Measuring Democracy

Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldanado in “Two Persistent Dimensions of Democracy” attempt to measure the validity of the measures of democracy used around the world. They are somewhat critical of Freedom House and Polity measures: the authors “challenge the common assumption that most existing indicators of democracy measure the same single dimension”. They use 11 different empirical tests to determine that these measures of democracy are measuring about 3/4’s of Dahl’s two fundamental dimensions of democracy: contestation and inclusiveness.

By contestation, Dahl means that citizens have the chance to make their own preferences, to identify them to the government and to citizens around them, and to have these preferences cosnidered and responded to by the government. By contestation, Dahl (and the authors) refers to the “proportion of the population entitled to participate on a more or less equal plane in controlling and contesting the conduct of government”.

The authors use confirmatory factor analysis, through 11 different tests, to show how the well the different measures of democracy address Dahl’s two dimensions. Essentially, the authors conclude that evaluating democracies through the lens of contestation and inclusion is both theoretically and empirically sound. This conclusion allows us to evaluate the major measurements of democracy, like the Polity score. In this example, the authors find that the individual data are a better measurement of democracy than the overall Polity score, as they differ across these dimensions.