Voting Counts: Participation in the Measurement of Democracy

Abstract

The measures of democracy commonly used in empirical research suffer notable limitations, primarily the exclusion of participation. As a result, quantitative studies may undervalue the effect of democracy on important social outcomes or misinterpret the aspect of democracy responsible for that effect. We respond by introducing and validating two variants of a new indicator, the Participation Enhanced Polity Score (PEPS), which augments institutional factors with the breadth of citizen parBruce E.

Democracy and Education in twentieth‐century Latin America

“…Most scholarship has adopted a binary conception of democracy, in which countries are defined, categorized, and considered at either ends of one continuum, labeled either of a democratic or autocratic nature (Avelino et al., ; Brown, ). Some works have countered that research on democracy and policy should attempt to build more multidimensional measurements of democracy (Aidt and Eterovic, ; Mainwaring et al., ) with concern for more nuanced levels of democratic structure (Moon et al., ). Other works have responded in fervent defense of a minimalist, dichotomous measure of democracy (Cheibub et al., ).…”

Who Should Vote? Conceptualizing Universal Suffrage in Studies of Democracy

“…28 For the suffrage to count as democratic, the Polity Index is content with the inclusion of 20 per cent of the total population, even if this meant that sex, race or some other category were to be used in defining the demos. 29 The virtue of these simplifications for the purpose of evaluating the democratic character of political regimes remains doubtful.…”

How Women and Illiterates Shaped Education Outcomes in 20th Century Latin America

“…Indeed, an emerging school of quantitative research has worked to build testable measurements of democracy which account for participation (Vanhanen 2000;Moon et al 2006;Holmes and Gutiérrez de Piñeres 2006). At the same time, those in the binary camp present concerns about alternatives to dichotomous measures, arguing that "alternatives are based on vague and arbitrary operational rules" (Cheibub, Ghandi, and Vreeland 2010: 68) On either sides of the debate there are growing calls for clarity-conceptual and operational-in terms of which instrument is to be used (Reiter and Tillman 2002;Treier and Jackman 2008).…”