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Social Indicators Research
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research 1/2013

01.01.2013

Aggregating Political Dimensions: Of the Feasibility of Political Indicators

verfasst von: Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Diana Buitrago, Andrea González

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 1/2013

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Abstract

Political indicators are widely used in academic writing and decision making, but remain controversial. This paper discusses the problems related to the aggregation functions they use. Almost always, political indicators are aggregated by weighted averages or summations. The use of such functions is based on untenable assumptions (existence of homogeneous substitution rates, total compensation, and strict monotonicity). We show through concrete examples how these hidden assumptions are likely to produce results that are basically an artifact of ad hoc decisions, which additionally contradict very fundamental notions common to all credible political theories. We suggest, also through example, that some—necessarily partial—solutions are possible.
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Fußnoten
1
See for example http://​www.​carleton.​ca/​cifp/​gdp_​indicator_​descriptions.​ht. From now on, we will use somewhat inexactly expressions as “indicator”, “index”, and “measure” as synonymous.
 
3
This includes also indexes that apparently constitute exceptions. For example, the Worldwide Governance Indicator uses an aggregation function which is more sophisticated than others. By the Unobserved Components Method, the WGI tries to isolate the signal from the noise sent by each variable. However, the outcome of this operation, as the coordinators of the index explicitly acknowledge, “is simply a weighted average of the rescaled scores for each country” (Kaufmann et al. 2010, p. 10). Something similar can be said about Polity IV (2010), see below.
 
4
It subtracts autocracy from democracy, and adds the variables of democracy and autocracy to obtain the respective scores. However, below this operation, there is a non-linear transformation of the scales, sending to zero the score of categories that are below a cut-off point. These transformations have their own issues, but we will concentrate here on the “high level” operation over the scores, not in the way the scores themselves were produced.
 
8
Adding numerical tags from ordinal scales is far from uncontroversial, but we will drop the issue here.
 
9
In economy typically individuals are taking decisions on their behalf. In politics they are habitually discussing rules that will apply for everybody, or for large chunks of the population.
 
10
For analogous exercises, see the Bouyssou et al. (2000) discussion of the Human Development Index, and other examples, p. 57. Anybody who is familiar in the way PIs are used in regressions will see that this kind of transformation is everything but extraordinary.
 
11
In that they use basically the same method, averages or summations, but plug in different parameters.
 
12
Rather atypically, and strangely, the FSI does not deal explicitly with variables. Each box has a mark, based on a soft assessment of criteria that “are neither exclusive nor exhaustive”. http://​www.​fundforpeace.​org/​web/​index.​php?​option=​com_​content&​task=​view&​id=​452&​Itemid=​900.
 
13
We took subsets of size two because there are more of them than subsets of size four, three or one. In each of these choices the exercise we present here is much easier to perform.
 
14
Additionally, we found in the process of correcting the paper that there were many forms of obtaining the same results. That is, several other arrays of weights would produce a similar outcome.
 
15
The domain of PIs is bounded above and below.
 
16
This definition can easily be generalized for g with different domains in each of its variables.
 
17
Once the scores of the variables have been fixed. See note 4 relative to Polity.
 
18
In Beliakov et al. (2007) weights are attributed ad hoc. For a more general example in this vein, see Gutierrez et al. (2010).
 
19
Note besides that, since scales are sometimes different and the aggregation is generally produced through a two-step procedure, in practice the majority of indicators allot different weights to their variables. The FSI at least gives the same weight to all its boxes.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Aggregating Political Dimensions: Of the Feasibility of Political Indicators
verfasst von
Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín
Diana Buitrago
Andrea González
Publikationsdatum
01.01.2013
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 1/2013
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9932-4

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