Measuring effective democracy: The human empowerment approach

Comparative Politics

Volumn 43, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 271-289

  Alexander, Amy C ^a   Welzel, Christian ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79959649175     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5129/001041511795274931     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. David Collier and Steven Levitsky, "Democracy with Adjectives," World Politics, 49 (April 1997), 430-51.
2. Guillermo O'Donnell, "Human Development, Human Rights, and Democracy," in Guillermo O'Donnell, J. V. Cullell, and O. M. Iazzetta, eds., The Quality of Democracy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 9-92.
3. Guillermo O'Donnell, "Why Rule of Law Matters," Journal of Democracy, 15 (October 2004), 5-19;
4. Richard Rose, "Democratic and Non-Democratic States," in Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian Welzel, eds., Democratization (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
5. Marc E. Warren, "Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion," PS Political Science and Politics, 39 (October 2006), 803-07.
6. Wolfgang Merkel, "Embedded and Defective Democracies," Democratization, 11 (December 2004), 33-58.
7. Christian Welzel, Ronald Inglehart, and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, "The Theory of Human Development," European Journal of Political Research, 42 (May 2003), 341-80, here p. 357.
8. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191-96.
9. As our analyses will show, almost half of the world's contemporary democracies are ineffective in the sense that the state lacks rule of law and is hence incapable of making people's rights truly effective.
10. For discussion, see Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell, "Cultural and Economic Prerequisites of Democracy," Studies in Comparative International Development, 39 (Winter 2005), 87-108;
11. Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, "Emancipative Values and Democracy," Studies in Comparative International Development, 41 (Fall 2007), 74-94.
12. Barry Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992);
13. C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);
14. David Philpott, "In Defense of Self-Determination," Ethics, 105 (January 1995), 352-85;
15. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
16. David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6.
17. Russell J. Dalton, Don C. Shin, and Willy Jou, "Understanding Democracy," Journal of Democracy, 18 (October 2007), 142-56;
18. Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).
19. A. C. Grayling, Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modem West (New York: Walker, 2007), 6.
20. John Donnelly, "Human Rights," in John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 601-20;
21. Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government: Volume 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
22. O'Donnell, "Human Development," 9-92.
23. John Markoff, Waves of Democracy (Thousands Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996);
24. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
25. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
26. Kurt Schock, Unarmed Insurrections (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
27. Mark R. Thompson, Democratic Revolutions (London: Routledge, 2004).
28. Bruce Ackerman, We the People I: Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
29. Mark Canovan, "The People," in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, 349-62;
30. Donnelly, "Human Rights," 601-20.
31. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1943), 270;
32. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
33. David Held, Models of Democracy, 263.
34. Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 45;
35. David Held, Models of Democracy, 265.
36. David Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999);
37. O'Donnell, "Human Development";
38. Michael Saward, "Democracy and Citizenship," in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, 400-22;
39. A. Williams, "Liberty, Equality, and Property," in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, 488-506.
40. This distinction is similar to the differentiation between "negative" and "positive" freedom.
41. See Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Henry Hardy, ed., Isaiah Berlin: Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
42. As Brettschneider argues, "democracy and rights are not in tension but part of a coherent, unified theory of self-government."
43. See Corey Brettschneider, Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 8, fn.4.
44. Brettschneider, Democratic Rights, ch. 1.
45. Democratic Rights, ch. 1. Ibid.
46. Brettschneider, Democratic Rights, 10;
47. O'Donnell, "Rule of Law," 5-19.
48. O'Donnell, "Rule of Law," 5-19;
49. Warren, "Political Corruption," 803-07.
50. Brettschneider, Democratic Rights, 10;
51. Anthony Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986);
52. Steven Holmes, "Lineages of the Rule of Law," in Jose Maria Maravall and Adam Przeworski, eds., Democracy and the Rule of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
53. Judith N. Shklar, "Political Theory and Rule of Law," in Stanley Hoffman, ed., Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 21-37;
54. S. C. Stimson, "Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law," in Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, 317-32.
55. Freedom House, Freedom in the World (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007).
56. Daniel Kaufmann, Anthony Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, "Governance Matters V," World Bank Policy Research Department Working Paper 3630 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).
57. Warren, "Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion," 803-07.
58. The zero point in the rule of law scale is not an absolute minimum. Instead, it indicates the lowest ever observed level of rule of law.
59. Charles Tilly, Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19.
60. Gibney et al. code country reports of Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department on violence, coercion, and repression used by state authorities against citizens. Countries receive a score of 1 for the lowest and 5 for the highest level of state repression. This is done twice based on Amnesty International and State Department information, so one can average the two scores for each country-year into a nine-point scale. Averaged over six years, as done here, this becomes a multi-point continuous scale, which we re-scaled into a range from 0 for the lowest to 1.0 for the highest repression level. Data and coding descriptions are for download at: www.politicalterrorscale.org.
61. See Mark Gibney, R. Wood and L. Cornett, "The Political Terror Scale," Online Manuscript (available at www.politicalterrorscale.org, 2008).
62. For democracies, of course, this holds true too: Among the 108 societies in the democratic zone of the popular rights scale the correlation is r=-.61.
63. N. Vittal, Corruption in India (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2003).
64. Robert Adcock and David Collier, "Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research," American Political Science Review, 95 (September 2008), 529-45;
65. Trevor Denton, "Indexes of Validity and Reliability for Cross-Societal Measures," Cross-Cultural Research, 42 (May 2008), 118-47.
66. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971);
67. Seymour M. Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy," American Political Science Review, 53 (March 1959), 69-105;
68. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
69. On economic development, see Carles Boix and Susan L. Stokes, "Endogenous Democratization," World Politics, 55 (July 2003), 517-49;
70. Kenneth A. Bollen and Robert W. Jackman, "Political Democracy and the Size Distribution of Income," American Sociological Review, 50 (August 1985), 438-57;
71. R. E. Burkhart and Michael Lewis-Beck, "Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis," American Political Science Review, 88 (December 1994), 903-10.
72. On distributional equality, see Daren Acemoglu and J. A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
73. Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
74. Tatu Vanhanen, Democratization (London: Routledge, 2003).
75. On civic values, see Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963);
76. Harold D. Lasswell, Democratic Character (Glencoe: Free Press, 1951);
77. Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997);
78. Christian Welzel, "Are Levels of Democracy Influenced by Mass Attitudes?" International Political Science Review, 28 (September 2007), 397-424.
79. On civic engagement, see Michael Bernhard and E. Karakoc, "Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship," World Politics, 59 (July 2008), 539-67.
80. John Foweraker and Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
81. Adrian Karatnycky and P. Ackerman, How Freedom is Won (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2005).
82. We are grateful to Michael L. Ross for providing to us his data on a country's per capita oil and gas rent.
83. See Michael L. Ross, "Oil, Islam, and Women," American Political Science Review, 102 (February 2008), 107-24.
84. Michael L. Ross, "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?" World Politics, 53 (April 2001), 325-61.
85. For a detailed index description, see Vanhanen, Democratization, 42-63.
86. Christian Welzel, "Levels of Democracy," 403.
87. This version of emancipative values is portrayed in Christian Welzel, "How Selfish are Self-Expression Values," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41 (March 2010).
88. Index description available at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org under "publications."
89. Welzel, "Self-Expression Values." Index description available at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org under "publications."
90. Results of these analyses are available upon request.
91. Factor scales are built from normalized component data: component measures are standardized to a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1.0. Factor scales are weighted averages of the normalized component measures.
92. Data can be inspected in the Internet-Appendix mentioned above.
93. Michael Marshall and Keith Jaggers, The Polity Project: Users Manual (University of Maryland, 2004).
94. David Cingranelli and B. Richards, "CIRI Dataset," http://ciri.binghamton.edu/index.asp, 2004.
95. Vanhanen, Democratization, ch. 2.
96. Economist, The Economist's Intelligence Units Index of Democracy (1, 2007).
97. Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi, "Governance Matters V."
98. The assumption is conservative because it presumes that the prevalence of democracy in the past is not itself influenced by empowering contexts of the past, so all variation taken away in current empowering contexts by democracy's prevalence in the past can really be ascribed to democracy in the past and nothing else.
99. The measure adds up a country's yearly scores on the Polity democracy index but depreciates the count by one percent for each year it fades to the past from the baseline of 1995. We are grateful to John Gerring for providing us the data on this index.
100. See John Gerring, J. P. Bond, W.T. Barndt, and C. Moreno, "Democracy and Economic Growth," World Politics, 57 (April 2005), 323-64.
101. The criticism is raised in Carl H. Knutsen, "Measuring Effective Democracy," International Political Science Review, 31 (2, 2010), 109-28. For a complete rebuttal,
102. see Amy Alexander, Ronald Inglehart, and Christian Welzel, "Measuring Effective Democracy: A Defense," World Values Research (1, 2011), 1-28.