Coppedge and Reinicke present a detour to the realm political science literature dedicated to the conceptualization and measurement of ‘democracy’ by, instead, measuring ‘polyarchy,’ in strict accordance with Dahl’s eight institutional requirements. In Dahlian theory, ‘democracy’ is an intrinsically unattainable ideal type of government and ‘polyarchy’ is the closest concrete approximation of it. However, for Coppedge and Reinicke, this difference is merely a matter of semantics (consider the similarities between the variables they study and the variables studied in various other measures of ‘democracy’); thus, their measure becomes most clearly differentiable from the others studied via their usage of Guttman scaling, which creates an ordinal scale placing countries  into ranked categories. The application of Guttman scaling to their results eliminates a quintessential concern in quantitative political science research: how to balance the weighting of the individual components of any given measure; on the polyarchy scale, none of the 4 variables are treated as more/less important than one another. This approach is not without its caveats. Despite solving the problem of weighting, the use of Guttman scaling also results in a number of countries being grouped at top-tier levels of democracy, detracting from the meaningfulness of the results attained.

Overall, while I did find Coppedge and Reinicke’s approach to be unique and memorable, I am not entirely convinced of its usefulness, especially in the context of the regional democracy report. Furthermore, when taking into account its limitations in temporal scope (with data available only for the years 1985 and 2000), and the number of cases, as few as they may be, that did not fit into a ‘perfect scale type’ there are structural disadvantages to the utility of this dataset as well.