NZ not too high for electoral freedom

A new report measures electoral freedom. They explain:

The project for a World Electoral Freedom Index was born out of conversations held by the author with members of the Political Science academic community in several countries. While many academic works aim at ranking countries on the quality of their democratic system, few of them have striven to measure the actual freedom and empowerment enjoyed by citizens in their capacity as electors.

This index is therefore likely to be the first attempt to classify countries according to their electoral freedom. To this end, it takes into account fifty-five indicators producing four sub-indices: political development, active suffrage, passive suffrage and elector empowerment. Altogether, the work is based on almost eleven thousand individual figures converted into a homogeneous scale for the one hundred and ninety-eight countries ranked.

They give scores out of 100 and outstanding is over 80, very high over 75, high over 70, acceptable over 65 down to remarkably low under 50.

The bottom ranked countries:

1. Brunei 4.5
2. Saudi Arabia 12.6
3. Thailand 13.8
4. Qatar 16.4
5. Eritrea 18.9
6. South Sudan 20.1
7. China 34.4
8. Oman 34.6
9. North Korea 35.9
10. UAE 37.4

The top 10:

1. Ireland 80.4
2. Iceland 79.0
3. Switzerland 79.0
4. Finland 78.2
5. Australia 77.3
6. Denmark 76.0
7. Portugal 75.5
8. Dominican Republic 75.3
9. UK 75.0
10. Lithuania 74.8

So where is NZ? Way back in 39th place with a score of 70.8.

Our sub-scores are:

• Political Development 80.6% (8th)
• Active Suffrage 83.7% (4th)
• Passive Suffrage 69.5% (105th)
• Elector Empowerment 55.6% (112th)