Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has issued a working paper dealing with problems with Freedom in the World Index, V-DEM indices, and EIU Democracy Index.
The Paper written by Sanjeev Sanyal Member EAC-PM and Akanksha Arora analyses three perception-based indices: Freedom in the World Index, V-DEM indices, and EIU Democracy Index.
Freedom in the World Index and V-DEM indices have placed India at the same level as during the Emergency of the 1970s.
Freedom in the World Index by Freedom House
Freedom in the World Index which has been published since 1973 by Freedom House, places India in the “PARTIALLY FREE” category – the same status it had during the Emergency.
According to the paper, “this seems very arbitrary as what did the period of emergency which was a period of obvious curtailment of various activities had similar to the period of economic liberalisation or of the current times”.
Moreover, India has been placed below countries like Northern Cyprus. Surely, this is not credible because Cyprus is a territory only recognized by Turkey, not even by the United Nations.
Meanwhile, the think-tank continues to treat Jammu and Kashmir as a separate territory since the early 1990s and now places it in the category of “not free”.
Democracy Index by Economist Intelligence Unit
This Democracy index is published by Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a research and consulting arm of the firm that publishes the Economist magazine.
India is placed in the category of “FLAWED DEMOCRACY” and its rank deteriorated sharply from 27 in 2014 to 53 in 2020 and then improved a bit to 46 in 2021.
The decline in rank has been on account of decline in scores primarily in the categories- Civil Liberties and Political Culture.
The paper argues that as India’s score for Political Culture is much lower than that of Hong Kong (7.5) and Sri Lanka (6.25), this seems very arbitrary.
Further, EIU in their methodology mention that they do not only rely on opinion of experts but also take responses for some questions from opinion polls, if available (primarily from World Value Survey (WVS)).
Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Indices
They are produced by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
It comes up with six indices covering various aspects of democracy – Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Liberal Component, Egalitarian Component, Participatory Component, and Deliberative Component.
The 2021 report of these indices term India as an “ELECTORAL AUTOCRACY” in the 2021 report, same as it was during the period of Emergency.
A common thread in all these indices is that they are derived from the perceptions or opinions of few experts.
These institutions do not provide any transparency on how the experts were chosen or even their expertise or nationality.
Serious Problems with methodology of these Indices
The EAC-PM tweeted the following thread which finds serious problems with the methodology used in these perception-based indices.
“The questions used by these indices are not an appropriate measure of democracy across all countries”, argues the paper.
“In recent years, India’s rankings and scores have declined on a number of global opinion-based indices that deal with subjective issues such as democracy, freedom and so on”, it says further.
There are serious problems with the methodology used in these perception-based indices.
First, these indices are primarily based on the opinions of a tiny group of unknown “experts”
Second, the questions that are used are subjective and are worded in a way that is impossible to answer objectively even for a country, let alone compare across countries.
Third, there are questions that should be asked but are excluded.
Fourth, certain questions used by these indices are not an appropriate measure of democracy across all countries.
Since these indices are inputs into the World Governance Indicators, the World Bank should ensure greater transparency and accountability from these institutions.
Meanwhile, independent Indian think tanks should be encouraged to do similar perception-based indices for the world in order to break the monopoly of a handful of western institutions.