Special analysis · Bayesian HGLM · Peer review pending
Does democracy protect scientific integrity?
We modeled retractions per 1,000,000 publications against the EIU Democracy Index, adjusting for GDP per capita, control of corruption, government effectiveness, and international collaboration in a Bayesian hierarchical negative-binomial model. The country-year association is weak and negative — directionally consistent with more democratic countries retracting less, but far from deterministic and sensitive to how publication volume is handled.
Pearson r
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Democracy IRR
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rate ratio, multivariate
Corruption-control β
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control of corruption (WGI)
Countries
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in current analysis
Figure 1
Democracy index vs. retraction rate, by country
FullFlawedHybridAuthoritarian
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Reading the chart. Each point is a country-year, sized by total publication output and colored by the dataset’s EIU regime classification. Rates are per 1,000,000 publications, so tiny-output countries can post very high values from a handful of retractions — read the cloud, not the extremes.
Average retraction rate by region
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Figure 2
Effect-size ladder
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Country-year panel · highest rates
| Country | Region | Regime | Democracy | Rate / 1M | Publications |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Caveats
What this doesn’t prove
- Correlation is not causation. Regimes vary on many axes; we control for some but not all confounders.
- Retraction detection may be higher in democracies with more transparent journals, partially confounding the observed gradient.
- Publication volume estimates use OpenAlex, which under-counts some non-English literature.
- The model treats country-years as exchangeable conditional on covariates; serial correlation within countries is partially addressed via random effects.