Concern about the health of democratic governments has been rising worldwide, and one of the key metrics researchers use to measure the robustness of a democracy is its ability to conduct free and fair elections.
With the United States in the midst of a polarized presidential election, we here at Science News have taken a close look at the science of studying democracies and what characteristics make them strong — or can destabilize them.
It turns out that how best to measure democracy is itself contentious. Some researchers argue it should be binary — there’s either a peaceful transfer of power from an incumbent who lost at the polls, or there’s not. Others think the calculus is much more nuanced. Political scientists who favor the second approach note that some countries are democratic-ish — they do better or worse on individual metrics including executive respect for the constitution or a free press. Researchers can use those indices to plot governments along a continuum, from least to most democratic.
I was surprised to learn that a key research effort, Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, has calculated values on the status of liberal democracies all the way back to 1900. That’s the year when Republican President William McKinley won re-election, fending off a challenge from Democratic Rep. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. McKinley pushed an imperialist foreign policy, having just won the Spanish-American War that gained independence for Cuba and wrested Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain. Bryan argued against the pursuit of empire and for an economic policy based on free trade and “bimetallism,” backing U.S. currency not just with gold but also with silver.
The United States’ liberal democracy score has risen steadily since the McKinley-Bryan election, with some ups and downs along the way. The score has dipped in the last decade, and political scientists say even a small decline is concerning. People seem to agree. A recent poll found that more than 60 percent of U.S. respondents think democracy is at risk depending on who wins this year’s presidential election. But the United States also has factors that make a democratic system more resilient, political scientists say, including independent media and civic organizations, intense competition between political parties and public engagement in the electoral process.
Should you wish to take a breather from the election, we offer an exploration of another quandary in measurement — the masses of neutrinos. Researchers have not yet been able to pin down that key attribute of these subatomic particles, with particle physicists and cosmologists using different approaches to measure them and coming up with contradicting answers, senior physics writer Emily Conover reports (SN: 9/20/24). Neutrinos and their masses influence the configuration of the cosmos, so both sides really want to get this thing figured out. Recent results from the DESI experiment can be explained by positing neutrinos with negative mass, which has physicists thinking that the cosmos might be weirder than they imagined. As one cosmologist tells Conover, if you take the results at face value, “then clearly we need new physics.”