Area Chart of Regime Types

The Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem) categorizes state regimes or governments into 4 distinct categories as shown in the chart.

V-Dem characterizes ideal democracies or “liberal democracies“ as regimes with free and fair elections, along with enshrined and respected civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, etc. An example is Japan. An “electoral democracy,” in contrast, will have free and fair elections, but tend to have a poor availability or respect of civil liberties. An example of this is Brazil.

(Lührmann, Anna et. al., pp. 7)

Meanwhile, ideal autocracies or “closed autocracies” have absolutely no free and fair elections (i.e. elections have no bearing on who gains executive power in the state), and no assurances or show blatant disregard for civil liberties. North Korea serves as an example. However in an “electoral autocracy”, while civil liberties are still not assured, there exist some valid elections in very small cases such as for regional offices or they occasionally influence who gains executive authority. But, they occur with such irregularity or corruption that would not be present in their democratic counterparts. An example is Egypt.

(Lührmann, Anna et. al., pp. 8)

An area chart serves as a nice way to visualize the growth trends in a time series, and then represent relative proportions over that time series using shading. One might notice the sharp fall in the proportion of autocracies around the mid 1940s which coincides with the end of WWII, and then again in the 1990s which coincides with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But it appears that the most abundant regime type today are hybrid regimes: electoral democracies and autocracies.

Codebook:

Lührmann, Anna et. al. “Regimes in the World (RIW): A Robust Regime Type Measure Based on V-Dem.” V-Dem Working Paper Series 2017:47. 2017.

Data Source:

Varieties of Democracy. V-Dem Dataset. Ver. 11.1. V-Dem Institute. 2021.

Top Importers of Chinese Goods and Services Streamgraph

This visualization was a small exercise in working with streamgraphs. They are more useful than area charts when the emphasis is on the relative proportions of some categorical variable rather than the growth of the whole.

Data Source:

World Bank. World Integrated Trade Solution. https://wits.worldbank.org/

Choropleth Map of HRV Index

The HRV Transparency Project created the HRV Index as a way to quantify the economic transparency of countries. Higher, more positive transparency index values represent more transparent countries, and vice versa for lower, more negative values. Economic transparency essentially means how well a given state’s government reports its economic data to IGOs such as the World Bank. This can be measured by observing how many metrics, that IGOs request, that the country actually provides. More poorer countries seem to be more opaque than richer, more well-developed countries. This might be due to poorer countries having less bureaucratic capacity to actually collect, and then report the data. Moreover, more democratic countries are more transparent than their autocratic counterparts.

(Hollyer, et. al)

Concerns over economic transparency are important to consider since they help with the promotion and sustainment of free trade, and can serve as one measure to consider the overall transparency of governments.

A choropleth map is the perfect way to visualize a numeric variable vs. a geographic variable: HRV index vs. country in this case.

Codebook:

Hollyer, et. al. “Measuring Transparency.” Political Analysis. 2014. Web. https://hrvtransparency.org/methodology/

Data Source:

James R. Hollyer, B. Peter Rosendorff, and James R. Vreeland, 2014. “Measuring Transparency.” Political Analysis 22(1):413-434. https://hrvtransparency.org/