U.S. military interventions and democracy
There’s been much discussion recently about the U.S. “bringing democracy” to Iraq. I got curious about the track-record of U.S. military interventions (my list below is taken from Wikipedia). Being a scientist, I looked for some quantitative data on the level of democracy in each country. This is an obviously difficult thing to quantify, but the data from Freedom House are useful and reasonably objective and reproducible. They use a 7-point scale for two different metrics, political rights (PR) and civil liberties (CL), with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of freedom. So, for the record, here are the U.S. interventions since 1972 (when the Freedom House data start), the rankings before the intervention, the change in rankings immediately after the intervention (positive numbers = more freedom), and the change in rankings 5-years after the intervention.
The net change is barely positive, with on average no-change in the PR score and a 1 point move toward more constitutional liberties. 5-years after the interventions, on average the countries have also moved 1 point toward more political rights. The next thing that should jump out at you is how variable the list is. Chile stands out as the single worst U.S. intervention, as the U.S. sponsored coup substantially reduced democracy. Grenada and Panama stand out as countries that significantly increased democracy after a U.S. intervention. Now, of course, this kind of crude analysis cannot replace a detailed analysis by historians of what actually occurred in each of these countries after the intervention, but I think the data capture the broad patterns of change very well.
To put this all in perspective, below are the average scores by region over the last two decades. There’s a general trend toward more democracy worldwide, with the exception of the Middle East and North Africa. Most of the changes are small (a point or two shift), but given that they involve hundreds of countries, they make the effect of U.S. interventions on democracy seem very minor indeed.
