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WORKING PAPER
Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type
Melton, JamesMeserve, Stephen Pemstein, Daniel Abstract Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from ten extant scales. We accompany this new scale with quantitative estimates of uncertainty, provide estimates of the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, and quantify what the ordinal levels of each of the existing measures mean in relationship to one another. Our method eschews the difficult -- and often arbitrary -- decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. Keywords Bayesian latent variable analysis democracy democracy measurement latent variable analysis measurement multi-rater ordinal probit regime regime type UDS Unified Democracy Scores File
Uploaded 02-07-2008 Document ID Number 733 |
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