Twenty Years of Political Transition

Abstract

To assess the extent of change in the political systems of the former communist states since 1989, some metric is needed. Compiling cross-national indexes of democracy has become something of a new industry in recent decades, and three products have pretty much cornered the market. Since 1973, Freedom House, a non-profit advocacy group, founded in New York in 1941 to promote democracy and expand political and economic freedom around the world, has compiled annual ratings of the extent of political and civil liberties in different countries. These ratings, on a 7-point scale, are based, according to Freedom House, on ‘a multilayered process of analysis and evaluation by a team of regional experts and scholars’.¹ The Polity project, begun around the same time by a political scientist, Ted Robert Gurr, also evaluates countries annually on the authority characteristics of their political regimes, rating them on a 21-point scale that runs from —10 (a fully institutionalized autocracy) to +10 (a fully institutionalized democracy).² Finally, a team at the World Bank has been compiling a dataset of worldwide governance indicators (WGIs), at first biannually and now annually. Among these is an index of perceived ‘voice and account-ability’ in countries around the world. Although this is useful for various purposes, a number of features of the voice and accountability index render it less useful for my analysis here.