Replication data for: The Democracy Cluster Classification Index

Utilizing hierarchical cluster analysis, a new measure of democracy, the DCC index, is proposed and constructed from five popular indices of democracy. The results indicate democracy is a latent class variable. Sensitivity and specificity analyses were conducted for the five existing democracy indices as well as the newly proposed Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) index and a predicted DCC score. This analysis revealed significant problems with existing measures. Overall, the predicted DCC index attained the highest level of accuracy although one other index achieved high levels of accuracy in identifying non-democracies. This replication dataset contains data for 24 Latin American and 39 European countries (1980 to 2010) for Freedom House (FH), Cheibub et al.’s index (Democ), Polity IV (polity), Vanhanen's index (VAN), and Cingranelli-Richards index (ELECSD). Missing values were imputed using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method via SA 9.3 Proc MI. All analyses were conducted using SAS 9.3.