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92835 t1_jc7is04 wrote

As much as I understand this isn’t your fault, democracy index is a really really bad way of measuring democracy.

The data is extremely opaque and basically originates in asking an unspecified list of ‘experts’ for their personal assessment of the how the country functions with respect to a large number of questions.

There is no indication whatsoever who the experts are, where they’re from, or why we should take their perception as fact.

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IntelligentBloop t1_jc9458v wrote

Okay, so what's the alternative?

Who will define the set of metrics or indicators that will measure the degree of democracy, if not a group of 'experts' whose input is compiled together?

I do agree that they could be transparent about this (and to be fair, I haven't examined their methodology to know what their methodology and degree of transparency is), but that doesn't mean that creating a democracy index is a bad idea.

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sisiredd t1_jcarrfj wrote

I don't know. Maybe not everything can be displayed with a single value. Maybe some things are so complex that we must describe them in more detail, and maybe some things shouldn't be ranked.

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