These charts explore conditions that correlate to authoritarian government. They use data from the "Polity V" dataset (http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity), rating governments from -10 (fully democratic) to 10 (fully authoritarian). We selected 50 countries that were distributed across the Polity V measure in 2018, and plotted their scores against other conditions.

Finding the right data across countries to test a hypothesis well can be very difficult. In these exercises at the end of each chapter, some charts are interesting because they show patterns, but some are interesting because they don't—suggesting that certain concepts are hard to measure. For each chart, consider what is being measured and why we might (or might not) expect such data to capture a meaningful pattern in the world.