World Leaders on Twitter - Top10 Rankings

Research Note: World Leader Rankings on Twitter August 2011 B:1 APPENDIX B: Guide to Political Scores The Polity Spectrum of Governance Government Types The Polity IV Project, a well-respected research group, tracks the characteristics and transitions of regime characteristics to quantify and compare political schema over time, and on a global scale. Begun in 1975, Polity is based on foundational research conducted by the collaborative work of Harry Eckstein in his seminal thesis, Patterns of Authority: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry. Since its inception, Polity has tracked trends in governance on a worldwide scale, and has become the “most widely-used data resource for studying regime change and the effects of regime authority.” The most recent rendition, the Polity IV Project, collates data through 2010 at the Center for Systemic Peace and George Mason University, with its main campus located in Fairfax, Virginia, U.S. The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system (i.e., states with total population of 500,000 or more in the most recent year). The Polity approach to analysis employs a unique methodology, examining “concomitant qualities of democratic and autocratic authority” in institutional governments, assigning a quantifiable score based on a 21-point scale that ranges from hereditary monarchies, which are scored at -10, to con- solidated and stable democracies which are given a score of +10. Polity Score: > -10 to -6 "Autocracy" -5 to +5 "Anocracy" +6 to +10 "Democracy" The organization makes no value judgments in its scoring model. It is simply a means by which change can be measured, evaluated and assessed and data collated. It should be considered an index – a measurement used to compare the status quo over time. As governments evolve, as new regimes gain or lose power, their scores change, providing a measureable means of tracking change in the way countries govern their people. Today, 93 of the 164 states recognized by the United Nations (57%) are considered to be fully democratic, or to put it another way, more than half the world’s population lives under a consolidated democracy as free citizens with a say in the role of their governments. In 1940, the number of autocratic nations far outweighed the number of democratic governments. When compared with today’s data, there is a clear trend toward a more democratic world – a trend that continues to grow as social media expands its sphere of influence.