La entrada de hoy es una secuela a la entrada “Noticias falsas y torres de marfil” (en español) o “Fake News and Ivory Towers” (en inglés), como una modesta prueba de la estrategia circular de agit-prop del independentismo por la que un ítem de propaganda, se genere donde se genere, siempre hace un recorrido completo a través de los ámbitos académico, mediático y político (partidos y organizaciones independentistas, Parlament y Govern).

Hace unos días, Viure Lliure enlazó el ranking de democracia elaborado por V-Dem para 2018: “Democracy for all?”. Ello dio origen inmediatamente a un intercambio sobre virtudes y defectos de ese ranking y sobre sus resultados para España en comparación con los resultados para el mismo año de los rankings de Freedom House “Freedom in the world 2018”, de la The Economist Intelligence Unit “Democracy Index 2018”, y de la Bertelsmann Stiftung “Sustainable Governance Indicators 2018” (gracias a Abraham). En la línea habitual de la prensa subvencionada, y como resumen de todo lo que vino desde el secesionismo tras sus poco profundos análisis,  Nació Digital tituló: “El rànquing més prestigiós del món rebaixa la qualitat democràtica d’Espanya” https://www.naciodigital.cat/noticia/171217/ranquing/mes/prestigios/mon/rebaixa/qualitat/democratica/espanya, con el poderoso argumento de que: “…a diferència del Democracy Index 2018 del The Economist -fet públic la setmana passada-, valora fins a 450 indicadors de 178 països i, per tant, és més prestigiós que el del setmanari britànic.“.

Por los canales internos del blog nos planteamos que era un poco raro que un índice con tan “contundentes” resultados fuera tan desconocido [publicado en mayo de 2018, según este tuit del mismo V-Dem (4 retuits y 7 me gusta)] y que, precisamente, su conocimiento público surgiera por vía del secesionismo. Por lo que parecía, se trataba de un proyecto independiente, ajeno en su elaboración y creación al secesionismo, pero coincidían elementos que llevaban a pensar en la existencia de influencias y sesgos que recogiesen las bases de la propaganda habitual secesionista.

Así que, como ahora nos dedicamos un poco al activismo cibernético, nos pusimos manos a la obra para revisar si existía alguna conexión entre la elaboración del ranking V-Dem 2018 y su explotación por parte del independentismo, con Puigdemont a la cabeza. Porque, como con cualquier información de este tipo, aquí nunca hay nada inocente.

La visita al sitio web del proyecto V-Dem nos dio resultados parecidos a los que nos solemos encontrar cuando uno busca separatismo por el mundo.

Así:

• Uno de los “Project Managers”, Svend-Erik Skaaning, de la Universidad de Aarhus (Dinamarca), encargado de las temáticas de “Libertades civiles” del proyecto, es experto ‘abajo firmante’ de la carta de apoyo a los síndicos electorales que comentamos en la entrada “Noticias falsas y torres de marfil”.
• El “Regional Manager” del proyecto para Europa Meridional (Portugal, España, Francia, Italia, Grecia, Chipre y Malta) es Tiago Fernandes, de la Universidade Nova de Lisboa, también experto ‘abajo firmante’ de la susodicha carta.
• Finalmente, dentro del equipo del Centro Regional para Europa Meridional, otros tres miembros del mismo eran expertos ‘abajo firmantes’ de la carta: José Santana-Pereira, “Country Coordinator” para Italia; Filipa Raimundo, “Country Coordinator” para Francia; y Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, experta en Cabo Verde y Guinea Bissau para V-Dem.

Contrastados estos datos, consultamos los documentos del proyecto para calibrar la importancia de los “Project Managers”, “Regional Managers” y “Country Coordinators” para los objetivos y resultados finales del proyecto y, por tanto, para la fiabilidad y credibilidad última del ranking.

El rol trascendental de esos expertos abajo firmantes nos hizo dirigirnos al Director y Sub-directora del V-Dem Institute de la Universidad de Gotemburgo con el siguiente escrito:

“Dear Prof. Lindberg and Prof. Lührmann (V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg):

We are writing to you as Director and Deputy Director of the V-Dem Institute to bring to your attention our concern for something to do with the image and credibility of your V-Dem project. But before we go ahead with the details of our concern, please, we would like to assure you of our full identification with the mission of the project as well as our appreciation of the huge effort put in place by your team not only in terms of the theoretical issues involved, but also in terms of the complex methodology to be implemented in the collection and treatment of data and, especially, in terms of the extra amount of transparency displayed by making publicly available all your sources, data, reports and technical documentation, which of course will be of the utmost importance and help not only for social scientists but also for policy makers, social agents and institutions all around the world; in short, the “Benefits of V-Dem” as listed in your website.

Now to our concern, which is to do with the fact that several members of your team are signatories to the following letter in support of Catalan colleagues charged by the public prosecutors in Spain (for your convenience we highlight the contested passages in this text, which can be accessed at: https://helpcatalonia.wordpress.com/ ):

“This letter expresses our indignation over the decision by the Spanish judiciary to prosecute two political scientists and three jurists. The political scientists Jordi Matas (full professor, Universitat de Barcelona), Tània Verge (associate professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) and the jurists Marc Marsal (part-time lecturer, Universitat de Barcelona), Josep Pagès (part-time lecturer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Marta Alsina (lawyer) were appointed members of the Electoral Commission in September 2017 by the Parliament of Catalonia to monitor the self-determination referendum to be held on October 1, 2017. The Spanish government challenged the legality of this referendum and about ten days before it took place, the Spanish Constitutional Court forced all the electoral commissioners to resign by imposing a fine of 12.000 Euros per person for each day that they remained in their position. Even though they resigned, the Spanish judiciary went a step further and decided to prosecute the members of the Electoral Commission. They currently face criminal charges of “disobedience” and “usurpation of functions” and are facing the very real possibility of up to two years and nine months in prison.

It is probably the first time in the history of the European Union that political scientists and jurists are being threatened with a prison sentence for just doing their job, which is both outrageous and disproportionate. After all, these political scientists and jurists’ only ‘crime’ consisted in using their expertise to guarantee that the referendum would be held in a fair and impartial way. In doing so, they acted at the request of the Parliament of Catalonia which had a valid legal mandate at the time that derived from Act 19/2017 relating to the self-determination referendum of Catalonia. Our colleagues therefore did nothing illegal since the Spanish Criminal Code does not have any specific legal provision to punish the organising of referendums, even if they are not authorised by the central state. Thus, their prosecution is not only a spurious one but is also grounded in political reasons, which is a blatant violation of human rights.

We, the undersigned, professors of political science, law and other disciplines, denounce Spain’s persecution of basic democratic and civil rights. While we do not seek to take a position on Catalonia’s independence in this letter, we firmly condemn the illegality of imprisoning someone because of her or his political beliefs. The global community of university professors is indignant over the prosecution of our colleagues and demand the immediate removal of the threat of a prison sentence and the dropping of all criminal charges filed against them”.

As you can see for yourselves, there is too much distortion, disinformation and manipulation in this text; however, there is no point in asking you to lose your time in the details, especially as you can have all of them clearly arranged in the following entry in our weblog “Cita Falsa”: https://citafalsa.com/2019/01/07/fake-news-and-ivory-towers/.

Before giving you the names of the members of your team who are signatories of this letter, please, be sure that this is nothing to do with any position whatsoever about the controversial issue of Catalan independence, as the signatories themselves so clearly posit in the text signed by them. It is obvious that freedom of expression is one of the highest-level components of Democracy and the members of your team are free to sign and make publicly available as many declarations as they wish about any issue they might think advisable, be it as experts or as common people. But, of course, if they make them public, in this case as experts, freedom of expression is as well to do with the reaction of the readers of those declarations, and especially so if they are so distorted, misinformed and manipulated like the one above.

So, these are the expert signatories of the letter who are members of your team:

Dr. Svend-Erik Skaaning (Denmark), Project Manager for Civil Liberties

Dr. Tiago Fernandes (Portugal), Regional Manager Southern Europe

José Santana-Pereira (Portugal), Country Coordinator on Italy

Filipa Raimundo (Portugal), Country Coordinator on France

Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, member of the Team for the V-Dem Regional Centre for Southern Europe.

The distortions, misinformation and manipulations (fake news, indeed) in the text above are well documented in our weblog entry for everyone to see for themselves, so we are going right now to our concerns in what they are to do with the V-Dem project:

A – According to your document “Organization and Management V.8 April 2018”, “Project Managers (PMs), along with the P[rincipal]I[nvestigator]s, were instrumental in the development of survey questions and the preparation of the collection of data in specific substantive areas.[…] The diverse specialization of the team and the division of labor enable us to define concepts, identify existing data sources, and create survey questions that reflect the wide ranging work and accumulated knowledge on these topics. It also allows for a decentralized system of informal consultation among experts (academics and practitioners) in these areas. Project Managers are also responsible for assuring cross-country equivalence for their indicators, so that a given question is not interpreted differently in varying country contexts”.

It seems the Project Coordinator who signed the letter above as an expert was not very careful in the very definition of several political science terms included, nor in the identification of existing data sources for the issue dealt with in the letter, as we have been able to prove in our weblog entry. Let’s hope he doesn’t apply the same standards to his job at V-Dem.

B – According to the same document above, “Regional Managers are responsible for identifying Country Experts and inspecting for problems of validity at regional level. Occasionally, Regional Managers manage only a single country, in which case they are referred as a Country Managers”.

The importance of the Regional Manager in the development of V-Dem activities in a specific region is paramount, as the texts quoted in C hereunder also clearly show. So, our concern for the Regional Manager for Southern Europe as an expert signatory of the letter of support is originated by his apparent ignorance and lack of impartiality in an issue with so many implications in one of the countries for which he is responsible so that he has to take so many important decisions about the data collection and treatment thereof, as well as on the measurement itself on many levels. Let’s hope he doesn’t apply in the selection and supervision of Country Managers and Country Experts in the region nor in his expert supervision of the whole process and outcomes the same lack of accuracy, impartiality and expertise on display throughout the letter above.

C –Again, according to the Organization document above, “A Country Coordinator is selected by the Regional Manager for each country to gather the type B data for that country. In the first rounds of data collection, they cross-checked A* data (see Methodology document) and assisted the Regional Manager with the identification of country Experts”.

According to your document “Methodology V.8 April 2018”, “Country Coordinators, under the supervision of Regional Managers, gather Type (B) data from country specific sources by. For a number of countries, research assistants at the V-Dem Institute have coded these indicators during the updates when the original series going from 1900 to 2012 were extended to 2017. As with Type (A*) and (A) data, this sort of coding is largely factual in nature. Type (C) data requires evaluation about the de facto state of affairs in a particular country at a particular point in time. Country Experts code these data. These experts are generally academics (about 80 %) or professionals working media, or public affairs (e.g., senior analysts, editors, judges); about 2/3 are also nationals of and/or residents in a country and have documented knowledge of both that country and a specific substantive area. Generally, each Country Experts code only a selection of indicators following their particular background and expertise (e.g. the legislature)”. And this about Country Experts recruitment: “First, we identify a list of potential coders for a country (typically 100-200 names per country). Regional Managers, in consultation with Country Coordinators, use their intimate knowledge of a country to compile the bulk of the experts on this list”.

Our long quotation here serves as a reminder again of the importance of the Regional Manager for the final outcomes of the project as well as for the reliability of these outcomes for a particular region. So any evidence about the possibility of a certain amount of bias, inconsistency or even lack of awareness should be of concern for the leaders of the project and the whole team. We also would like to notice that, to our knowledge, the Country Coordinator for Spain and Malta, Dr. Joao Cancela, doesn’t appear among the signatories.

Lastly, according to the “Organization” document above, “Country Experts code type C indicators (see Methodology document). The experts are generally holders of a PhD and usually residents or citizens of the country they are coding. They also have specialized knowledge in at least one of the thematic sections of the V-Dem survey.”

It seems Dr. Joao Cancela knows better about the deep and very controversial implications of everything around the Catalan independence issue, included, of course, the legal aspects covered in the letter of the expert signatories as well as in our response.

We are absolutely sure that both the V-Dem Institute and the University of Gothenburg have in place an academic procedure of quality control and improvement to deal with uneasy issues like this one. Anyway, we hope this exchange will be useful for your project in the long run.

Best regards,”

La respuesta del Director del Instituto y del Proyecto fue escueta, dos líneas, e inmediata. Ahorramos la reproducción literal, pero os la resumimos: gracias por la información, buscamos mantener los estándares más altos posibles. Ningún otro detalle ni comentario.

Simultáneamente, se publicaba un artículo en El Confidencial (“¿España peor que Venezuela?”) donde se aclaraban bastantes de los pasos seguidos en esa estrategia circular del independentismo a que se hacía referencia al comienzo de esta entrada y que se resume en la tergiversación de la información. Asimismo, es interesante resaltar la publicación de este artículo de Joaquim Pujol “On how the pro-independence press distorts an international index on direct democracy”, quien escribe algo perfectamente aplicable a las complejas cuestiones jurídicas que a veces se abordan en el blog: “a report which has a high degree of complexity and is difficult for the layman to interpret.” (…un informe que tiene un alto grado de complejidad y es difícil de interpretar para el lego.)

Hasta aquí, se podría llegar a mantener que la recopilación de conexiones entre algunos de los responsables de la elaboración del informe (anterior a la carta de apoyo a los síndicos dimitidos) y un determinado sesgo o intencionalidad en las puntuaciones es algo circunstancial y que no hay motivos fundados para dudar de la profesionalidad con que se aborda la recopilación de datos y su traslado a un informe. Bueno, de inicio tampoco habría motivos para dudar de la profesionalidad con relación a la “carta de apoyo” y ya sabemos todos que cualquier parecido con la realidad es pura coincidencia.

Exacto. Coincidencias. Svend-Erik Skaaning, el experto abajo firmante danés y, además, experto “Project Manager for Civil Liberties” se encuentra, según su curriculum oficial, de “Visiting Scholar, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2019”. Si acudimos al listado de expertos abajo firmantes de la carta de apoyo a los síndicos electorales, veremos que hay destacados miembros de ese departamento de la UPF en la lista (ahorro referencias personales que serían relativamente innecesarias y nos centramos en el informe V-Dem; no es difícil encontrar la conexión entre miembros del departamento y la carta de los síndicos). Será una coincidencia o, como de costumbre, seguramente no. En este caso, a diferencia de otras muchas veces, no contamos con pruebas directas, pero son tantas las veces que hemos encontrado “curiosas coincidencias”…

CONCLUSIÓN. En la primera parte de “Noticias Falsas y torres de marfil” llegamos a la conclusión de que, detrás de las firmas, podía descubrirse una absoluta falta de rigor y, a la vez, intereses académicos de todo tipo. Puede que sea una mera coincidencia o no, pero el periodo de inicio de “Visiting Scholar” de un Project Manager del ranking V-Dem y la publicación del ‘Real Decreto Ley de Waterloo’ declarando ese ranking como el mejor del mundo porque España ha bajado presentan una más que sospechosa coetaneidad.

No se trata de ser conspiranoicos, por cierto; se trata de reconocer que, en esto del procés y del independentismo, los círculos de la agit-prop siempre acaban cerrándose.  De forma totalmente espontánea y nada planificada, por supuesto.