Effect of Democracy and Land Language on Human Development Index

The factors that affect Human Development Index have been investigated extensively in previous researches. These studies consider education as an important factor and focus on the quality of education such as teachers’ skills, educational facilities and student conditions. Democracy has also been established as an important factor in HDI. In this study, we examined two variables, the democracy index and the land language index as fundamental variables of the Human Development Index (HDI). The land language index is a new variable created to signify the importance of the medium of instruction in higher education institutes, particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. We performed a multiple-correlation analysis with the available data to find the correlation of these two indices on HDI. We found that together, the democracy index and land language index had a strong correlation to HDI. The results of this study can have a significant impact on social scientists and policymakers and should be considered for further research.


Introduction
Finding factors that improve the quality of human life has always been important for social scientists and policymakers. Human Development Index (HDI) is a widely accepted index created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as a measurement for the quality of human life in each country. HDI is a summary measure of three indices: health, the standard of living and education. The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the standard of living dimension is assessed by gross national income per capita and the education dimension is a combination of expected years of schooling for children entering school and mean years of schooling for adults 25 years and over (UNDP, 2018). It is often used to rank and compare the welfare of people in different countries.
There have been many efforts to find specific variables that affect HDI, such as quality of education and the level of democracy. A study by Demirbolat, analyzed the correlation of the sub-indices of the HDI with education and precursors of international student success (Demirbolat, 2018). One important factor in the quality of education is the Medium of Instruction (MOI). MOI is the language used in classrooms between teachers and students and is an important factor for language policy planning as it can affect areas of learning such as lessons, test-taking and classroom interactions. In Hong Kong, a study done on MOI showed that the relationship between MOI and classroom interactions were better when the medium of instruction was also the first language of the students (Lo & Macaro, 2012).
Another important variable that affects HDI is the level of democracy in a country. The democracy index was developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) as a measure of the level of democracy in a country. Countries are categorized as full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. These categories are calculated based on five factors: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of the government, political participation and political culture (EIU, 2018). Nygard explained the effect of democracy as a factor that affects the ranking of countries based on HDI. He argued that democracy is a fundamental component of long term sustainable human development and the HDI (Nygard, 2020).
voices can be heard more efficiently by policymakers (Carson, 2019;Pogrewbinschi, 1914;Nygard 2020). The language factor is also a fundamental aspect of brain functionality that contribute to Education (Japhet, 2017;Okebukola;2013;Puteh, 2013). Further, Higher education has an impact on the HDI (Ebrahimi & Chavooshi, 2019). To include the medium of education at the higher level we coined the new term Land Language Index (LLI) as an index to represent the role of (MOI) at tertiary.
In the next section, we describe the methods used to test our hypothesis that there is an effect of democracy and land language on HDI.

Methods
Data were collected for the Human Development Index (HDI) and democracy index of forty-one countries. Data for HDI was collected from the UNDP for 2018 and data for the democracy indices were collected from the EIU for 2018 (UNDP, 2018;EIU, 2018).
Land Language Index (LLI) represents the number of people whose first language is the MOI at the tertiary level or in HEI divided by the total population. Land language data were gathered online for countries that had data available on the number of people who speak the language used in education. The language in higher education was chosen if the language used in higher education was different than in primary and secondary levels for the LLI calculation. If no distinction was made for the language between the levels of education, then that language is assumed to be the language at the tertiary level. For some countries where STEM programs had a different MOI than other programs such as the Philippines, MOI for STEM program was selected over other academic programs. For example, STEM programs in the Philippines are in English, whereas social science and arts are in Filipino. Therefore, English was selected for the calculation of LLI for the Philippines (IQAS, 2009).
The forty-one countries used in the analysis were selected based on which countries had data available online on the medium of instruction and the number of people who speak the medium of instruction as a first language. Then data for the HDI and democracy index were collected for those forty-one countries. Since the availability of data was limited, the inferences, mainly for the forty-one countries included in the study. Data on the number of people who speak the medium of instruction ranged over the last twenty years. This is based on the observation that these 41 countries haven't changed their medium of instruction in the twenty-year duration. Countries were not included in the multiple regression analysis if there was no information about the MOI or the number of people who speak the MOI as their first language.
LLI was calculated from data for a country's population, the MOI in HEI and the number of people who speak it as their first language. Land Language Index was calculated for forty-one countries with the following formula (Table 1): Multiple regression analysis was performed and tested the correlation between LLI and democracy index on HDI. Statistical analysis was done using Excel (Data Analysis ToolPak in Excel 2010) HDI was considered as the dependent variable with LLI and Democracy Index as the independent variables. Assumptions were checked with a residual plot (Figure 1) which indicated that the assumption of the homoscadescity is not violated and the correlation coefficient was calculated between the two independent variables with an r2 of 0.03 indicating no strong correlation between the democracy index and land language index.

Results
In this sec Index and Index, Lan Language

Discussion
There are many views on developing countries and why these countries face challenges to be classified as developed. UNDP developed the HDI to classify countries based on specific variables, but it isn't clear how other factors such as language in education and level of democracy impact HDI. It was investigated that the language in education in a country improves education practices and the HDI (Ebrahimi, 2019;Jepesen, 2011).
Countries that have the local language as the MOI in education have had success such as shown in a study by Puteh in Malaysia. The study examined the development and implementation of the Malay medium of instruction policy in the Malaysian educational system. These results showed high performance in Malay-medium of instruction universities (National University of Malaysia, UTM and UPM) at the higher education level (Puteh, 2013). Another study investigated the local implementation of the National Policy of Education (NPE) on the use of mother tongues or the languages of the immediate community (Japhet, 2017). The result of this study showed the advantages of Yoruba medium of instruction over English using a case study approach of Yoruba as the MOI for Ikire in the south-western part of Nigeria.
In addition to the education and language policies, it is important to consider the level of democracy for a country to increase the HDI. Previous literature has shown that living under democratic governance leads to higher growth (Acemoglu et al., 2019). A high democracy index value can lead to long-term sustainable development with factors such as economic growth and reduced infant mortality and should be considered as a fundamental component of human development (Nygard, 2020;Gerring et al., 2020). A study by Demirbolat also showed significant associations between educational attainment and civil liberties, political participation, GDP per capita, average years of schooling, expected years of schooling and happiness (Demirbolat, 2018).
Population and language data was not available for all countries, however, the limited data from this study suggests that HDI can be improved with a high level of democracy and the education policy in HEI particularly in STEM fields of study and should be further examined. Further, the data suggest that the democracy index has a lower effect on HDI when compared with LLI. This can be seen by the observation that, for example in India where the democracy index is reasonably good but India is still low in HDI.
In addition, more studies can determine the effect of LLI and democracy index on the individual factors of HDI such as mean years of schooling or Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (UNDP, 2018). This will determine the specific areas of HDI that are most impacted by language in education and level of democracy and will allow for more informed policy practices.
The importance of language in education and the level of democracy in improving HDI, in general, has been studied widely. The result of this paper shows that there is a strong correlation between these factors and HDI and should be taken into consideration when examining HDI. Therefore, further studies on these factors or relevant factors will provide more insight for countries to achieve a high HDI. These results may be relevant for educators and policymakers in developing countries.