Transcript
Transcript: Democracy in Practice Series: Measuring Democracy
[00:00:02 Text on screen: Welcome/Bienvenue.]
[00:00:07 Annik Lussier appears in full screen.]
Annik Lussier: Hello colleagues and welcome to today's event, the fourth in our learning series titled: Democracy in Practice Series: Measuring Democracy. So, thank you for joining us. My name is Annik Lussier, my pronouns are: She, Her, Elle. I am the manager of the Human Rights Policy team at the Department of Canadian Heritage. I am very happy to be moderating today's event.
Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you from Ottawa, on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe People. I express my deep gratitude to past and present generations, custodians of this land, and I am grateful to be able to live and work here today.
I know that many of you are watching us today from different regions of the country and that you may be working on a different Indigenous territory. I therefore encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the territory you are on and your relationship with this territory.
The topic of our discussion today is particularly relevant in the current global context. We know very well that democracy is facing significant pressures, including rising polarization, disinformation and also a decline in trust in institutions.
Understanding how democracy is measured helps us to better grasp these challenges and think of concrete solutions that can be applied here and possibly elsewhere. Since I work on human rights files, I cannot help but reflect that these issues are closely linked, of course, to rights such as freedom of expression, political participation and the right of access to information, among many others, protected in Canada by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and also by our international human rights obligations. These rights are at the heart of the principles of transparency, participation and trust in institutions, truly essential factors of our democracy.
Canada, as you know, has a long tradition of valuing democracy and we are committed to defending it here and abroad. But how do we measure democracy? Do we all have the same definition? As we will hear from our speaker, measurement is complex, data is sometimes limited, methodologies are imperfect, and there is no consensus on indicators either. But despite these challenges, one element remains truly central, and that is that trust in democratic institutions is essential to the vitality of our society and our country.
As public servants, we have a key role to play in maintaining this trust and recognizing the signs of its erosion. To explore these questions, I am now pleased to introduce our speaker.
[00:03:08 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Claire Durand is a full professor in the sociology department at the Université de Montréal. She has served as the president of WAPOR, the World Association of Public Opinion Research, and is internationally recognized for her research on election polling and democratic practices.
To begin, Professor Durand will give a presentation which will be followed by a discussion and, if time permits, a question-and-answer session with you. So, throughout the event, you can submit your questions by clicking on the bubble icon and your questions will not appear in the chat, but rest assured that we will receive them. For those who wish to obtain an English translation of the presentation given today by Professor Durand, this will be available in the Resources section of the learning platform.
Without further ado, let us welcome Professor Durand who will dive deep into the subject with us. Over to you. Thank you.
[00:04:06 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: Thank you. Hello. I won't be able to answer all those questions in 20 minutes, but we will at least start to answer them. First, so, the plan, the context, a bit of history, who wants to measure democracy and why?
[00:04:24 Slide titled: The plan. As described.]
Claire Durand: Population measurements, how does the population perceive democracy in one's country? And what is the relationship between the measurements of experts and those of the population? And why are there differences? Basically, that's my presentation.
[00:04:46 Slide with graphic titled: Democracy in decline? As described.]
Claire Durand: We need to understand here that it isn't for nothing that we're starting to talk about democracy, about the decline of democracy. It really started in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. Before that, almost no one talked about it, for two reasons.
You can see here, starting in 2016–2020, many articles. And then, each year, it just kept increasing. Last week, in a single day, I received about 10 articles published in 2025. Why? Because of certain actions taken by Donald Trump, but also because researchers and the researchers who are looking into this issue are primarily American.
[00:05:41 Slide titled: The origin, the 1970s. As described.]
Claire Durand: Originally, it all started in the seventies. There's the Cold War, there's the Vietnam War, there's the nuclear arms race. There are two blocs: the Eastern bloc or the socialist bloc, and the Western countries. There are two indices that will emerge at this point: Freedom House and Polity.
[00:06:05 Slide titled: Freedom House. As described.]
Claire Durand: Freedom House published a first list of countries according to their degree of freedom in 1974. This was a list sold to governments and companies who wanted to know which countries they should do business with. This aimed to fund, among other things, Freedom in the World, which owned that list. The premise was: Freedom is best achieved in liberal democracies. The person responsible was Raymond Gastil. He would develop the criteria himself. He would then apply them to a set of countries, roughly 140 at that time, mainly basing this on articles from the New York Times. But the list was adopted very quickly, including in academic circles.
[00:06:57 Slide titled: Freedom House. As described.]
Claire Durand: Freedom House promotes… if you go to its website, it promotes the slogan: Expanding Freedom and Democracy, presents itself as the leading American organization dedicated to promoting democracy around the world through a network of activists fighting for democratic change in their countries. It is active in 140 countries. In the last year of the Biden administration, it received 80% of its funding from USAID.
There is a certain ethical problem here because there is confusion between Freedom House's role of measuring democracy and the role of promoting it, and not just intellectually, but we are talking about a network of activists who organize activities in various countries.
Research will also show that the index is biased in favour of US allies and against Muslim and socialist countries. What does the index look like?
[00:08:00 Slide: An arrow connects: Political Rights, Freedom House and Civil Liberties. As described.]
Claire Durand: There are two sub-indicators. From the start: Political rights and Civil liberties. Political rights, three sub-indicators: Electoral process, Functioning of government and Participation; and for Civil liberties; Freedom of expression, Freedom of association; Rule of law and Individual rights.
So far, so good, but I would like to point out that there are 172 questions that measure 25 concepts that are part of these sub-indicators. I would like to point out, because we will come back to this, among other things, that Freedom House believes it is very important that the opposition to the government is sufficiently strong; and in terms of rights, with the right to property and to create a business, we see that this is in line with the struggle between the two blocs in the seventies.
[00:08:48 Slide titled: Polity IV. As described.]
Claire Durand: Polity takes a completely different approach. It was founded around the same time as Freedom House, but it focuses less on freedom and more on elections being held. There are three concepts: the holding of elections, the presence of constraints on elected officials, and participation. They assert: Democracy is a management technique that provides educated humans with the ability to manage complexity. It is sponsored by the CIA, which doesn't mean the measures aren't good. But basically… and this is out in the open, it's not hidden, Raymond Gurr takes contracts for the CIA and the initiative is funded by the Political Instability Task Force, which itself is funded by the CIA. However, these are university researchers. It is, broadly speaking, overseen by the University of Maryland.
[00:09:51 Slide with graphic: Polity and three concepts. As described.]
Claire Durand: What are the three main concepts? Competitive election, Constraint on power, Regulated participation. So, is there… The question is whether there's regulation of executive recruitment, whether there's competitiveness in executive recruitment, and whether the recruitment is open. Then, whether there are constraints on the executive. And finally, whether there's regulation of participation and competitiveness in participation. So, it's a very, very, very factual type of measurement.
[00:10:26 Slide titled: Varieties of democracy (V_Dem). As described.]
Claire Durand: In 2017, Varieties of Democracy emerged. This was preceded by a whole series of articles that criticized, among others, Freedom House and Polity and that proposed a new measurement of democracy. This is an academic initiative being developed by the American University of Notre Dame and the Swedish University of Gothenburg. Now, it has been completely repatriated to Sweden. Democracy, according to V_Dem, means government by the people. However, the originality lies in the idea that there are several models, several different types of democracies: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, egalitarian democracy. They'll mobilize more than 4,000 experts. They want to have five experts per country and per key indicator.
This is an absolutely incredible company. It initially appears as a democracy initiative, where there is talk of a campaign to defend democracy. The goal is to openly demonstrate and promote the socioeconomic and security benefits inherent in a more democratic world. So, there's a stance being taken nonetheless, not only on democracy, but on its postulated effects.
[00:12:02 Slide with graph: V_Dem and its indicators. As described.]
Claire Durand: V_Dem has a big index called electoral democracy (Polyarchy), which is composed of free and fair elections, universal suffrage, elected officer, and freedom of speech and of association.
We must understand that the first three indicators are strongly correlated with each other, while the other two indicators are extremely correlated with each other. So what electoral democracy basically means is that there are elections and then there is freedom of speech or of association. They create an index here, which is a marvel in terms of equations, where we multiply the indices together, add the same indices, and then take the average of the two. In any case, it gives the result you see here, which I do not have time to explain.
Liberal democracy, as well as participatory, deliberative and egalitarian democracy, will be an addition to the Polyarchy index so that all of this is strongly correlated. Increasingly, the liberal democracy index is being used. In this presentation, I use the electoral democracy index because it is the closest to the other indices I want to compare it to.
[00:13:24 Slide titled: Evolution of democracy indices by region. As described.]
Claire Durand: What does that give us? What you have here is the evolution of the three indices, Freedom House, Polity, and V_Dem, from 1995 to 2022. The only exception is Freedom House, which starts in 2006, because we only have complete data from then on.
As you can see, the Western countries are at the top. Then, they are roughly in the same order in all indices. There is Latin America, post-communist countries, Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, and West Asia. The Western countries dominate. Is it safe to say that there's a decline, a decrease in democracy? More or less; but, in the case of Polity, certainly not, because there is a rise in democracy in post-communist countries, as well as in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa, with a recent slight decline. Then, in the case of Freedom House, there is also a decline nearly everywhere, including in Western countries, but only a slight one. Let me draw your attention to the drop in the V_Dem indices, because we will later see that it is a technical problem rather than a real drop. So, here's what we have.
We can see how it varies. What you have there is called a box plot,
[00:15:02 Slide with graph titled: Distribution of democracy indices by region. As described.]
Claire Durand: "boîte à moustaches" in French. So, it's the variation in the indices. Our indices are indices by country/year. We find that there's little to no variation in Western countries. Therefore, everyone is the same. Whereas in other regions, it's very different and fluctuates based on the indices. We have Freedom House in yellow, Polity in green, and V_Dem in blue. I'd like to draw your attention to certain points. First, the most post-communist countries in Polity here are the ones that are much less democratic, which are all the Central Asian countries and Belarus.
As we go forward, in Central and South America, and in Freedom House, Nicaragua, Venezuela. As for North Africa and West Asia, Freedom House informs us that the most democratic countries are Israel and Tunisia.
[00:17:01 Slide titled: Is democracy in decline? As described.]
Claire Durand: Is democracy in decline? According to Freedom House, it's slightly declining in all regions. According to Polity IV, it's stable in the West and in Latin America and has been increasing in other regions since 1995. According to V_Dem, there has been a slight or moderate decrease, especially since 2013. And then in 2024, V_Dem issued a warning, saying that since 2013, we have had a problem with a lack of responses. Some of our experts did not respond, and we realized that these experts were the ones who had been the most positive before. Therefore, the decline shown by V_Dem is false. And due to a non-response problem.
[00:17:01 Slide titled: What do the populations think?]
[00:17:05 Slide on screen titled: The data. As described.]
Claire Durand: What do the populations think? The collected data comes from 17 survey projects from 1995 to 2022, with 2,500,000 respondents who answered at least one question about democracy. This ranges between 1.2 and 1.9 million respondents depending on various indicators. We have three indicators: satisfaction with democracy; assessment of the level of democracy, namely to what extent is your country democratic; and support for democracy. This data is available on Dataverse.
[00:17:42 Slide titled: Coverage. As described.]
Claire Durand: With regard to coverage, considering all these projects, we have pretty good global coverage, except for West Africa, and a bit of the Horn of Africa, which we see right here in white. We have very, very good coverage in Latin America because there have been several projects there. And we have good coverage in Russia, as well, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were several projects going on and there is a practice that makes all polls consist of at least 3,000 people. And since it's based on the number of respondents, we have very good coverage in Russia.
[00:18:24 Slide titled: Average attitudes toward democracy. As described.]
Claire Durand: What does this tell us about the average attitudes on democracy? With regard to satisfaction, Canada and the Scandinavian countries are doing very well. However, I would like to point out that we have some African countries, including Botswana and Tanzania, here. And here we have, and it's very small, Vietnam.
Now, we're asking people, "To what extent do you consider your country to be democratic?" In this respect, Canada and the United States are somewhat similar, although Canada is doing better when it comes to satisfaction. Here you have China, which is one of the countries where the population considers the country to be the most democratic, as much as in Australia. Finally, support for democracy. There, the United States, along with a certain number of East African countries, will stand out as a very strong supporter.
So, this is maybe not the picture we were expecting when looking at other indicators where everything is going well in the West.
[00:19:32 Slide with graph titled: Evolution of attitudes on democracy according to regions. As described.]
Claire Durand: What this demonstrates, when we look at the evolution of attitudes, is that sometimes we had the West at the top and then Latin America afterwards; it was clearly distinguished. Now, we see a sort of jumble where everyone is kind of in the same area, slightly below or above 50%. However, let me draw your attention to what's in blue here, Latin America: a sharp decline in satisfaction, a sharp decline in perceived level of democracy, and sharp decline in support for democracy. The other region of concern is sub-Saharan Africa, which is also experiencing a decline almost as sharp as in Latin America. In Latin America, it had increased and then decreased afterwards. As for sub-Saharan Africa, it has been declining since the beginning. The same applies to the perceived level of support for democracy.
[00:20:28 Slide with graph titled: Distribution of attitudes on democracy by region. As described.]
Claire Durand: When we create the same graphs as we have for expert indices, hence the variation of the various countries and regions, we do not have this thing we had earlier in Western countries, for example—there was no variety. We have a variation that's similar in the various regions, but it won't be the same countries that will appear more or less democratic.
In post-communist countries, such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan for example, they appeared more democratic in 2005 and in 2014, but very undemocratic in the indices.
As we proceed and in the least democratic post-communist countries—we are talking about satisfaction—Ukraine in 1998 and Georgia in 2001.
If we move toward Central and South America, we had Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti in our indices. There, we still have Haiti, but it is Paraguay that seems to be one of the countries with a rather low level of satisfaction, this in 2001, 2002, and 2003. As for Polity, Venezuela and El Salvador appear for 2018. And if we look at Asia, among the most satisfied countries, we have Vietnam. Finally, we examine North Africa, West Africa, West Asia, where Freedom House noted Israel and Tunisia as the most democratic countries. We're going to have Egypt in 2001 and Jordan in 2007.
[00:22:09 Slide titled: Is democracy in decline? According to the populations. As described.]
Claire Durand: So, all attitudes toward democracy are in sharp decline in Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, North Asia, North Africa and West Asia. They're increasing or stable in the West, in Asia and in post-communist countries.
[00:22:26 Slide titled: What distinguishes experts from the wider population?]
Claire Durand: What distinguishes experts from the wider population?
[00:22:32 Slide with graph titled: Correlations between expert indices and satisfaction with democracy. As described.]
Claire Durand: I looked at the relationship between expert indices and satisfaction with democracy. What we have here, see for post-communist countries and for countries—except for Freedom House—and for North African countries, no significant relationship between the two. No relationship. For Asia, a negative relationship. The more expert indices consider these countries to be democratic, the less satisfied people are, and vice versa.
[00:23:12 Slide with graph titled: Correlations between expert indices and perception of the level of democracy. As described.]
Claire Durand: We have the same thing for the perception of the level of democracy, so no relationship for post-communist countries and North Africa and a negative relationship for Asia. The relationship is generally positive for other regions.
[00:23:36 Slide with graph titled: Understanding through comparison: U.S., Canada, France. As described.]
Claire Durand: We can take the United States, Canada and France to get a better idea of how it declines. On the one hand, for the United States, you have the three expert indices at the top, and at the bottom the satisfaction and perception of the country as democratic.
First thing to note: satisfaction and the perception of the country as democratic are still significantly lower than the assessment of expert indices.
Second thing to look at: in 2016, all indicators point to a sharp decline in democracy in the United States. But in the meantime, public satisfaction remains stable. And it remains similar after Biden was elected.
The other thing I want to point out to you is that, here, what you see in green is Freedom House. Freedom House gives 98% to Canada. By the way, I think it just gives 80% to the United States; 98% to Canada, where does Canada lose its two points?
Canada loses its two points because there is something called the Indian Act, which does not give the same legal status to all Canadians. And the second reason is the secularism law in Quebec, which infringes on freedom of religion.
We see that the countries here, we see that the indices do not behave in the same way. Populations do not react in the same way as expert indices, particularly in the United States. Why?
[00:25:19 Slide with graph titled: Relationship between expert indices and political and economic situation. As described.]
Claire Durand: What I did here was, I asked myself: are there socioeconomic, sociopolitical indicators that could help us understand why we have these differences?
I took a number of indicators. Voting participation. Is it a proportional representation system? The vote for the first party, the vote for the second party. The proportion of women in Parliament and the UN Human Development Index.
So, if we compare, we'll do it indicator by indicator. Participation is strongly linked to attitudes toward democracy, satisfaction, perceived level, support, it is high, whereas it is not significantly linked to expert indices. This is surprising because we think that democracy is, among other things, about participating in elections.
Let's continue. Proportional voting, in this case, is negatively linked to attitudes and positively linked to expert indices. Expert indicators view the fact that there is a proportional vote favourably, while the population does not.
Vote for the first party. We saw that Freedom House had the following indicator: Is the opposition strong? This applies to all expert indices. The higher the vote for the first party, the less expert indices consider it to be a democracy. The population does not see things the same way since there is a positive correlation between voting for the first party and satisfaction, the perception of the country as democratic and support for democracy.
As for the human development index, there is a strong relationship to the point where it is almost interchangeable between the human development index and the democracy indices. Whereas in terms of satisfaction, support for democracy, and so on, it is very low.
Finally, one last small point here, it's not a significant difference, but I would say that the proportion of women in Parliament is positively and significantly linked to satisfaction with democracy, whereas the relationship with expert indices is not significant.
[00:27:49 Slide titled: Do people prefer consensus democracy? As described.]
Claire Durand: Expert indices are negatively linked to voting for the first party, while satisfaction and evaluation of the country as democratic are positively linked. They are positively linked to proportional voting; the opposite is true for expert indices. Satisfaction and evaluation are positively linked to participation in voting, whereas this has no bearing on expert indices.
In parallel, I conducted an analysis on trust in political parties. Given this huge difference in confidence in voting for the first party, expert indices are negatively related to confidence in political parties, while attitudes are positively related.
Incidentally, I started all this because I was working on trust in institutions and I realized that there was a consistent negative relationship between democracy as measured by expert indices and trust in institutions. In general, the more the indices consider countries to be democratic, the less trust there is in institutions, with two exceptions: trust in elections and trust in the police.
[00:29:09 Slide titled: In conclusion. As described.]
Claire Durand: So, in conclusion, it is possible that there is a decline in democracy. This is what attitudes show, among other things, for Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. But the measurement of democracy by experts was first and foremost a political undertaking aimed at, among other things, improving the United States' image in the world by emphasizing freedom and contested elections in response to the countries of the Eastern bloc.
Therefore, we must be somewhat wary of the measures taken by the enemies of Western countries. Experts use Western democracy, particularly American democracy, as a model. We see as ideal two strong parties alternating in power; and at the same time, we complain about the polarization which is inherent in a system where there are two sides that are close to each other. They focus on the elements for which Western countries appear better than other countries. Only these components are taken into consideration in the measurements. It's sometimes quite surprising. For example, Western countries are not doing so well in terms of the proportion of women in Parliament. This is not really taken into account by most indices, and so on.
[00:30:28 Slide titled: In conclusion, continued. As described.]
Claire Durand: Democracy requires that the population benefits from it. That's it, government of the people, by the people, for the people. Therefore, satisfaction and perception should be considered relatively reliable indicators of democracy as practised. What information can we use to look at a country and ask ourselves if it is truly democratic? In addition to measurements from polls, voter turnout is a good indicator. The presence of women in Parliament is also a fairly good indicator. For citizens, governments elected with a good majority are a good indicator. That is to say, the average citizen seems to find it more interesting to have certain consensuses than to have, for example, situations like Belgium had, where there was no government for 18 months.
It is important to be aware that there are many factors that are not taken into account by expert indices. Local democracy is not [inaudible]. The reality of rights, that is to say that expert indices measure formal rights and we must ask ourselves in practice what does that provide? Factual data, beyond perceptions, are also important and are always compared. One might ask, for example, whether alternation, which is very important for expert indices, exists everywhere in Western countries? The answer is no, it does not exist in Japan. It did not exist for a very long time in Ontario, Alberta, and so on. So, basically, that was my presentation.
[00:32:08 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Very good. Thank you very much, Professor Durand, for this truly fascinating content. I think I have a lot of questions. I know that I also have colleagues who are listening, who are working on issues concerning democratic institutions here in Canada, and they will surely have questions to ask you.
Just a reminder, colleagues, whether you work directly on democracy issues or not, it is really linked to our work as public servants in one way or another. I invite you again, if you would like to ask Professor Durand a question, you can do so in the section where you can add your questions.
[00:32:50 Annik Lussier appears in full screen.]
Annik Lussier: We will receive them through our chat. Perhaps, before going to the questions of the people listening to your presentation, I would like to ask you a question. What interests me a lot is the difference between expert indices and public opinion surveys. Would you say there are advantages or disadvantages to using expert assessments rather than public opinion surveys? Let me give you an example: At another point in my career, I was working on democracy issues and at that time, we liked to receive Freedom House's annual reports because to us, it was a product where we could easily obtain information, get a global overview of the state of democracy almost everywhere. We used it as an important tool.
I am very interested in the differences that we see. Do you think there's still an advantage to consulting this type of document? Do you think we should instead turn to more complex instruments like V_Dem, for example, in order to perform the analyses necessary to produce our analyses?
[00:34:17 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Claire Durand: Listen, the advantage is... You just mentioned it, and it's essentially about having information every year, usually with a report explaining why the indices have or haven't moved. That said, there are several indices. There are two others I haven't mentioned: The Global State of Democracy and The Economist. That's the advantage, but we tend to go directly to the overall index, whereas in some cases,
[00:32:50 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: I'm thinking of V_Dem, for example, there are several indices, small indices, sub-indices that could be more interesting than the overall index, especially when we have indices that are factual.
This is the criticism that was made of V_Dem. There was a large panel and a special issue of journals on this issue of people criticizing V_Dem and saying that if we only look at the factual evidence, there is no decline in democracy. There is only a decline in democracy when we look at the insights of experts. One might think that experts are influenced by media hype, and so on. And besides, who are the experts? Sometimes, the experts are people from NGOs who have their own interests, let's say.
But the advantage remains that we have continuous information, and so on. But I think we should perhaps forget the reports and then look at some of the indices that could be extremely interesting.
So, the drawback, obviously, is that all the indices are funded by USAID, the Department of State, OSF, some Western countries, and departments of Foreign Affairs. Therefore, we cannot assume that it is completely separate. I am personally convinced that there is no undue influence in the measurement process. Except for Freedom House, where there is a committee of six people who come from the United States government and who can change the indices.
[00:36:47 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Okay. We're starting to receive questions from colleagues now, but I might continue with one or two more questions. I think it's really interesting to see that, of course, citizens are losing faith in democracy, and that's an interesting phenomenon. I think that for me, when I was studying, at the beginning of my career, for us, it was always a bit like the system. It might not be perfect, but it was the best system for advancing governance and respecting laws and the rule of law, of course, in the countries.
But citizens are losing confidence. So, is it really a question of institutions not keeping their promises, or is it perhaps because people's expectations of democracy have changed, that they expect a little more?
Claire Durand: I think we are starting to see actors who are saying that essentially, what people want is consensus.
[00:38:03 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: It's not a democracy in the fight between various groups, but a democracy where the world begins to say, "OK, what would be best for the country?" The loss of trust is somewhat present. It seems like... Also, the loss of trust in political parties is very strong, and political parties, along with unions, are the two institutions where the level of trust is the lowest, and this is true everywhere in the world.
It's really the fact that these are two polarizing institutions. I say this and I must certainly say the opposite of what the other person says, because otherwise, it's as if we were the same.
I think this is a discourse that is starting to take shape among academic researchers, to say that the problem is less about the quality of institutions than the polarization caused by the type of system, so that people probably think more in terms of consensus.
The other thing is democracy. We always thought it was the best. I was very surprised by what I found, I would say, but we forget that before the democratic system, there have always been governance systems that exist in all countries. So, countries in the third wave of democracy are starting to set up institutions that are somewhat modelled on those of Western countries, but we must take into account the fact that each country has a very different history. I think some countries felt that a model was being imposed on them rather than being allowed to move beyond their own model.
Incidentally, there is some very serious research that shows that the American Constitution was heavily inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy. Just to say that it wasn't us who invented democracy either.
[00:40:22 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: An excellent reminder, indeed. Do you think, or is there a dialogue on an international scale, on the responsibility of the creators of these kinds of expert indices, given that the rankings they produce influence international pressure or national political debates? Is there really a discussion about the ethics, the ethical values behind the creation of these indices?
Claire Durand: I would say that apart from a few more critical academic researchers, there are almost none. In fact, there are people who talk more about the establishment of democracy, a well-rooted establishment. The measurement of democracy is part of...
[00:41:16 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: The problem we have is that it's part of the promotion. The only index that is truly more independent is The Economist's index, but it's an index that is absolutely not transparent. We have no idea who does what, who gives what score, and why.
The responsibility of index creators should certainly be to ensure, for example, the independence of the experts they summon. But what I see… I went to the Freedom House website, now there are many, many experts, but they are often people who have at most a bachelor's degree, a master's degree. We are not in the realm of what we usually call academic researchers. It's extremely difficult. V_Dem wanted to seek out only academic experts, but this is not possible because there are not that many of them, for one thing, and academic experts are not always neutral either.
So, it's a little difficult. I think the first thing would be for them to completely separate measurement and promotion. These should be two operations that do not communicate with each other at all; that the same people are not there, that there is no relationship between the two. Because as long as there is a relationship between the two, one can assume that there are conflicts of interest.
[00:43:03 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Thank you, Professor Durand. So, I might move on now, because we've received a lot of questions from people listening to the discussion. Perhaps I'll start with more international questions. There's also an excellent question related to the topic... The question is: why is a higher level of democracy linked to lower satisfaction within Asia? Which factors do you think could help explain this lower satisfaction?
Claire Durand: I think that expert indices do not understand Asia well or are trying to apply criteria in Asia that are not appropriate. We know, among other things, that in Asia… Listen, the first surprise: the level of satisfaction is very high in China and Vietnam, among others. These are two countries that expert indices consider to be absolutely undemocratic. Incidentally, expert indices have no way to understand whether there is a certain level of democracy in single-party countries, for example. One might think that some of these countries are more authoritarian, freedom of expression is more controlled; in others, it is less controlled. What we do know is that several of these countries have seen their economies improve tremendously over the past 20 years. The population can also be satisfied because it produces results. The population looks at the results more than the processes, essentially. So, if it produces results, it works.
Annik Lussier: We also have some questions about other sources of indices. We mainly spoke about those produced by the West. Is it possible to compare non-Western expert indices with those produced by the West so that we can try to really get a better, perhaps less biased, overview of the actual situation?
Claire Durand: There aren't any. That is one of the problems, there aren't any. There are a few other indices which are, for example, indices made only in Europe.
[00:45:46 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: But I didn't find any indices that were created outside of Western countries. The funding isn't there either. However, there are many researchers, excellent researchers, who are looking at the relationship between indicators and satisfaction and perception of democracy in Africa, in Latin America, among other places. There are some very good researchers who are looking into these questions.
[00:46:18 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Excellent. It will be interesting to see whether there is further development of expert indices by other sources in the future. I might move on to one of my topics that I know very well, namely, respect for human rights. Here, there is a question about the fact, or the question, around: Is democracy a good measure of the respect for human rights in a country?
[00:46:51 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: Respect for human rights is one of the measures of democracy. I think everyone considers, all the indicators suggest, that this is an essential aspect. This is partly what explains, I think, the lower scores of some countries. I always try to look at things in comparison. For example, LGBTQ rights is an issue that has been discussed a lot. I have real grey hair, so I remember when it was forbidden in Canada.
But closer to that, when France wanted to legalize same-sex marriage, there was a very, very, very, very significant outcry. What I see is that we're applying a certain vision of LGBTQ rights, and I'm not saying it's not a good vision, but to African countries, for example, and we forget that ultimately, these rights are very recent in Western countries.
So perhaps we should let time take its course for things to progress in other countries rather than attaching great importance to the issue of minority rights. I am not saying that minority rights are not important. I'm just saying that, for example, I was talking to a Tunisian colleague who told me, "You know, in Tunisia there are five organizations fighting for LGBTQ rights, but above all, don't bring Western groups to fight here, it will make things worse."
So, it's partly about telling yourself that you shouldn't antagonize people. Human rights must be developped.
[00:48:59 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Yes, you also said that we ourselves, in Canada, Freedom House had noted improvements that are still needed and that we had gone down by 2 percent, I believe, given the Indian Act. The other example you gave is an example that, especially regarding human rights, there is always progress to be made all over the world, not just in certain regions.
I wanted to ask you a question that is perhaps more related to the hybrid regimes that are somewhere between democratic and authoritarian systems. How can we really assess where they are on the governance spectrum?
Claire Durand: It's difficult. Firstly, we are the ones who decide that these are hybrid regimes. And hybrid on what?
[00:50:03 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: Often, we have the whole question of elections, of free and honest elections, and so on. Then we have the question of respect for rights, the rule of law, and then we have the questions of freedom of expression, and so on. I'm not sure that we always look at those indicators, especially those concerning freedom of expression. I think that's often what people focus on: freedom of expression and respect for rights. Regarding freedom of expression, it varies considerably. We will have countries that we consider hybrid which will be restrictive on one level, but not on another; and others which will outright, heavily restrict freedom of expression. Freedom of expression also means access to information. So I think we should have more precise and factual measures of access to information, among other things. And I had one last point, but I just… I lost it. It will come back.
[00:51:15 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: I might take you in a completely different direction. This may be a question that was sent by colleagues at the Canada Revenue Agency, but it is a question about taxation, so taxes. Have you explored the idea that taxation forms part of the democratic pact, that is, that citizens pay for democracy when they believe in its value? Is this a measure?
Claire Durand: That's an extremely interesting question. I would say that I don't think anyone has looked at this. There is an index which is an inequality index, which comes back to this question of taxation, that is called the Gini index, which I wanted to use for my analyses. The problem is that, on the one hand, I think we only have it for 60% of countries; and on the other hand, my economist colleagues tell me that it is strongly linked to the standard of living, that is to say, the more the average GDP per capita increases, the more the Gini increases. In other words, it stretches.
[00:52:25 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: So, the United States, for example, have a Gini index that is the same as that of Morocco. So, how do we untangle all of this? But that's part of the whole issue of equality, among other things. This is an issue that no index of Western countries has really wanted to address, except for equality for the rights of LGBTQ minorities. They don't even address the issue of women's equality. The farthest we'll go, generally, is the rights of sexual minorities.
I'll come back to... Just before, I had forgotten something. I was saying to you, yes, freedom of expression, for example, or V_Dem, so I thought: Yes, freedom of expression is important; I'm going to go and see V_Dem's index on media freedom. V_Dem's index says: Do journalists self-censor in this country? Can you tell me how I can measure the extent to which journalists self-censor in a country? This is purely the perception of an expert, more or less an expert.
[00:53:45 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Claire Durand: So, I can't trust it, that's my problem. That's why when we talk about hybrid regimes, yes, but how was it measured that they were hybrids?
Annik Lussier: For fellow public servants who really want to look into the issues of measuring democracy, is there really a first point of entry that you could suggest so that they can perhaps learn a little more so that they can develop advice and carry out their analysis?
Claire Durand: Listen, there is one index that I looked at and that I did not present because it is very rarely used, which is called Global State of Democracy.
[00:54:34 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: It's the IDEA Institute, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. There are several sub-indices. There is no overall index, which is almost an advantage. They have a tool on the site that really allows you to compare countries on different indices. It's pretty interesting. I looked at the relationships between that index and a number of other pieces of information. It was the one that was best connected to what we think it should be connected to in a certain way.
[00:55:11 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Perhaps one of our last questions, Professor Durand, perhaps to conclude with a final question on human rights. Here, the question is about civil and political rights versus economic, social and cultural rights. Are civil rights—because you really talked about freedom of expression, political participation, etcetera, rather than civil and political rights—more strongly associated with indicators of democracy than, for example, economic, social and cultural rights?
Claire Durand: Most likely, but so little.
[00:55:57 Claire Durand appears in full screen.]
Claire Durand: Because, as I was saying, ultimately, it's very, very... Are there any formal rights? That's what the indices look at. Are there any formal rights? Are they being implemented? That's a question we don't look at. That's why the indices are more linked to, for example, voter turnout. We know that in the United States, there are phenomena of gerrymandering at the moment, where attempts are being made to restrict the right to vote or the possibility of representation in certain states, and this is not really being taken into account.
Does a state, like Canada for example, do absolutely everything to allow as many people as possible to vote? There are states that do it and there are states that do not do it very well. The turnout gives us an indication of that, to what extent the state was really concerned that everyone could vote and that it was really worthwhile. For example, there are countries that will keep members of parliament for minorities. Niger, for example, had one member for Arabs and one member for other groups.
In Canada, one might think: Should we have MPs for Indigenous people, for example?
[00:57:26 Shared screen: Annik Lussier and Claire Durand.]
Annik Lussier: Good question to ask. Thank you very much, Professor Durand. I believe we have no more time left, so we will bring this session to a close. Thank you very much for your presentation and this discussion. Thanks to my colleagues, of course, for participating and sending in your questions.
[00:57:41 Annik Lussier appears in full screen.]
Annik Lussier: I have really appreciated the different dimensions of our discussion today. For colleagues online, if you would like to better understand democracy and the challenges it faces abroad and in our country, please visit the School's website for other events related to this series on democracy.
Finally, perhaps a short word from my colleagues at the School reminding us that your comments are really very important for the development of these kinds of sessions. So, I invite you to complete the electronic evaluation that you will receive in the next few hours. Once again, a big thank you to everyone and have a good rest of the day.
Claire Durand: Thank you.
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