Looks like the United States is continuing its inevitable decline into a fascist Nazi socialist new world order, just like all those Tea Partiers predicted it would.
The latest round of global Democracy Rankings are out, and the U.S. has slid from 14th to 15th place, where it's now beaten out by Australia. The most democratic nation in the world? Norway. Then Sweden, the Finland. Scandinavia does democracy right, folks.
Democracy Ranking is an initiative launched by a bunch of Austrian political scientists and researchers (they put their own nation at 10th, btw) that releases annual listings of which countries have become more or less democratic. They also illustrate the results in neat little maps to better disseminate their findings across the internets.
Voila:
So how do you measure the democratic quality of a nation? I mean, besides 'arbitrarily'? Democracy Ranking employs the following conceptual formula:
Quality of Democracy = (freedom & other characteristics of the political system) & (performance of the non-political dimensions). The non-political dimensions are: gender, economy, knowledge, health, and the environment ...
The Democracy Ranking applies a broader understanding of the quality of democracy and refers to the following dimensions (with the following weights for the aggregate ranking scores): politics (50%), gender (10%), economy (10%), knowledge (10%), health (10%), and the environment (10%).
So, see? It's science. To even get considered for the list, your nation also has to have over 1 million people, and be considered at least "partly free" by something called the Freedom House.
Crunch the numbers, and the results look like this, I guess:
(List continues here)
Meanwhile, Tunisia, Bangladesh, and Libya were shone to have made the most progress towards improving democracy. Egypt, notably, didn't make the 'most improved' list. Yemen is at the bottom of the list of democratic nations, worse even than Syria.
There's a whiff of Anglocentrism to the whole affair; European-style parliamentary democracy seems to be the archetype by which 'democracy' is measured in these estimations. Still, the exercise provides an opportunity to consider the standing of democracy in nations 'round the globe, and to consider the ongoing evolution of our greatest political ideal.