Meaning: Index measures the extent to which people's enlightened democratic desires exceed exceed the perceived democraticness of their country, assuming that this gap between desired and perceived democraticness creates mass mobilization potential for democratic reform movements. The potential is the 0-to-1 standardized residuals obtained from regressing EnlDes on PerDem at the individual level and aggregating these scores to the country level by using the mean.
Source: Welzel, based on data from the World Values Surveys, all countries from rounds five and six.
Scaling: Multi-point index ranging from minimum 0, when a respondent's enlightened democratic desire is much lower than what her democracy assessment predicts, to maximum 1.0, when the enlightened democratic desire is much higher than what the democracy assessment predicts. Country scores are population averages (arithmetic mean) on the 0-1 index.
Remarks: Individual-level scores are normally distributed around the mean in each national sample.
Type of variable: Continuous
Last updated by source: 2014-03-01