Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics

Preface

Preface ........................................................................................................................... The measurement of political concepts, and of democracy in particular, has emerged as a key issue in academic and political circles. Political scientists, responding to the process of democratization that transformed global politics in the late twentieth century, started to address the need for systematic information to analyze this political trend in earnest in the 1990s. Increasingly , this search for data led many researchers to address the methodological issues involved in measuring concepts such as democracy. Thus, a rich literature on measurement methodology developed in tandem with the rapid multiplication of data generation initiatives. This interest among political scientists in measurement has been broad-based and has not shown signs of waning. Indeed, we are in the midst of the most significant collective drive to produce political data in a methodologically self-conscious manner since the efforts launched by Karl Deutsch and Stein Rokkan in the early 1960s. Beyond academia, the promotion of democracy has became a concern of a broad spectrum of actors since the end of the cold war, and, as an inextricable part of democracy promotion programs, concerted efforts have been made to monitor democracy in countries around the world. Intergovernmental organizations, including the European Union, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Organization of American States (OAS), and nongovernmental organizations, such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and the Carter Center, evaluate whether elections are free and fair. The U.S. government uses various datasets on democracy and politics to determine which countries shall be allocated development assistance funds in a new and innovative program, the Millennium Challenge Account. And many other public and private institutions routinely collect data on aspects of politics, such as the funding of political parties and political campaigns, the health of political parties, the xii PREFACE working of parliaments and the judiciary, corruption of public officials, public access to information and media freedom, and the capacity of states to implement public policies. In short, the design of instruments to measure democracy and other related concepts, and the generation of data on these concepts, have become a priority in the worlds of scholarship and politics. This book brings together a series of writings that contribute to this measurement revolution in political science and the political world. It offers a discussion of the methodology of measurement that systematizes what current thinking has to offer to the specific problems that pertain to the measurement of political concepts. It focuses on the design of instruments to measure democracy, deriving specific lessons from a thorough and comprehensive assessment of existing methodologies. It presents two new measurement instruments prepared by the author for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the OAS, unique testaments of the new role of quantitative data about politics in the political process itself. The book also outlines an agenda for future research geared at developing measures of democracy that extend beyond its electoral aspect as well as of other closely related political concepts. Taken as a whole, this book offers a methodologically rigorous and grounded discussion about how to measure democracy , a rare look at an experience in which a bridge was tended between the worlds of scholarship and politics, and a discussion of steps that can be taken to maintain the momentum of the current measurement revolution. This book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 calls attention to the stakes of measures of democracy. It offers an overview of the rise of democracy promotion and shows how data, understood as quantitative or numerical representations of reality, have been used for a variety of purposes in the context of democracy promotion activities. Thus, it makes the case that measuring democracy is not solely an academic matter. Furthermore, because some common and blatant misuses of data raise questions about the legitimacy of using data in democracy promotion, it shows there is a need for engaged scholarship—that is, for academics eager to contribute to the collective effort to bring knowledge to bear on politics. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a discussion of central methodological issues in the measurement of democracy. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive and integrated framework for research on measurement and employs the proposed framework to assess a variety of democracy indices. The framework, which constitutes a point of reference in subsequent chapters, distinguishes PREFACE xiii three challenges involved in the production of data—conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation...