It’s unclear whether Freedom House scores are used by researchers any more, at least as a dependent variable for studies of successful/unsuccessful democratisation. However, the 2009 Report has just appeared, giving scores for Free, Partly Free and Not Free countries for the period 1 January-31 December 2008.

All in all, according to Freedom House, 2008 was a bad year for semi-presidential countries.

Let us assume that a move from Partly Free to Not Free constitutes a collapse of democracy. In that case, one semi-presidential country collapsed in 2008 – Mauritania. Interestingly, Senegal also registered a change of status, from Free to Partly Free. No semi-presidential countries moved from Not Free to Partly Free or from Partly Free to Free.

In addition, Armenia, Bulgaria and Democratic Republic of Congo recorded a decline in their overall Freedom House score, even though they did not change status. No semi-presidential countries registered a rise in this way.

Unless it is my imagination, there is a data innovation this year. There is now an Excel sheet with the list of Electoral Democracies from 1989-2008 inclusive. Previously, I had only been able to compile a list of Electoral Democracies from the year-by-year reports and the full list was only reported from 1994-95. If this is a new development , then it is really welcome. Even though the time series is shorter that the standard FH scores, the concept of an Electoral Democracy is a useful proxy for some studies.

Semi-presidentialism did not fare very well in 2008 in the Electoral Democracy category. Three semi-presidential countries lost the status of an Electoral Democracy – the Central African Republic, Georgia and Mauritania – while no semi-presidential countries joined the list. Actually, that is not quite true. Turkey joined the list because of its switch to semi-presidentialism (if we count full years rather than part years of scores).