This CIVICUS rating has a lot less fidelity. But both seem to be based off surveying political scientists and other experts. I guess it is difficult to quantify something as complex as the "democraticness" of a government.

It's somewhat funny that Australia and the UK should be lumped in with the US. Australia's democracy has a ton of features that the US system completely lacks; independent electoral commission, preference voting, an ecosystem of parties that have real power outside the two major parties, parliamentary system instead of presidential, and many more.

I think a lot of alarm over recent scandals is just the ongoing tug of war between order and liberty. People who support more liberty or more order are always quick to argue that recent events extrapolate into infinite of whatever they think is bad. Very occasionally they are right, but mostly they are not.

Political science, like all the social sciences these days, has an extreme ideological skew. Consequently, any subjective evaluation of the openness (or any other kind of goodness) of a particular country is going to partially reflect merely the extent to which that country reflects the prevailing ideological skew among the experts doing the evaluation. In the present climate, it's difficult to imagine a well-run democratic country with politics opposite to that which prevails in Western academia receiving a great score no matter how well it's run.

Personally, I consider these sorts of studies as just noise. I can't trust any of their methods or conclusions when the researchers are all drawn from an intellectual monoculture that demands constant activism in favor of that monoculture.

Yes, that's the problem with reducing all these things to one number.

From the "How it works" page

> We aim to share reliable, up-to-date data on the state of civil society freedoms in all countries.

I guess you can be more democratic than you are free? Also it's an index that's bound to be imprecise to some degree. And one is by a consortium of human rights orgs, the other by a company.