as well as the bounded nature
of many national-level democracy scales. In this study, 16 countries maintained the
maximum democracy value for all years under analysis and another country had no
variance but at a lower democracy level. It is also worth pointing out that 20 countries
achieved the fully democracy status for at least 1 year during the course of this study,
and 13 of those maintained that level through 2003. Figure 1 graphically summarizes
the mean level of democracy rankings over time in relation to the mean distributions
of newspapers, radios, televisions, and sociopolitical instability for the 122 countries
included in this study.