In recent weeks, the claim that North Carolina could no longer be classified as a democracy has been widely circulated and sparked significant debate. Here, Pippa Norris, Director of the EIP project, explains how perceptions of electoral integrity in 50 US states and worldwide were assessed by political scientists. The blog also presents independent evidence from V-Dem demonstrating the core EIP claim that, when compared to other Western democracies, America has the least free and fair elections. The strong correlation between two independent studies lends confidence to the reliability of the estimates

Norris, Pippa

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1/8/2017It’s even worse than the news about North Carolina: Americanelections rank last among all Western democraciesblogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/01/08/its-even-worse-than-the-news-about-north-carolina-american-elections-rank-last-among-all-western-democracies/In recent weeks, the claim that North Carolina could no longer be classiﬁed as a democracy hasbeen widely circulated and sparked signiﬁcant debate. Here, Pippa Norris, Director of the EIPproject, explains how perceptions of electoral integrity in 50 US states and worldwide wereassessed by political scientists. The blog also presents independent evidence from V-Demdemonstrating the core EIP claim that, when compared to other Western democracies, America hasthe least free and fair elections. The strong correlation between two independent studies lendsconﬁdence to the reliability of the estimates.On 22nd December, an op-ed published in the Raleigh News and Observer by Andrew Reynolds, Professor ofPolitical Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, went viral. The article commented on elections andpolitics in North Carolina, with the headline suggesting “North Carolina is no longer classiﬁed as a democracy“.There is no independent and reliable measure of how US states rank in terms of liberal democracy. But, movingbeyond hearsay and anecdote, new evidence is available assessing the quality of elections. For this, ProfessorReynolds drew on data from the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), an independent academic project based at Harvardand Sydney Universities, which I direct. The project has conducted expert survey of Perceptions of ElectoralIntegrity for the last ﬁve years to evaluate the quality of parliamentary and presidential elections around the world,including the 2012 and 2014 US elections. This technique is commonly used for evaluating performance in theabsence of directly observable indicators. It is similar to the methods employed for the Perception of CorruptionIndex by Transparency international. The empirical evidence is gathered from rolling expert surveys gaugingPerceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) globally (across 213 elections and 153 countries worldwide since 2012), andacross US states (in 2014 and 2016). ‘Electoral integrity’ refers to international standards and global normsgoverning the appropriate conduct of elections, during the pre-election stage, the campaign, polling day and theelection aftermath.The EIP evidence indicated that compared with the performance of other states, experts assessed North Carolina’selections particularly poorly on district boundaries, their legal framework and voter registration processes.Moreover problems are not just conﬁned to one state; as I published in a blog at the Monkey Cage on 29 March2016, well before all the hullabaloo, the US ranks 52nd out of 153 countries worldwide in the 2016 Perceptions ofElectoral Integrity index, displaying the worst performance among equivalent Western democracies. As I said at thetime: “By contrast, elections in many newer democracies are seen by experts to perform far better in the globalcomparison, such as in Lithuania (ranked 4th), Costa Rica (6th), and Slovenia (8th).”The op-ed by Professor Reynolds triggered dozens of news reprints, thousands of tweets, and a hail-storm ofdebate, some deploring politics in the Tar Heel state, others challenging the evidence for the claims. Somequestioned the PEI global ratings based on so-called ‘sniﬀ’ tests, a fancy way of saying that several cases in thedataset did not reﬂect the prior assumptions of the readers.Now no scientiﬁc data is ever perfect. Methods can always be improved. Skepticism is the nature of science.  Webelieve that the PEI has learnt and continuously improved its methodology as it has developed over time – and weare committed to do so further. Fair criticisms, based on what the EIP has published as scientiﬁc research, iswelcome to improve our work. Several concrete examples can be given.First, EIP makes no claims about rating democracy – EIP measures electoral integrity, which is far from 1/6First, EIP makes no claims about rating democracy – EIP measures electoral integrity, which is far fromequivalent. Liberal democracies require eﬀective elections – but also many other institutions which facilitatecompetition and participation. Similarly, electoral integrity requires that states have the capacity for eﬀectivegovernance, to prevent unintentional problems arising from maladministration and human errors, as well asdemocratic principles safeguarding basic human rights and preventing the abuse of power.Issues of cross-cultural comparability have been with us ever since the Civic Culture. Following Gary King’sEIP has included ‘anchoring vignettes’ designed to improve our understanding of the benchmarks used whenexpert make their evaluations of complex issues in diverse contexts.Two cases included in PEI 3.0 (March 2015) – North Korea and Trinidad and Tobago – were dropped ﬁvemonths later in the subsequent release, because we had doubts about the technical responses in thesecases, as noted transparently in successive annual reports.To share awareness of best practices, methods, and standards in the production of expert surveys, and toimprove our work, last year EIP organized two international workshops in conjunction with the InternationalPolitical Science Association in Poznan and the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia,engaging leading scholars and practitioners from organizations such as V-Dem, Polity, Freedom House, theCarter Center, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the United Nations DevelopmentProgram.Media commentary has focused obsessively upon the exact ranking of particular American states vis-a-visother countries. But the Electoral Integrity Project has not made these comparisons in our extensive researchpublications. There are two separate datasets. The long series of EIP publications have compared nation-states with each other in the global survey (PEI-4.5). The project has also compared American states witheach other in the sub-national survey (PEI-US-2016). Whether the state-level and global level data should becompared remains an open question for debate within the scientiﬁc community.Social media commentary has commonly distracted us with shiny baubles, reﬂecting partisan click-bait, fake news,and spurious attacks on red herrings, mixing up all these complex issues, rather than engaging seriously with theproblems which need to be addressed in elections at home and abroad.In particular, there has been no serious rebuttal to the evidence that US elections are seriously ﬂawed in certainrespects.  But when there are disputes about the validity of any evidence, rather than employing dubious ‘sniﬀ tests’,social scientists usually seek to compare the results using two or more independent sources of data which measureidentical or equivalent concepts. The more the agreement among independent studies, all other things being equal,the more conﬁdence we should have in the evidence. Like pieces of a jig-saw, triangulation is the name of the game.Comparing the evidence So are American elections actually as exceptionally bad as claimed? Here for evidence we can turn to the Variety ofDemocracies (V-Dem) project based at the University of Gothenburg, an independent academic study involving ateam of over 50 social scientists on six continents. The latest version of the dataset (V6.2) covers 350 indicators and30 democracy indices in 173 countries annually from 1900 to 2012. This project has been widely acknowledged; forexample, last year it received one of the most prestigious dataset awards in American political science. What doesthe V-Dem evidence show about how the quality of American elections compared with contests around the rest ofthe world?V-Dem gauges the quality of elections using dozens of indicators such as those concerning voting rights, campaignmedia, the extent of any problems of opposition boycotts and electoral-related violence, and the independence ofthe electoral management body. For a summary measure, V-Dem asks its expert respondents: “Taking all aspectsof the pre-election period, election day, and the post-election process into account, would you consider this national2/6election to be free and fair?” Responses to this item, averaged for the period from 2000 to 2012, can be compared in161 countries.Now the concepts, instrument, time-period, and methods used by V-Dem and EIP are not identical, by any means.The concept of ‘electoral integrity’ is not the same thing as whether elections are ‘free and fair’. V-Dem seeksretrospective evaluations whereas EIP is contemporaneous. Nevertheless, the concepts are close enough toprovide comparisons.As shown in Figure 1, out of 28 Western democracies, according to the V-Dem data, the US ranks last. And this waswell before the 2016 election, which isn’t yet in the V-Dem dataset. The United States is clearly exceptional.Figure 1 – V-Dem rankings of 28 Western DemocraciesTo compare more broadly, Figure 2 shows that out of 161 countries worldwide, according to V-Dem data USelections ranked 46th. As shown in Figure 2, the US is similar to the position of Indonesia, Lithuania and Bulgaria,and well below many newer democracies such as Chile (ranked 5th), the Czech Republic (ranked 13th), and Estonia(ranked 25th).  By contrast, Germany, the UK, and Norway top the list as best electoral performers. Conﬁrming theEIP results, in terms of free and fair elections, the United States again displayed the worst performance among allWestern democracies. Figure 2 – How countries rank in electoral fairness and liberal democracy (alternative formats)3/6Note: Mean estimates for the period 2000-12. All countries scoring over 1.0 on the ‘free andfair’ elections standardized index. Source: Calculated from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Version 6.2 https://www.v-dem.netAs Figure 3 shows, despite diﬀerence in their methodologies, concepts, and time periods, there is a strongcorrelation (R=.82***) between the EIP and V-Dem estimates of the quality of elections. This compares only thecases where the election year can be matched across both studies.There are some outliers observable in the comparison – particularly the cases of Ethiopia (which V-Dem rates morepositively) and Cuba (which EIP rates more positively), both cases where the ruling party swept up 100% of theseats, and both diﬃcult cases to classify, with room again for genuine scientiﬁc debate. Party competition is acontinuous variable (such as measurements by the ENEP and ENPP indices). EIP prefers to maintain the PEIratings for comparson with levels of party competition, rather than automatically curtailing the dataset by usingautomatic cut-oﬀ rules which prevent comparison.  Similarly, Guyana and Poland are also outliers.But the overall high correlation between independent studies is no ﬂuke or accident. Now of course both sourcescould be wrong; but it is up to any critics to come up with better evidence demonstrating this, rather than relyingupon unduly rosy assumptions. Moreover since both projects publish disaggregated indices, not just thestandardized summary measures, the underlying reasons for any diﬀerences can be explored further.Figure 34/6Sources: PEI 3.5 (www.electoralintegrityproject.com) and V-Dem 6.2 (www.v-dem.net/en/)America likes to think of its democracy as a shining city upon the hill and a beacon for liberal values around theworld. I can understand why some may feel dismayed by these results. To close observers, however, this globalranking is far from a surprise. Ever since Florida in 2000, the quality of how US elections are administered havebeen subject to far closer scrutiny, with growing partisan polarization over basic electoral procedures and rights.Let’s agree that there are problems and get on with the task of ﬁxing them. A long series of vulnerabilities in theconduct of US elections has been widely documented, for example in the 2014 report of the bipartisan PresidentialCommission on Election Administration. The Pew Center’s Election Performance Index has repeatedly and carefullyhighlighted uneven standards across US states.The concerns evident about the November 8 th elections are often dismissed as motivated by partisanconsiderations by sore losers, but these are not red or blue issues. Nor are they just about particular incompetentlocal oﬃcials, Russian hacking, or partisan shenanigans in speciﬁc states like North Carolina; instead the problemsare rooted in the DNA of American constitutional democracy, evident well before Trump’s victory, and likely to persistand worsen in the polarized partisan atmosphere during the next few years. This isn’t actually about Donald Trump’selection at all, nor fraud at the ballot box, not even voter restrictions in several states. Democracies which leavemajor decisions over the basic rules and procedures of the electoral game in the hands of dozens of local and statepoliticians, putting the foxes in charge of guarding the hen-house, are asking for problems.Featured image credit by JMacPherson (Flickr: Democracy_going_sign) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia CommonsPlease read our comments policy before commenting.           5/6 Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP– American Politics and Policy, nor ofthe London School of Economics. Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/2j6JZqF _________________________________  About the authorPippa Norris – Harvard and Sydney Universities, Electoral Integrity ProjectPippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School ofGovernment, Harvard University, ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government andInternational Relations at the University of Sydney, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. A political scientist and public speaker, her research compares election and public opinion, politicalcommunications, and gender politics. She also served as Director of the Democratic GovernanceGroup in United Nations Development Programme, NY and as an expert consultant to manyinternational organizations such as the World Bank, Council of Europe and OSCE.  All data for EIPcan be downloaded from the project website www.electoralintegrityproject.comCC BY-NC 3.0 2015 LSE USAPP6/6

It’s even worse than the news about North Carolina: American elections rank last among all Western democracies

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