POLITY IV, an ordinal measure of democracy, rates countries on their levels of ‘Competitiveness of Political Participation’ (Burkhart 2000a: 19). How does one define ‘multiple parties’,
and how important are they in the measure? POLITY IV does not directly
measure the number of parties. Can a country be truly democratic with only
two political parties? Does it make a difference to a country’s level of democracy
if there are multiple registered parties, but only one or two parties dominate
the system?
.