10.7910/DVN/WWYOHUPemstein, DanielDanielPemsteinMeserve, Stephen A.Stephen A.MeserveMelton, JamesJamesMeltonHarvard Dataverse2013Dan PemsteinDanPemsteinUnified Democracy Scores201320102013-07-102013-07-0910.1093/pan/mpq020286117527383578158746451322231387133910536226023text/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIItext/plain; charset=US-ASCIIapplication/x-gzip2.0CC0 1.0<p> Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. </p> <p> This replication package contains a series of R scripts and a source package which contains code and data for replicating the analysis presented in the article. The R source package contains embedded C++ code, has only been tested on Linux and OS X, and is undocumented. This is not production-level software; use at your own risk. </p>