Unified Democracy Scores (Updated March 12, 2014)

We are pleased to announce the release of an updated version of the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), now covering the time period 1946-2012. These new scores incorporate recent updates to three of the ten original measures—Freedom House (2014), Polity IV (Marshall et al. 2012), and VanHanen (2012)—that feature in the analysis that we report in our 2010 article. In addition, the current release adds a recently developed measure of democracy—Economist Intelligence Unit (2012)—to our framework. Using the most current release of the UDS, we have replicated figure 3 from the original article to provide users with a snapshot of the updated scores, focusing on the year 2000.

Although the new scores are similar to earlier versions, they are not identical, even for previously available country-years. We realize that this may pose problems for those who wish to replicate either the published article or others' research that uses the UDS; you may find previous UDS releases in our archive.

The dataset is in compressed comma separated format. Common software, such as gzip and WinZip, can decompress the files. Users may download the scores in summary format, or may opt to obtain 1000 or 5000-draw samples from the posterior distributions of the UDS. Our example analysis illustrates how to use the UDS in applied work.

UDS Summary Scores

UDS 1000 Draw Sample

UDS 5000 Draw Sample

Summary and posterior sample files are formatted as follows:

Summary File

Posterior Sample Files

Column	Description
country	Country name
year	Observation year
cowcode	Correlates of War project country code
mean	Unified democracy score posterior mean
sd	Unified democracy score posterior standard deviation
median	Unified democracy score posterior median
pct025	Unified democracy score posterior 2.5 percentile
pct975	Unified democracy score posterior 97.5 percentile

Column	Description
country	Country name
year	Observation year
cowcode	Correlates of War project country code
mean	Unified democracy score posterior mean
sd	Unified democracy score posterior standard deviation
z1	The first draw from the posterior distribution of the country-year's unified democracy score
z2	The second draw from the posterior distribution of the country-year's unified democracy score
...
zn	The nth draw from the posterior distribution of the country-year's unified democracy score

Please cite this article, which was published in the fall 2010 issue of Political Analysis, if you use, or redistribute, these scores in your work.