How Deep is Your Democracy? : A New Institutional Approach to Measuring Democratization

This paper develops a new alternative methodology for measuring and comparing the depth of national democracies or 'levels of democratization'. It does so by comparing and scoring 12 representative and participatory national-level legislative and executive government institutions across 30 OECD countries during the 2000s. The paper begins with a theoretical exploration of democratic inclusiveness that builds off of recent insights from Arend Lijphart, John Gerring and other empirical scholars of democracy. It then applies these insights by gathering and codifying a new and comprehensive dataset of democratic sub-institutions including but not limited to electoral systems, campaign finance regulations, and voter registration rules in advanced developed countries. The empirical results are then presented in dramatic contradistinction to democratic indices commonly cited in the literature such as Polity and Freedom House. The paper concludes with a reflection on how to better understand and conceptualize the different levels of democratization across countries that are often lumped together into the coarse category of democracies