The Quality of Democracy: Freedom as the Foundation

The paper begins by exploring the conceptual links between freedom, rights and democracy, and the institutional arrangements necessary to guarantee civil and political rights and fundamental freedoms in a democracy. It then sets out a procedure for assessing the quality of a country’s democracy in four successive steps: defining the appropriate democratic ‘goods’; identifying standards of best practice as a benchmark for the attainment of each of these ‘goods’; analyzing the typical modes of subversion which may prevent their attainment; and exploring possible agencies of protection against these subversions. After applying each of these steps to the subject of civil and political rights, the paper concludes with a reservation about the limits of purely institutional indicators.