The publication of Freedom House’s 2009 Report reminded me that there was an update of the Polity democracy scores at the end of December. The figures have been updated to include scores for 2007.

There were several changes in the scores for semi-presidential countries (the Polity scale goes from -10 (complete autocracy) to +10 (complete democracy)):

Georgia +7 to +6
Kyrgyzstan +4 to +3
Mauritania -3 to +4
Russia +7 to +5

Polity’s scores are more difficult to interpret than Freedom House’s categories. However, Polity classes countries with a score of -5 to +5 inclusive as anocracies. Therefore, Russia has gone from being classed as a democracy to an anocracy, which means that it is more unstable (and also less democratic, of course).

Another way of interpreting Polity’s scores is that countries in the range +1 to +5 inclusive can be classed as Partly Free, or countries that are partly democratic. If so, then Mauritania joined the list of such countries in 2007. Presumably, because of the events last August, it will lose this status when Polity updates for 2008.

Bear in mind that Polity does not include small countries in its list (Iceland, Cape Verde and Sao Tome, for example, are all excluded from Polity’s classifications).