assessing the quality of quality measures of democracy: a theoretical framework and its empirical application

Pickel, Susanne; Stark, Toralf; Breustedt, Wiebke

doi:10.1057/eps.2015.61

Cited by 26 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Adcock and Collier 2001), where the content of the indicators would be validated by asking whether the changes in the indicators are consistent with country expertise. The framework for assessing the quality of measures of democracy proposed by Pickel, Stark, and Breustedt (2015) could also help in determining the relative merits of competing governance indicators.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marketplace of indicators: Inconsistencies between country trends of measures of the rule of law

Kołczyńska¹,

Bürkner²

2020

Preprint

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Social scientists can choose from among multiple quality of governance indicators which use different conceptualizations of governance and its components, rely on different data sources, and employ different aggregation and scaling techniques. Despite all differences, these indicators are commonly found to be strongly correlated, which makes the choice of indicator for a given analysis seem inconsequential. We demonstrate that the correlations between governance indicators are indeed high when comparing across countries or using pooled country-year data sets, but are surprisingly low -- sometimes even negative -- within countries. Given the increased interest of researchers in longitudinal analyses with country time series, low agreement between country time trends in the quality of governance is concerning. We illustrate the problem with an analysis of the effect of rule of law on support for democracy, which leads to opposite conclusions depending on which measure of rule of law is used.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marketplace of indicators: Inconsistencies between country trends of measures of the rule of law

Kołczyńska¹,

Bürkner²

2020

Preprint

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“…Finally, do our measurements of democracy reflect real-world political developments? For decades, scholars have pitted different conceptions of democracy against each other (e.g., Alvarez, et al, 1996;Bollen & Jackman, 1989;Collier & Adcock, 1999) and they have quarreled over the translation of theoretical terms into observational concepts (e.g., Munck & Verkuilen, 2002;Pickel, Stark, & Breustedt, 2015). Disagreement continues and, ultimately, measures of democracy have to prove their value by registering real-world developments.…”

Section: Lessons Learnt? Locating This Thematic Issue In the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they do not demonstrate in great detail how or why those differences affect empirical research nor do they provide much methodological advice on democracy measurement beyond concept building. Later review articles such as Pickel et al (2015) often emphasize measuring the quality of democracy as does a recent thematic issue edited by Geißel, Kneuer and Lauth (2016). Moreover, the latter explicitly refrains from supplementing the methodological debate that accompanies measuring democracy since the inception of the field (Geißel et al, 2016, p. 572).…”

Section: Lessons Learnt? Locating This Thematic Issue In the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Why Choice Matters: Revisiting and Comparing Measures of Democracy

Giebler

Ruth

Tanneberg

2018

PaG

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Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.

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“…Susanne Pickel et al (2015) present a new framework for comparative social scientists that tackles one of the most prominent topics in political research: the quality of democracy. In particular, the authors propose a framework to assess the measurement properties of three prominent indices of the quality of democracy.…”

Section: The Edited Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

quantitative approaches to comparative analyses: data properties and their implications for theory, measurement and modelling

Neumann

Graeff

2015

Eur Polit Sci

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While there is an abundant use of macro data in the social sciences, little attention is given to the sources or the construction of these data. Owing to the restricted amount of indices or items, researchers most often apply the 'available data at hand'. Since the opportunities to analyse data are constantly increasing and the availability of macro indicators is improving as well, one may be enticed to incorporate even qualitatively inferior indicators for the sake of statistically significant results. The pitfalls of applying biased indicators or using instruments with unknown methodological characteristics are biased estimates, false statistical inferences and, as one potential consequence, the derivation of misleading policy recommendations. This Special Issue assembles contributions that attempt to stimulate the missing debate about the criteria of assessing aggregate data and their measurement properties for comparative analyses.

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assessing the quality of quality measures of democracy: a theoretical framework and its empirical application

Cited by 26 publications

References 32 publications

Marketplace of indicators: Inconsistencies between country trends of measures of the rule of law

Marketplace of indicators: Inconsistencies between country trends of measures of the rule of law

Why Choice Matters: Revisiting and Comparing Measures of Democracy

quantitative approaches to comparative analyses: data properties and their implications for theory, measurement and modelling

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