In January, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)’s Democracy Index demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy.” That’s disturbing, but what does it mean?

Measuring a country’s level of democracy is crucial for understanding basic questions about politics. So why are the measures so bad?

To track the spread of democracy around the globe, we used the ratings contained in the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity IV dataset. Polity is a widely used resource in political science that ...

Troiano analyzed data from the Polity IV Project, which measures the degree of democracy or autocracy in countries over time, assigning each country a numerical score ranging from -10 (full ...

Democracy—measured by the Polity IV status —has rapidly spread around the globe. Vaccination against some of the worst killers of human history has become almost universal.

Troiano analyzed data from the Polity IV Project, which measures the degree of democracy or autocracy in countries over time, assigning each country a numerical score ranging from -10 (full autocracy) ...