Comparing Democracies
Further Techniques for Measuring Democracy
The democracy assessment methodology developed by Democratic Audit and International IDEA is part of an international drive by political scientists since the 1950s to provide measures of democracy, democratic performance, and democratic longevity.
The joint aim is to test a series of empirical propositions about the survival and maintenance of democracy in the modern world. Early attempts that tended to divide nations simply into distinct categories of democracy and non-democracy have been overtaken by "standards-based" measures of democracy that judge the democratic performance of a country against theoretically-defended criteria using scales which rank such performance. In addition to such scales, political scientists have provided both events-based and survey-based measures that use different data collection techniques and complement the scales approach.
The point of these efforts is to establish measures of democracy that are comparable - that is, they must "travel" to fit different political contexts and give scholars the capacity to rank the performance of a country along some pre-specified criteria of democracy.
In contrast, the Audit's assessment methodology seeks to provide robust country-specific measures of democracy, based on a pre-specified list of questions measuring the various dimensions of democracy. The aim is to enable and mobilise national citizens to examine their own state of democracy; and the results of the assessments are therefore not comparable in the same ways as extant measures developed in mainstream political science.
| We attach a paper prepared for EUROSTAT by Dr Todd Landman, Director of the Centre for Democratic Governance at the University of Essex and former vice-Chair of Democratic Audit, which outlines and evaluates the main initiatives to measure democracy, human rights and good governance, compares their relative value and addresses issues of comparability and advocacy: |
| Click here to download and read more >> |
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