I enjoy the simple clarity of your narrative, but it kinda seems like you think that single party democracies aren’t “real democracies”? Whereas normally I think political scientists think the places that technically hold elections but which have a SINGLE political party are the “fake democracies”?
Looking around a bit, Wikipedia shares this impression enough to have a whole page on the criterion as a re-usable element of many such “freedom indices” or “democracy indexes” or whatever you want to call it. The criterion’s semi-official wikipedia name is “effective number of political parties”.
The value is mostly objective, in the sense that Wikipedia considers it to be a number they can calculate from independent objective sources. The highest is in Brazil (9.9 parties de facto with Belgium in second place at 9.2) while the lowest hovers a little bit above 1 with countries like Barbados, Monaco, Ethiopia, and Venezuela!
Thank you for calling my attention to this! That Wikipedia page is almost exactly the sort of thing that I’m interested in, as a “sociological measure of a situation that would be naturally relevant to picking the best electoral system for that situation”! Its a bit circular (since the number itself probably is partly determined by the status quo electoral system) but its lower level personal and social determinants could probably also be studied <3
I enjoy the simple clarity of your narrative, but it kinda seems like you think that single party democracies aren’t “real democracies”? Whereas normally I think political scientists think the places that technically hold elections but which have a SINGLE political party are the “fake democracies”?
Looking around a bit, Wikipedia shares this impression enough to have a whole page on the criterion as a re-usable element of many such “freedom indices” or “democracy indexes” or whatever you want to call it. The criterion’s semi-official wikipedia name is “effective number of political parties”.
The value is mostly objective, in the sense that Wikipedia considers it to be a number they can calculate from independent objective sources. The highest is in Brazil (9.9 parties de facto with Belgium in second place at 9.2) while the lowest hovers a little bit above 1 with countries like Barbados, Monaco, Ethiopia, and Venezuela!
Thank you for calling my attention to this! That Wikipedia page is almost exactly the sort of thing that I’m interested in, as a “sociological measure of a situation that would be naturally relevant to picking the best electoral system for that situation”! Its a bit circular (since the number itself probably is partly determined by the status quo electoral system) but its lower level personal and social determinants could probably also be studied <3