Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach

Abstract

In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized ashistorical,multidimensional,disaggregated,andtransparent.We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017

“…Drawing on the large literature on attempts to measure electoral democracy (e.g., Coppedge et al 2011;Hadenius and Teorell 2005;Munck 2009;Munck and Verkuilen 2002), we argue that no extant measure fulfills all of the five essential criteria: (1) capturing all institutions in Dahl's concept of polyarchy; (2) providing disaggregated data allowing for analyses of dimensionality and inquiries into what lower-level changes account for the shifts in higher-level indices; (3) covering a global sample of countries across long swathes of time; (4) using transparent data generating processes and aggregation rules; and (5) providing estimates of measurement uncertainty. Extant measures meet only some of these criteria (for details, see Coppedge et al 2017).…”

Vote Buying is a Good Sign: Alternate Tactics of Fraud in Africa 1986-2012

“…country experts worldwide to collect data (Coppedge et al 2011(Coppedge et al , 2014. 15 In this paper we use the V-Dem data on the quality of elections and strategies of electoral manipulation.…”

“…The next section presents our theoretical argument and hypotheses pertaining to trade-offs between different strategies to manipulate elections. The subsequent section provides descriptive statistics on the development of a select set of qualities of 285 African elections from 1986 to 2012, using the new Varieties of Democracy data (Coppedge et al 2011(Coppedge et al , 2014. Section four discusses the data and methods used, followed by the results of our empirical analyses in section five.…”

Different Paths to Democracy in the MENA Region: A Configurational Comparative Analysis

“…Moore [47,48], for example, argue, "No bourgeoisie, no democracy 45 ," and Rueschemeyer et al argue that democracy needs a working class and not a middle class 46 . At the same time, Coppedge [49,50] argues that economy is not always a necessary factor because there are some democratic countries with elitist and non-egalitarian economies 47 .…”

“…Pevehouse [52] argues that international organizations such as NATO and EU require member states to democratize its institutions 49 . Other countries have funded civil society organizations and provided conditional aid to the targeted countries to promote democracy 50 . In the MENA region, there have been two faces of such intervention.…”