In Paxton’s article on “Women’s Suffrage in the Measurement of Democracy,” I found it fascinating that Paxton finds a casual factor or variable that causes past empirical research on democracy to be less reliable and valid in terms of measuring democracies. Paxton argues that if we factor in this variable, past emprical measurements on democracy could have less statistical significant. Women’s Suffrage variable compared with democracies can one, the measurements can affect the dates of transitions to democracies. Secondly, it can effect how the description of democracy is measured and third, can effect measurements on how democracies would be caused.
Paxton does assure her audience that this new found research is not original to herself, and that integration of women has been included in measuring political theories in the past. “I demonstrated that changing an author’s measurement to include women also changes his dating of democratic transitions, sometimes by more than 50 years.” (pg 105) As such, Paxton’s main argument driving her hypothesis comes from analyzes authors such as Muller, and Huntington. She stresses that the critical problem with this kind of research is that “this paper has shown, however, in practice that criterion translates into male suffrage. The issue is that dichotomous categorizations ignore degree–a crucial issue if we wish to incorporate women.”
Paxton shows through her measurements and research that
“our current understanding of democratization may be underspecified
due to our focus on an exclusionary form of democracy,” meaning focusing on how male suffrage has correlated to transitions, causes, emergence’s of democracies. As such she also argues that past research from her study case have failed to place time, or transition dates of democracies in degrees- therefore Paxton claims if one were to measure democracy transitions in degrees-“would help resolve ambiguous transition dates.” Moreover, if measured in degrees it would make the women research more well rounded because “The factors affecting later degrees of democratization might be different than those operating earlier, because women gained suffrage during different historical time periods.” (pg. 106)
Arguably, I find the main empirical issue with measuring democracy is each study conducted factors a countries democracy adoption date differently which can cause a great deal of error when dealing with unanimous transition dates.
I really liked this article. I thought it did a great job of illustrating the misclassifications of regimes based on sexism, racism, etc. It has never sat well with me to consider ancient Athens a democracy. It was more of a highly diluted Aristocracy. I think the same is true of later “democratic” city states in Italy and early Western democracies. The democratizing changes in these states must be acknowledged (moving from empowerment of an aristocratic class to 20-50% f the population is highly democratizing), but by no means does that make it a democracy. I think 50% enfranchisement is conceptually closer to 1% than 95% in a contemporary democracy. Not only has Paxton identified a “masculine-centric” misconceptualization, but also made a good argument for graded measures of democracy.
Yes, I agree, even Aristotle said that the form of Demos that Ancient Athens exhibited was not truly democracy in its form as we
see it today- more of an Aristocracy, and just a little more chaotic. There are so many cultural and social classifications that are
usually disregarded as a way of classifying the degree in which a democratic state functions…modernized ideals of what we would constitute as a functioning democracy that didn’t exist even a hundred years ago, such as peoples freedom of sexuality, gay/lesbian, or women’s rights to access abortions, birth control…So I do agree how Paxton is progressive in her classification to observe sexual dichotomies within a democratic framework- as you said “masculine-centric.”