Automated Democracy Scores

New paper. Abstract:

This papers uses natural language processing to create the first machine-coded democracy index, which I call Automated Democracy Scores (ADS). The ADS is based on 42 million news articles from 6,043 different sources and cover all independent countries in the 1993-2012 period. Unlike the democracy indices we have today the ADS is replicable and has standard errors small enough to actually distinguish between cases.