Replication Data for: How the Objective Approach Fails in Democracies

Little and Meng question the prevailing narrative of widespread democratic backsliding by showing that various objective indicators of democracy are flat over time. However, because recent democratic decline is concentrated in democracies, the objective indicators can only accurately test for backsliding if they can track democratic quality within democracies. This response shows they cannot for conceptual and empirical reasons. The indicators can generally distinguish democracies from autocracies, but are blind to variation in quality within democracies. Little and Meng are therefore showing that one form of variation in democracy is stagnant, but are systematically missing the very type of variation that has most informed current warnings about backsliding.