“Under-performing Russia in terms of democratic accountability isn’t easy to do, but Azerbaijan managed to do it”

From an article published by Forbes last November, a couple of months after the Maltese government signed on the dotted line (well, it had probably done that significantly earlier, when it was the Opposition, but let’s not get into that) to allow the corrupt and abusive regime of Azerbaijan to own 20% of the new power station project:

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2012 democracy index (free registration required) gave Russia a less than stellar score of 3.74, which earned it 122nd place out of 167 measured countries. Its hardly a novel observation, but few democratic activists want to imitate Russia’s government.

And it’s not just the Economist Intelligence Unit. Freedom House also ranks Azerbaijan as “not free” giving it a score equal to Russia’s. The Polity IV research project, which provides an annual, cross-national, time-series on democratic and autocratic patterns of authority, also ranks Azerbaijan as being substantially more autocratic and repressive than Russia (in their ranking Russia is a highly flawed democracy, while Azerbaijan is an outright autocracy).