TY  - JOUR
VL  - 18
PB  - Oxford University Press
A1  - Pemstein, Daniel
A1  - Meserve, Stephen A.
A1  - Melton, James
SP  - 426
Y1  - 2010///
IS  - 4
JF  - Political Analysis
ID  - eprints41
N1  - Replication Materials available here: http://www.unified-democracy-scores.org/replication.html

EP  - 449
SN  - 1047-1987
N2  - Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult?and often arbitrary?decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. We make the UDS and associated parameter estimates freely available online and provide a detailed tutorial that demonstrates how to best use the UDS in applied work. 
AV  - none
TI  - Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type
UR  - http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/4/426.full
ER  -