By: Mariano TurziProfessor of International Relations at the School of Government of the Universidad Austral.
There are many ways to classify political systems, with different measures and approaches adopted by different researchers.
The criteria applied by political science are, to some extent, subjective, and in fact, the discipline disagrees on the specific characteristics to consider or on whether one or more measures adequately reflect what a democracy is. Measuring the state of democracy in the world is not merely a scientific endeavor. It has a political impact, as it determines the degree to which people enjoy civil rights and political freedoms.
There are seven main benchmarks for measuring democracy: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), Regimes of the World (RoW), Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED), Polity V, Freedom House's Freedom in the World (FH), The Economist Democracy Index (EIU), and the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI). V-Dem, which measures the existence of democracy on a scale of 0 to 1, places Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba below 0.25 points.
According to LIED, these three countries are “one-party autocracies,” and Haiti is a non-electoral autocracy. The NGO Freedom House considers all four countries “not free.” BTI gives all four countries a score below 4 on its 0-10 scale.
For comparison, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia have a score of 7.7, and Uruguay a score of 9. The EIU—which also ranks countries from 0 to 10—gives Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela less than 3 points, with Haiti just above 3. RoW classifies El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela as “electoral autocracies,” a category that also includes Haiti. Polity V, which ranks countries from -10 to 10, gives Havana a score of -5, Caracas a score of -3, and Managua a score of 6; one point below Bolivia and one point above Ecuador.
It is simply not true that everyone at the CELAC Summit was “elected by their people,” as the Argentine president claimed. Biology, with its study of evolution; environmental science, with its study of climate change; and medicine, with its study of COVID-19, all put a stop to the deniers who, from positions of power, sought to manipulate reality for their own benefit. When those in power attempt to manipulate knowledge, they should be challenged by the scientific community, which should not endorse the distortion of reality for reasons of political affiliation or economic expediency.
