Democracy is a broad and varied concept that is not easily defined. Efforts to measure democracy therefore involve necessarily subjective decisions about how to define democracy, how to find evidence of it on the ground and how to compile that evidence into a numerical score. This HillStudy, Measuring Democracy, examines three widely used democracy indexes: those produced by Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The paper explains how these indexes work, how each index evaluates the state of democracy in Canada, how they differ from each other and some possible limitations of their approaches.
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