A Better Place To Be- Republicanism and the Liberal Democracy index

Dr. Philip Pettit's theory of republicanism is a brilliant modernization of the classic theory of a domestic balance of power within the state. This paper takes my dissertation research, itself based on Dr. Pettit's work and pushes it from the theoretical in the political-comparative part of our discipline. Combining political theory with comparative politics, this work does two things. First, it creates a first-of-its-kind liberal democratic index, that used the political-theoretical concept of liberal democracy as the backbone of a standard democratic index. Next, it applies this index to understanding how to measure republicanism in the real world and figuring how close many vaunted democracies come to the ideals of the republic and liberal democracy. In a global liberal democratic crisis, it is good to know where major democratic countries currently stand. The fragility of the non-dominating state to some extent actually reinforces and underscores the desirability of that state.