3 - An index of democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
Summary
What we on the concrete level call political democracy comprises various means, in the shape of institutional arrangements, which enable the citizens to control public policy. They pertain to the holding of elections, under certain forms, to the central, national decision-making organs, and to the maintenance of certain fundamental political liberties. These instruments of popular control must be in the nature of rights, and thereby apply equally to all. We shall now try to define what these rights signify in detail and, when they exist to varying extents, how they are to be graded and weighed.
The objective is to establish a number of empirical criteria for the evaluation of the level of democracy in the 132 countries which are the object of the study. These criteria are to result in a scale where the countries' different performances, the relative level of democracy, can be read. This scale, our index of democracy, is constructed on the basis of the following considerations.
(1) The measurements to be applied are divided into two main groups: elections and political liberties. The selection of attributes in the respective categories was governed by the ambition to heed as far as possible the conditions which appear essential vis-à-vis the basic criteria of democracy.
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- Democracy and Development , pp. 36 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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