Measuring Democracy and Autocracy: Detecting the Nature of Source Effects and Improving Aggregated Indices

Democracy scores are nowadays provided by a variety of authors and organisations which not always agree on the level of democracy of particular countries. In a recent publication, we show that indicators of various aspects of democracy are systematically influenced by who has produced and published them. These source effects are much stronger in terms of the assessment of *changes* in regime properties than with respect to average levels in various dimensions of democracy. In our proposed paper, we take a closer look at the dynamics of these changes. We focus on three major sources which provide a wide array of indicators and a large set of countries as well as a time-span of several decades: Freedom House, Polity IV, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. Looking at countries where regime change is relatively pronounced, we examine which sources perform best in detecting substantive changes. Based on these insights, we provide an improved data base of regime measures that reduces biases introduced by the sources of regime indicators.