20 PM
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Subject: [EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

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

 [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<mailto:rr at fairvote.org>  (301) 270-4616<tel:%28301%29%20270-4616>  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<http://Reform2020.com> vision. (Combined Federal Campaign number is 10132.)

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