The criticism of the V-Dem ranking of the world’s democracies points to the problem with its method of ranking. R Jagannathan is giving information about this
There are definitely flaws in Indian democracy. We should have no doubt about this because no democracy in the world is perfect in itself.
However, the Narendra Modi-led government has been needlessly unhappy about the fact that over the years several independent ‘think tanks’, from Freedom House to the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Swedish V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy), have Has consistently lowered India’s ranking on democratic indices.
Two things are important here. First, the government should not dismiss such reports simply because they are adverse, even if they do have some problem. If we find their methodology wrong, we should point out that mistake and get them rectified by talking to the rating agencies.
The problem arises when these ranking agencies also outright ignore legitimate criticism simply because it comes from officials close to the government.
V-Dem director Stephen Lindbergh recently said in an interview that the rating given by his organization to India was ‘fair’. He shrugged off allegations that the experts V-Dem used to give India a bottom ranking of 93 in 2022 were biased towards India.
Especially since Sanjeev Sanyal and Akanksha Arora, two critics of the rankings, noted that Lesotho, where the 2014 coup took place, was ranked much higher than India. Lindbergh indicated that the comparison with Lasotho may be racist. He claimed that the V-DEM results were based on high-level mathematics and therefore cannot be tampered with.
Lindbergh revealed that the experts used three of the five criteria. All these were kept confidential. These experts included scholars who are experts in their respective fields and have published scientific articles on the judiciary or elections in India. He also said that he has systematic scientific information about India.
For a country as complex as India, pure science cannot be used to draw conclusions, but behavioral science would be more appropriate, where biases can inadvertently creep in, consciously up or down a country’s ranking. There is no need for prejudice.
The V-Dem bubble is about to burst because of a research paper by Salvatore Babones, director of the Sydney-based Indian Century Roundtable, who has debunked the methods used to rank India on democracy. Professor Babons is currently doing research for a book on Indian democracy.
Professor Babons states that V-Dem’s ranking is based on five sub-indices which are elected officials, universal suffrage, fair elections, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.
Of these, the first two parameters are seriously flawed and the remaining three also have a lot of scope for bias. For example, major elected officials and universal suffrage were evaluated on the basis of the constitution of the countries included in the ranking. That is, if the constitution of a country talks about ‘election’ of officers, then it gets full marks. In such a situation, the countries that got full marks on this basis were Cuba, Libya, Russia, Syria and Vietnam. 131 countries got full marks.
India lagged behind as two Lok Sabha members from the Anglo-Indian community were elected till 2021. This law was abolished in 2021, but in spite of this, in 2022 V-Dem gave India low marks due to this.
In terms of universal suffrage, 174 countries were given full marks, including China, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and Venezuela. In this case, the world’s largest totalitarian countries and most democratic countries got equal marks. That is, if a country with one-party rule also gives voting rights to everyone, then it will also be considered as democratic as a country with multi-party system.
Babons says that the remaining three parameters ie free elections, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression were ranked purely on the basis of expert opinion. He underlines the problem by saying, ‘Political science is not a science, political scientists assessing the indicators of democracy is not like a chemist assessing the temperature of a liquid.’ That is, an expert’s knowledge of Indian democracy cannot be considered absolute and may be influenced by political, ideological or personal bias.
For example a judge may be an expert in law but we know from our experience that different judges may prescribe different punishments for the same offence.
An example of the subjectivity of experts comes from India’s poor ranking on the parameters of clean elections. This standard actually decides how accurate and fair the Election Commission is.
In 2014, India got 3.6 out of total four points, which has now come down to 2.3. That is, we slipped from the level of Switzerland to the level of Zambia. This is the situation when the ruling party has lost as many elections as it has won since 2014.
Professor Babons says, ‘The problem with V-Dem is not related to statistical calculation but to the wrong choice of indicators, problems in understanding the decisions and the bias of experts.’ In short, the problem is not with the model but with the data.
India should take two lessons from Professor Babons’s research. First, it should interact with the V-Dem and inspire them to change their methodology so that it reflects Indian democracy in true sense. Shouldn’t care what ranking we get in the end.
Second, it should formulate its own standards by which to measure India’s diverse, multi-religious, multicultural, multilingual and pluralistic democracy. Our aim should be to improve our ranking and not to change the V-Dem system.
Talking about pluralistic democracy, there are not many such countries around India. This can be compared to countries with a great deal of cultural diversity, such as the US or the UK.
India is the only country whose average district size is equal to or larger than more than 100 countries. India’s largest state ranks fifth worldwide in terms of population. In such a situation, using universal standards will not reveal the correct picture. We should always keep this in mind.
(The writer is editorial director, Swarajya magazine)
