Names of Nations and Their True Democratic Natures

Social Science++ Blog has a very neat analysis of the names of various countries and how democratic they are:

Sometimes it seems bad countries come with long names. North Korea is "People’s Democratic Republic of Korea", Libya is "Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya", and the like. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of counter-examples — it’s the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and "Republic of Cuba", after all. Do long names with good-sounding adjectives correspond with non-democratic governments?

The graph explains it all:

The upper rows show a substring and the number of names that are matched by it, and the average PR score. (These groups occasionally overlap.) The lower rows are several example countries for reference. So Republics are ever so slightly less democratic than your average non-Republic, and also amusingly, Kingdoms edge them out too. But Democratic, People’s, Socialist, Islamic and Arab countries are definitely the big-time un-democracies, while the only clear winners on the other side are Commonwealths and Principalities.

Link – via The Good Reverend