Polity IV Project Dataset

The Polity IV Project continues the Polity research tradition of coding the authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis. The Polity conceptual scheme examines concomitant qualities of democratic and autocratic authority in governing institutions, rather than discreet and mutually exclusive forms of governance. This perspective envisions a spectrum of governing authority that spans from fully institutionalized autocracies through mixed, or incoherent, authority regimes (termed "anocracies") to fully institutionalized democracies. The "Polity Score" captures this regime authority spectrum on a 21-point scale ranging from -10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy). The Polity scores can also be converted to regime categories: we recommend a three-part categorization of "autocracies" (-10 to -6), "anocracies" (-5 to +5 and the three special values: -66, -77, and -88), and "democracies" (+6 to +10). The Polity scheme consists of six component measures that record key qualities of executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition. It also records changes in the institutionalized qualities of governing authority. The Polity data include information only on the institutions of the central government and on political groups acting, or reacting, within the scope of that authority. It does not include consideration of groups and territories that are actively removed from that authority (i.e., separatists or "fragments"; these are considered separate, though not independent, polities) or segments of the population that are not yet effectively politicized in relation to central state politics. Annual Polity IV records code the regime characteristics in effect on December 31 of the record year and provide the dates and magnitude of Polity changes that occurred during the record year. The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system (i.e., states with total population of 500,000 or more in the most recent year; currently 163 countries) over the period 1800-2008. The Polity IV project has also compiled a list of non-constitutional changes in executive leadership (e.g., coups d'etat, revolutions, or forced resignations) that may not be captured in changed Polity scores or may result in only minor changes of Polity scores.^{[ref 1]}

Variable Categories and Subcategories

Polity IV Dataset contains indicators in the Legitimacy Variables category. The subcategory is Regime and Institutions.

These variables can answer questions like:

• How competitive is executive recruitment in the regime? Competitiveness refers to the extent that prevailing modes of advancement give subordinates equal opportunities to become subordinates.
• Is the regime considered an autocracy? How institutionalized is this autocracy, considering competitiveness of political participation, the regulation of participation, the openness and competitiveness of executive recruitment, and constraints on the chief executive?
• Has this regime undergone a transition?
• How durable is this regime?
• Is participation regulated to the extent that there are binding rules on when, whether, and how political preferences are expressed?

Data Quality

Critique

Critiques of Polity IV data relate to a key attribute in the index - executive constraint. The problem is that no basis is offered for distinguishing the significance of constraints on the executive exercised by different “accountability groups,” such as elected legislatures, nonelected legislatures, ruling parties, councils of nobles, or advisors. Yet it is simply not conceptually equivalent, from the perspective of democratic theory, if an elected legislature has power vis-à-vis an elected executive and, say, if the ruling party in a Soviet-style one-party state can constrain the head of the Politburo. Thus it is hard to understand how an index that includes such an attribute might be interpreted as offering information about whether a country has a democratic regime or the extent to which it might be considered more or less democratic.

Additionally, another critiques revolves around the understanding of participation. A more expansive understanding of participation should include the right of suffrage. As a result of this omission, a central source of variation in the process of democratization is not registered, as is readily apparent in the essentially fixed and practically perfect overall scores assigned in Polity IV to the United States from 1809 onward.

Additionally it is important to be attentive to the difficulty of establishing neat boundaries between concepts, such as distinguishing characteristics associated with the regime from those pertaining to state failure and to include only regime characteristics in the dataset. It is worth considering whether they may have gone too far in excluding these stateness attributes. Indeed, although the extent to which political authority is effectively exercised throughout a national territory is largely independent from the nature of the regime, it nonetheless impinges in part on the regime.

There are also concerns about aggregation procedures that can lead, under the proposed aggregation rule, to double counting that is not justified on theoretical grounds. These problems can be circumvented because scholars can selectively use the Polity IV’s attributes and, as Marshall et al. point out can also use different aggregation rules. But there remains yet one more weighting scheme implicit in the Polity IV indices due to the different scales used to measure each attribute. As a result, executive constraint is implicitly assigned a larger weight in the aggregate scores.^{[ref 2]}

Response

In response to critiques that argue that the omission of one of the core dimensions of democracy, namely, participation or inclusion, is a particularly grave problem for the Polity index, the authors highlight that they do include a component that addresses this factor, identified as “competitiveness of political participation,” which is “the extent to which alternative preferences for policy and leadership can be pursued in the political arena”, and “regulation of political participation,” which is the degree and type of regulation applied regarding how political preferences are expressed by subordinates. Polity assesses the quality of political competition by focusing on the tenor of interactions and relations among contending political groups (i.e., involving group representatives, or agents, actively engaged in determining the political agenda, whether with the government or from the opposition). Formal voting procedures are only one highly stylized element in a complex political bargaining process among such groups and may themselves be subject to regulations that seriously restrict their supposed voluntarism.

Authors of the dataset also argue that the problems of redundancy may be better understood as patterns. The Polity project is engaged in the identification of patterns of authority. An important underlying premise is that effective authority patterns tend toward consistency, complementarity, and coherence and that a lack of characteristic redundancy is itself a problem of governance. In this scheme, incoherent or inconsistent polities are the most problematic and unstable, and indeed, these incoherent polities, or “anocracies,” have been found to be highly associated with societal failures. The various ordinal scale indicators that comprise the Polity coding scheme and database measure different aspects of the same thing. As such, the correspondence among the indicators is generally very high, thereby increasing confidence in the identification of distinct authority patterns. On the other hand, such concurrent measurements may also reveal important pattern anomalies.

The authors also disagree about the issues with aggregation on the grounds that the Polity index influences relevant variables in a manner consistent with theoretically informed hypotheses regardless of which of several alternative indicators are used in the combinations. It does not exhibit the erratic qualities or produce the inconsistent results one would expect from a flawed scale. In other words, the Polity index performs consistently as one would expect a scaled measure of the quality of governance to perform in comparison to and in combination with other measures of political conditions and behaviors. Polity is unique among measures of “democraticness” in that it recognizes that ideal types are very often qualified in practice, that falling short of the ideal may hold special explanatory power, and that inconsistent authority may be less effective than consistent authority. The Polity index expands the conceptual boundary separating democratic from autocratic practices so that we may more accurately place borderline or transitional polities along the supposed continuum from tightly closed autocracies to highly open democracies. The weighting scheme used in the construction of the Polity index is simply a summation of the qualities of democratic traits qualified by the sum of the qualities of autocratic traits. The values that contribute to the separate autocracy and democracy scales are coded on several component variables, but those components are similarly scaled from election to selection, from open to closed, from unlimited to limited, from restricted to competitive. Because there is no overlap in traits between the separate scales, the combination of those scales should not be problematic. The combination of scales simply transforms the autocratic weightings from positive to negative. ^{[ref 3]}

References

1. ↑ Monty G. Marshall, "Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2008," Polity IV, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
2. ↑ Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Generating Better Data: A Response to Discussants," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2002.
3. ↑ Monty G. Marshall, Ted Robert Gurr, Christian Davenport and Keith Jaggers, "Polity IV, 1800-1999: Comments on Munck and Verkuilen," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2002.

Marshall, Monty G. and Keith Jaggers. 2000. POLITY IV Project Codebook.