Measuring Effective Democracy
Draft November, 2007
Abstract:
There is no consensus in the social sciences on how to best measure democracy. Inglehart and
Welzel (2005) argue that they have constructed an improved measure which they call
“effective democracy” that capture not only the form of democracy but also actual democratic
practises in a country. This measure has been criticized by Hadenius and Teorell (2006) on
several grounds. The debate on the usefulness of the measure is still ongoing, and this article
contributes to this debate. The article is sympathetic to Inglehart and Welzel’s underlying idea
of capturing “substantial” rather than “formal” democracy, but is critical to the specific
measure of “effective democracy” proposed by these authors. The measure has several
unfortunate theoretical and distributional properties, and the empirical scores generated by the
measure are often highly unintuitive. The concrete criticisms of the “effective democracy”measure proposed here, related to both the validity and reliability of the measure, should help
end the ongoing debate and initiate a new search for better measures of substantial democracy.
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1.0
Introduction.
Democracy and its causes and consequences are some of the most frequently studied subjects
in the social sciences. There exists no consensus however on how to define democracy, let
alone on how to measure it in practice. Over the last couple of years, a debate has been going
on in “Studies in Comparative International Development” between Ronald Inglehart and
Chris Welzel on the one hand and Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell on the other, on the effects
of “mass attitudes” on democratization. Linked to that substantial debate is a methodological
debate on how to operationalize and measure democracy. Especially, there has been a
disagreement on whether Inglehart and Welzel’s measure of “effective democracy” is a valid
or even meaningful measure. “Effective democracy” is constructed by multiplying the
Freedom House Index with a measure of corruption, either the one provided by Transparency
International (CPI) or the World Banks World Governance Indicators. According to Welzel
(2007: 421) “the dispute about the usefulness of measuring effective democracy” is still
unresolved. This article does not contribute directly to the substantial debate on mass attitudes
and democratization, but rather looks more narrowly at the methodological debate on the
meaningfulness, reliability and validity of the “effective democracy”-measure. In order to
discuss how best to operationalize a concept, one needs to clarify the concept first. I argue
that whether “effective democracy” is a meaningful operationalization of democracy depends
on the conceptual definition chosen. Whether the operationalization then is reliable or valid
are different questions.
2.0
The conceptual debate: What is democracy?
Institutionally based democracy definitions
Joseph Schumpeter’s critique from 1942 on what he called the “Classical Doctrine of
Democracy” (Schumpeter 1976: 250-268), and his preferred alternative theory of democracy
(Schumpeter 1976: 269-283) are good starting points for analyzing the concept of democracy.
According to Schumpeter “[T]he eighteenth century philosophy of democracy may be
couched in the following definition: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement
for arriving at decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide
issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will”
(1976: 250). Schumpeter’s critique of this democracy concept has proved to be very
influential. His main point was that defining democracy in terms of institutions’ ability to
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secure the implementation of a “general will” or a “common good” is unsatisfactory, because
these constructs lack a meaningful reference. Schumpeter pointed to the relatively plausible
fact that for “different individuals and groups, the common good is bound to mean different
things” (1976: 251). According to Schumpeter, people in a country diverged both in their
conception of means and ends, and a “common good” therefore lacked a precise reference.
Some years later, theoretical arguments, presented by Kenneth Arrow (1951), sought to show
the impossibility of aggregating individual (fixed and well defined) preferences to a
determinate, well-defined collective preference when the number of individual and the
number of issue-dimensions were allowed to increase sufficiently. To many, public choice
theorists and others, one important implication of this theoretical proof was that democracy
viewed as an implementation of a “general will” was nonsensical, due to the emptiness of the
concept.
Schumpeter’s famous alternative was defining democracy, or more precisely the democratic
method, as the “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s
vote” (1976: 269). In other words, Schumpeter leaped over the issue of popular will by
referring directly to an institutional mechanism, namely competitive elections. He was thereby
implicitly solving the problems of fuzziness, indeterminacy and even emptiness of the
“Classical” definition-type. The heritage of Schumpeter is still looming. Adam Przeworski
has been a vocal defendant of a “minimalist” democracy definition, defining democracy as a
political regime that is holding contested elections. According to Przeworski et al.
““democracy” has become an altar on which everyone hangs his or her favourite ex voto.
Almost all normatively desirable aspects of political life, and sometimes even of social and
economic life, are credited as features of democracy” (2000: 14). The benefits of a minimalist,
institutionally based definition, are analytic stringency, precision and clarity. Przeworski et al.
(2000) even provide relatively clear and reliable algorithms for classifying whether an
empirical system can claim the title “democratic”, or whether it should be categorized as a
dictatorship.
There can be formulated at least two powerful criticisms of the “Schumpeter-Przeworski”
view of democracy. The first criticism takes the “institutional starting point” as given, but
argues that limiting the definition to elections is too narrow. This criticism can be related to
what Terry Lynn Karl termed the “fallacy of electoralism” (Diamond 1999: 9). The main line
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of thought is that elections are by far sufficient in securing a democratic political regime. One
needs additional institutional guarantees, and therefore the democracy definition needs to be
broadened. One paradigmatic list of such “institutional guarantees” can be found in Robert
Dahl’s “Polyarchy” from 1971. The list includes freedom to form and join organizations,
freedom of expression, right to vote, eligibility for public office, right of political leaders to
compete for support, alternative sources of information, free and fair elections and particular
institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of
preference, like elected parliament and (directly or indirectly) elected executive government
(Dahl 1971: 3).
Substantial definitions of democracy
The second criticism of the electorally based definition disagrees with the underlying premise
of defining democracy in terms of institutions, and, despite the strong criticisms presented
above from Schumpeter and Arrow, takes the role of the populace as point of departure. If one
claims that democracy merely consists of a matrix of certain rights, liberties and institutions,
one misses the mark, according to Beetham (1999). The question can still be raised about why
particular institutions and rights are to be considered democratic. Any answer risks ending in
a tautologous argument. According to Beetham “[T]he only way to avoid circularity is by
specifying the underlying principles which these institutions embody or help to realize, and in
terms of which they can plausibly be characterized as democratic” (Beetham 1999: 90). In
modern day political, academic and daily life, the usage of the term democracy often refer to
the role of the population in political life, and this is in my view also the most fruitful starting
point when thinking and theorizing about democracy. Even authors using institutional
definitions are often at least implicitly interested in how the role of the population in political
processes are affected or are affecting certain other variables. They are for example interested
in “contested elections” because they give broader population segments influence over
political alternatives, and further policy formulation. David Beetham exclaims relatively
straightforward that “[T]he core idea of democracy is that of popular rule or popular control
over collective decision making” (Beetham 1999: 90), and Beetham adds that the degree of
political equality among citizens is an important criteria backing up this general definition.
Institutions are to be considered democratic only if they contribute to realizing this underlying
idea. One can still be interested in particular institutions, their existence and also their
functioning, when studying democracy, but these are only instruments that underpin
democracy. Take notice that this definition does not refer to a “general will” or to aggregated
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preferences of the collective, but only to the populace’s opportunities for actual influence in
public decision making, and further it implies something about the distribution of these
opportunities for influence among the citizens. By not referring to a “general will” the
definition therefore evades some of the direct criticisms of the “Classical Doctrine of
Democracy” discussed above, but the “vagueness” and “indeterminacy” criticisms can
nevertheless to a certain extent still be applied to a Beethamian democracy concept: What
does actually “popular control” mean, and who is the relevant demos?
Economists often stress that there exists no free lunch. No one definition of democracy is
optimal on all the normative dimensions scientists cherish. As I see it, when it comes to
choosing between an institutional and substantial democracy definition, there is a trade off
between precision and stringency on one hand, and the want to validly capture the nature of
an underlying concept on the other. Defining democracy institutionally will have the first
advantages, evading problems of vagueness and indeterminacy, whereas the “substantial
democracy definition” actually takes the intuitive and common notion of democracy as
something related to people’s power over politics seriously. My proposal is that if you want to
study for example the effects of particular institutions, there is an opportunity for doing so in a
relatively more stringent fashion, but one is then not studying the “effects of democracy”, but
rather the effects of for example “elections” or “freedom of speech”. “Popular control over
politics” is a different concept analytically from “contested elections”, even though they are
empirically connected. Even though we can not make precise scales for “democracy” in the
Beethamian sense that are perfectly valid and reliable this does not imply we should refrain
from trying measure it. “Claiming that a concept is hard to measure (epistemologically), does
not make the concept disappear (ontologically)” (XXXX 2006: 25).
The implications of the conceptual debate for the “effective democracy”-measure.
Note that the position taken in the debate on the right conceptual definition of democracy in
many ways preconditions the discussion that is to follow on the “effective democracy”measure. If one takes an institutionalist definition of democracy seriously, it is hard to make
extra claims on what constitutes “effective democracy” within the limits of the definition.
Effectiveness can of course be defined as an independent concept, and one could measure
whether democratic institutions were empirically effective in bringing for example economic
growth, equity or improve schooling. The mere existence, or possibly the degree of existence,
of one or more institutions is the sole criteria looked at when defining democracy. However, if
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one uses the definition of democracy as “popular control over collective decision making”,
the question of defining “effective democracy”, not only becomes a sensible question, but also
a very vital one. A first approximation to operationalizing “popular control over politics” can
be made by looking at the empirical existence of certain formal institutions like elections,
constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association, which have historically
proved to be efficient in fulfilling this criterion to a larger degree than other institutional
arrangements. However, measuring “effective democracy”, can now plausibly be interpreted
as a way of incorporating also how these institutions in a particular country actually functions
in translating the voice and demands of broader segments of the population into legislation
and implemented policies. Viewed in this light, “effective democracy” is not a combination of
two analytical concepts, but it is rather a better empirical approximation to the theoretical
definition, than the original “formal” measure. As Robert Dahl (1971) suggested, democracy
should be viewed as an ideal concept. Egalitarian distribution of power over collective
decision making between all citizens provides the proper measure stick. Empirical regimes
will to a larger or lesser degree fulfil the ideal. Ceteris paribus, to have broader parts of the
population involved in politics makes a system more democratic. Ceteris paribus, a more
equal influence between the participants in legislation and policy formulation also makes it
more democratic i . The possibility of equal political influence hinges not only upon the
existence of formal institutions, but also on how these institutions actually function in practice
when transforming demands and other “inputs” into political outcomes. “Effective
democracy” therefore becomes somewhat of a misnomer, since it is actually here intended as
a more comprehensive and better measure of democracy.
As several authors have recognized, the need to take the actual functioning and not only the
existence of formal rights and institutions seriously has become even more urgent in the post
Cold War world. Przeworski et al. partly legitimizes their usage of their minimalist theoretical
definition and further operationalization by the fact that “[D]ifferent views of democracy,
including those that entail highly subjective judgements, yield a robust classification” (2000:
57). They for example find that their measure correlate 93,7% with FHI. However their
analyses end in 1990, and as Diamond (1999: 286) notes, after the end of the cold war with
the change in international political and ideological context, there is reason to believe that
there might be larger divergence between the formal properties of institutions and the actual
democratic character of political regimes. As Welzel and Inglehart notes “[E]lectoral
democracy can easily be abused to hide severe deficiencies in the actual practice of civil and
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political liberties” (2005: 175), and this is probably an option for several regimes in an era
when everything from EU-membership to World Bank loans, as well as generally being
recognized as a “civilized” nation, requires democratic institutions and practises. Summing up
this general empirical trait Inglehart and Welzel notes that the political development of the
new democracies of the “third wave” have been more disappointing than initial optimism
among some suggested, since “many of the new democracies show severe deficiencies in their
actual practice of civil and political liberties” (2005: 149). Elections is no longer (if it ever
were) a sufficient proxy for what many view as “true” democracy. The construction of a
broad democracy indicator is therefore of utmost importance.
3.0
Operationalizing democracy
The Freedom House Index
The Freedom House Index (FHI) is one of the most utilized democracy indicators in
contemporary academic research. Larry Diamond calls it the “best available empirical
indicator of liberal democracy” (1999: 12). The FHI scores countries after a scale ranging
from 1 to 7 (where 1 is most democratic) on two dimensions: political rights and civil liberties.
Political rights “enable people to participate freely in the political process, including through
the right to vote and stand for public office, and elect representatives who have a decisive
impact on policies and are accountable to the electorate. Civil liberties allow for the freedom
of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal
autonomy without interference from the state” (Freedom House 2005: 775). Both categories
are indexes constructed from large subsets of indicators, which are formulated as “check
questions”. Freedom House scores its indexes (primarily) on the basis of a list of 25 such
questions, which each has several sub-questions. Ten of the 25 questions relate to political
rights, and fifteen to civil liberties. The FHI is to a large degree based on the presence or
absence of different institutions, but it also seeks to account for the actual functioning of these
institutions. Freedom House itself claims to measure “the real-world rights and freedoms
enjoyed by individuals” (Freedom House 2005a: 1) Therefore this operationalization is not
only valid for institutional definitions of democracy, but, I would claim, also to a certain
degree relatively valid for more substantial democracy definitions. However, the presence or
absence of certain institutions remains core even to the Freedom House Index; dominating the
check list of questions on especially political rights.
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“Effective democracy”
If one is using a substantial definition of democracy, one needs to look beyond the existence
formal institutions and constitutional rights, when measuring. One important quest is therefore
to look for systematic components affecting democracy other than the formal institutions and
rights. Power dispersion and the functioning of institutions in transforming popular demands
to collective decisions are in their very nature hard to observe and evaluate. Inglehart and
Welzel (2005) make a strong case for one such component affecting the actual functioning of
institutions: They highlight the absence of corruption and the practice of rule of law more
generally. The idea is that in order to make them effective “civil and political rights also
require honest, law-abiding elites. Corruption, broadly understood, reflects nepotism,
favouritism, and other illegal mechanisms used by elites to circumvent the rule of law and use
their power for their own benefit, depriving ordinary people of their legal rights” (Inglehart
and Welzel” (2005: 192). By this Inglehart and Welzel drive a clear wedge between formal
democracy and what they call “effective democracy”. In order to make democratic rights and
institutions effective in practice, there is a clear requirement related to lack of elite corruption:
“In short, effective democracy measures not only the extent to which a society has liberties on
paper but the extent to which these liberties are actually practised by the state and its officials.
This variable spans a continuum ranging from little or no real democracy to fully effective
democracy” (Inglehart and Welzel 2005: 194). The authors operationalize effective
democracy by multiplying an aggregated index based on Freedom House’s political and civil
liberties dimensions with a measure on corruption, supposed to tap honest and law abiding
elite behaviour. The authors have used different indexes in different articles and books, with
the “Corruption Perception Index” from Transparency International used in for example
Welzel et al. (2003) and the “Control of Corruption” score from the World Bank in the study
from 2005. After normalizing the corruption scores to a measure ranging from 0 to 1 (X) and
FHI from 0 to 100 (Y), “effective democracy” is given as X*Y. X*Y is then a proxy for “how
much freedom people actually have rather than how much freedom they have on paper”
(Inglehart and Welzel 2005: 196).
4.0
The benefits of the effective democracy measure
Inglehart and Welzel have described and also defended their “effective democracy” measure
against criticism in different articles and books (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, and Welzel and
Inglehart 2006). These authors give clear presentations and well-argued discussions on the
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benefits of this measure. I will therefore not go as deeply into its benefits as the measure
maybe deserves. I will however go through a couple of positive characteristics of the measure.
The “effective democracy” measure is explicitly constructed in order to tap also the “actual
functioning” of institutions and individual rights and not only their form. In addition to the
measure’s relatively parsimonious nature, constructed as a product of two separate indexes,
this is the main benefit of this operationalization. Functioning is specified as whether the
institutions and society in general is plagued by corruption. There is a clear cut theoretical
argument behind this reasoning. Corruption means the abuse of public positions for personal
ends. This again implies the lack of rule of law. A further consequence is then that the
ordinary citizen’s formally guaranteed democratic rights and opportunities can not be
practiced in the way they are constitutionally described to be. In a case where the constitution
is guaranteeing elections and freedom of speech, but the country and polity is plagued by
rampant corruption, democracy is said to be “formal” and not “effective”, and hence the
country will score relatively low on the measure. As I mentioned earlier, this is especially
important in a time period where observers and researchers are claiming that the “deficient
democracy”, the “semi-democracy” or the “electoral authoritarian regime” is becoming a very
common type of political regime. Equating free elections and freedom of speech with popular
rule over collective decision making in its strictest and most egalitarian sense is of the mark
empirically, also in OECD-countries. To name a few: Italy is often being accused of
clientilism (in the south) combined with a not fully independent media. French and Japanese
politics are often labelled as elite driven and oligarchic. American politics is perceived to be
heavily influenced by organized business interests and other narrow lobby-groups. However,
the most obvious discrepancies between “formal” and “effective” democracy are to be found
in the developing world; in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Cases are numerous, as for
example some of the six comparative studies in Diamond and Morlinho (2005) exemplify.
Clientilism and personalistic politics is a particular political trait that seems to devoid formal
democratic institutions of what many see as its normative purposes. Jean Francois Medard
(1996) claim that African politics is laden with structures referred to as “neo-patrimonial”.
Formal state institutions exist, but these are not the arenas where the actual political action is.
Politics is rather managed through vertical personal-based ties, in a “patron-client” fashion,
where personalization of politics is an inevitable result. Chabal and Daloz (1999) in their
analysis of African politics claim that these kinds of structures and practices make democratic
institutions function badly. Another example is Philippine politics. Politics in the country is
according to Sidel (1998) characterized by “bossism”, and abuse of electoral practises is
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widespread. Especially landowners have “used” elections in order to maintain power by
means not always recognized as true to democratic ideals. Generally, when elites manipulate
democratic practices, neglect the rule of law, and undermine ordinary citizens rights by
corrupt practices, formal democratic institutions and rights are rendered ineffective.
There is another benefit to the “effective democracy index” when compared to for example
the FHI. The FHI, and also other indicators like Polity, have been accused of differentiating
too little between regime types, and this goes especially for the most democratic regimes. It is
a problem for the FHI indicator that several empirical cases are assigned the highest score, in
practice equating the regimes in these countries with perfect democracy. The most
problematic issue for any analysis on causes and effects of democracy is that some of these
countries have a larger degree of “popular control over collective decision making” than
others, but all of them pass the ceiling-criteria for being given a score of 1 on political rights
and civil liberties. Not to say that Freedom House is completely insensitive to distinctions
among what is generally viewed as the world’s more democratic regimes. The four large
Western European countries for example all received a 2-score in civil liberties at some point
in time during the last couple of decades. France was denied the top score among others
because of existence of political corruption, and the UK because of Thatcher’s union bashing,
limiting the freedom of assembly. “Effective democracy” as an interaction term produces
more graded measures, and also diversifies more at the top end of the scale. The degree of
corruption here provides the factor that creates this divergence. Inglehart and Welzel
explicitly recognize this as one important benefit of the indicator when compared to Freedom
House: “If we took the formal democracy measure at face value, we would conclude that
Latvia and Slovakia are just as democratic as Britain and Germany. But in reality they have
relatively corrupt elites who devalue the constitutional rights their people theoretically
possess” (2005: 195).
4.2
Validity and reliability problems of the measure
The effective democracy measure as constructed and used by Inglehart and Welzel has been
heavily criticized by Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell (2005) on several accounts. One claim is
that Inglehart and Welzel are wrong in multiplying two different concepts into one measure,
claiming that “[T]he mistake, thus, is to confuse basic and quality criteria” (2005: 90). Welzel
and Inglehart (2006) answer the criticism by pointing to the fact that both a lack of formal
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institutions and deficiencies in the actual practising of formally guaranteed rights and liberties
can deprive people of their actual democratic rights and liberties. I would go even further than
Inglehart and Welzel, who claim that the combination of “two different things”, democracy
and elite integrity, make a very sensible measure. Both formal institutions and corruption are
relating to the very same underlying concept, namely democracy defined as “popular control
over collective decision making”. Therefore, I am in principle sympathetic to the approach by
Inglehart and Welzel, which is trying to incorporate a quality dimension when measuring
“democracy” properly conceptualized. However, Hadenius and Teorell produce other
criticisms that are indeed very relevant to the validity of the effective democracy measure. I
will reintroduce some of these criticisms, and elaborate upon them. I will also present some
novel criticisms which cast grave doubts on the reliability and validity of the measure.
1) FHI’s nature as a partially “quality-oriented” index
One of the most controversial claims of Inglehart and Welzel in different articles and books is
that Freedom House with their index only measure the existence of formally guaranteed
political rights and civil liberties. This assumption stands in stark contrast to the explicit
intention by Freedom House to measure “the real-world rights and freedoms enjoyed by
individuals” (2005: 1). The index is constructed in such a way that it is not bound to be
restricted by the formal institutions and constitutional properties of a country. Among others
referring to the FHI, Przeworski et al. claim that it entails “highly subjective judgments”
(2000: 57). Hadenius and Teorell criticize Inglehart and Welzel for assuming that the FHI
only limits itself to formal institutions and rights, since it also in their view incorporates
“actual upholding of such rights” (2005: 90). Welzel and Inglehart however agree that
Freedom House is not only looking at the legalization of democratic liberties but that the FHI
also incorporates whether these rights and liberties are free from obvious violations.
Nevertheless they still claim that the FHI is insensitive to more subtle ways actual political
processes break with and circumvent formal rights and liberties, outside obvious open
violations (2006).
I want to list some of the check questions (Freedom House 2005: 780-782) here in order to
validate my claim that Freedom House takes quality aspects into consideration when rating. In
my view, the FHI index is actually almost as open for attack from the “opposite front”,
namely that it contains elements that should be separated analytically from democracy, and
rather be rated as causes or effects (XXXX 2006). For political rights, check question B3
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reads: “Are the people's political choices free from domination by the military, foreign powers,
totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group?”
Question C2 should be considered an even more obvious “qualitative component”, especially
for the proponents of the effective democracy measure:
“Is the government free from
pervasive corruption?”One of the further specifications on this check question is actually:
“What was the latest Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index score for this
country?” C3 also provides a qualitative component asking: “Is the government accountable
to the electorate between elections, and does it operate with openness and transparency?” This
goes to the core of actual practicing of people power, beyond institutional formalities, asking
whether ordinary people can directly influence politics and use their formal rights. For civil
liberties, D1 asks: “Are there free and independent media and other forms of cultural
expression?” The under-questions show pretty clearly that the measure is intended not to
capture only constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech: “Is self-censorship among
journalists common, especially when reporting on politically sensitive issues, including
corruption or the activities of senior officials?” Check question F5 sounds: “Does the rule of
law prevail in civil and criminal matters? Are police under direct civilian control?” There are
many other examples as well. Believing these “qualitative” components do not affect the
overall grading of the FHI-measure obviously seems unwarranted. If one still doubts, the
country studies show that several countries score much lower than their formal institutions
and rights would suggest. Jamaica for example was scored a 2 in political rights and 3 in civil
liberties (2,5 average) through the mid-nineties, and the main reasons given were the violence
plaguing the country as well as corruption rendering formal rights less effective in practice.
India was actually averaging 4,0 in 1993 through 1995, showing once again that countries are
subtracted for dismal functioning institutions and rights.
2) Additive and multiplicative measures and their implications for ranking countries
One of the concerns of Hadenius and Teorell is that certain quality criteria can compensate for
the lack of basic democratic criteria. Their fear is that for example relatively incorrupt
authoritarian regimes will get higher scores on the “effective democracy” indicator than
corrupt democratic regimes, thereby reversing the “correct” ranking between these countries
(2005: 89). Welzel and Inglehart’s (2006) reply is that this could have been the case if one
was using a additive measure, adding the components of formal democracy and “quality”
measured as corruption. However, Inglehart and Welzel point to the interactive nature of their
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measure. They point out that “high scores in effectiveness cannot compensate for low scores
in democracy”, since effectiveness is only a weighting factor of a given level of democracy.
The mathematical intuition is simple. Zero multiplied with something is still zero, and a small
number multiplied with one is still the small number. However, even if we take the
“interactive weighting argument” at face value, there arises a methodological problem due to
the way the FHI is constructed. The implications is that the effective democracy measure de
facto functions partly like an additive measure, which Inglehart and Welzel claimed is
inappropriate. As we saw above, it seemed obvious at least a decent number of the FHI’s
check questions are output or “quality” oriented. Now denote FHI as A and the CPI as B.
These are intended to respectively capture “formal institutions and rights”, X, and “quality or
actual functioning”, Y. In the ideal case where A perfectly reflects X and B reflects Y, the
“effective democracy” measure A*B perfectly captures X*Y. When the degree of formally
guaranteed rights and democratic institutions becomes “very small”:
 X 0  A 0  A*B0
This is precisely Inglehart and Welzel’s argument formalized. Let us now say that an arbitrary
1/4 of the FHI points are deducted from “quality”-considerations, which I do not find to be an
overestimation. This implies that A = (3/4X + 1/4Y). Take the case of a regime lacking formal
institutions and rights, but where there exists rule of law and no corruption, no political
violence, etc.; that is X0 and Y1:
 X0 & Y1  A ¼ & B1  A*B ¼.
In this case, the effective democracy measure resembles an additive measure, since a regime
lacking formally guaranteed rights and institutions, but doing well on economic performance
and keeping firmly to its constructed, authoritarian laws, is given a score of ¼. This is a
higher score than the 0 received by the totally corrupt formal democracy. More generally, if z
is the share of “quality-based” points in FHI, and z >0, a regime lacking all traits of “formal
democracy” will be assigned a value on the effective democracy score of (z*Y)*Y = z*Y 2.
This is not equal to zero unless Y is zero. Therefore Inglehart and Welzel’s argument that due
to the interaction-characteristic of their measure they avoid the criticism from Hadenius and
Teorell (2005) is invalid.
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3) Corruption as a narrow, and sometimes misleading, measure of democratic quality
Inglehart and Welzel are relatively clear on the point that corruption stands as a proxy for the
wider phenomenon of lack of rule of law. There can be raised two questions: First of all, is
corruption a valid and reliable measure for the rule of law? Second, are there not other ways
than lack of rule of law that can render formally guaranteed rights ineffective? The answers to
both these questions in my view point to the insufficiency of using corruption scores as a
measure of “quality” or “effectiveness” of political regimes. It is important to notice as
Hadenius and Teorell (2005: 90) that CPI is actually mainly based on perceptions of among
others businessmen and country specialists, rather than ordinary citizens. A country keeping
its trade with large scale international businesses relatively free from corruption would
therefore gain a relatively fair CPI-score, even if it was corrupt in dealing with its citizens.
The World Bank measure later used by Welzel and Inglehart (2005), trying to capture
political corruption therefore represents an improvement when it comes to validity.
As history shows however, there are several ways through which formally guaranteed rules
can be rendered inefficient. Political leaders with lust for continued power have creatively
used a variety of means in order to restrict popular participation in the political process. The
mechanisms can be as subtle as implicit threats of sanctions (loss of position or benefits), that
make formal freedom of speech useless. Violence and terror are other ways of restricting
actual exercise of formal rights. Media manipulation is a third, and in general lack of
responsiveness makes the chain of representation most modern democracies pivot around
dysfunctional. Corruption is thus only one way to render formal rights for the populace
ineffective. In the anthology edited by Diamond and Morlino on the quality of democracy, the
authors recognize at least “eight dimensions on which democracies vary in quality” (Diamond
and Morlino 2005: xii). These are listed up as: rule of law, participation, competition, vertical
accountability, horizontal accountability, respect for political and civil freedoms, political
equality and responsiveness. Why then only single out only corruption, which again is
intended to stand as a proxy for the rule of law? The question then becomes why one should
weigh corruption so heavily, thereby influencing the effective democracy score to an
extremely large extent? Corruption might not for example be a good proxy for democratic
quality in richer and medium income countries, since threats to democratic quality might be of
a different nature in these countries. The case of Singapore is an extreme example. There are
elections taking place in Singapore, and it is relatively free of corruption. However, there are
several other channels through which the rights Singaporeans have are rendered almost
14
useless. Manipulation of media and voting districts, as well as jailing of opposition leaders on
cumbersome charges are among them. Richer and medium income countries with doubtful
quality of democracy might therefore not be punished by a measure focusing on corruption,
whereas poorer countries always tend to get their democracy scores reduced, because of the
strong correlation between low income and high corruption.
If corruption functions as an unbiased estimator for “quality” this would be a problem only
because it generates a lot of uncertainty in the estimates of “effective democracy”. However,
there is strong reason to believe that corruption is systematically linked to other variables.
First of all, corruption is because of several reasons highly correlated with income level. The
Weberian insight that poorly paid officials might tend to expand their earnings by illegal
means is one obvious mechanism. That corruption in the economic sphere creates badly
functioning economies, independent of surrounding political institutions is also clear to most
development economists. Corruption in the economic sphere therefore is both a cause and an
effect of a low income economy. Giving perceived corruption a large influence on a
“democratic quality” measure is therefore bound to secure the measure a very large
correlation with income and therefore also other variables correlated with income such as
education or “emancipative value-indexes”. The correlation coefficient between income
measured as GDP per capita in 2000 (PPP) and corruption as measured by CPI was 0,87 in
1999. This is perhaps the most troublesome aspect related to using Inglehart and Welzel’s
“effective democracy” measure. The fact that both formal democracy and corruption are
strongly correlated with income and other economic variables, tend to make the correlation
between income and effective democracy an extremely strong one. All causal analysis relating
effective democracy to income, or variables that are highly correlated to income, would
therefore tend to produce stronger results than are actually warranted, even if there are strong
theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that actual functioning of democratic rights is
correlated stronger with income than formal democratic institutions.
Table 4.1: Empirical correlations between FHI, CPI and effective democracy in 1999,
with GDP per capita in 2000
GDP 2000
FHI 1999
CPI 1999
Effective
democracy
0,62
0,87
0,87
15
4) The subjectivity-factor: Validity and reliability issues
Suppose for a minute that FHI, X, measures the real degree of formal democracy, A, plus a
random measurement error, ε. CPI, Y, measures “functioning of institutions”, B, and an error
term, γ. This gives:
X*Y = (A+ ε)*(B+ γ) = A*B+A* γ +B* ε + ε* γ. Finding estimates for
the variance of a product of variables is obviously not a straightforward task (Goodman 1962),
even if the variables are independently distributed and measures are unbiased. The
multiplicative formulation of the “effective democracy” measure has the implication that the
size of the total variance, and also error variance is relatively large when compared to any of
its componentsii. Moreover, the assumptions of independence and unbiasedness are probably
not holding when it comes to FHI and CPI. The indexes are strongly positively correlated.
There are also reasons to believe that biases in one estimate on one index increases the
probability of having a bias in the same direction on the other index, alas the error terms are
correlated as well. One obvious point is that the CPI actually is an integrated part of a check
question of FHI, and that FHI is one of the surveys the CPI uses when giving its estimates.
We also have to remember that these two indexes are constructed as relatively subjective
measures. As Bollen points out (1999), judges can be biased in their scoring of such indexes,
and they might be systematically influenced by certain other variables. In this case, not only
the indexes but also their error terms are not independent of each other, which could lead to
further problems. Economic variables, like GDP-growth, might influence judgements
systematically. Might Singapore and Botswana for example be judged as more democratic
and less corrupt than they actually are, because of their shining economic performances?
Judges are not objective and totally unaffected by wider concerns than those they are
supposed to judge. If the error terms of the CPI and FHI are systematically correlated, this
will exaggerate the size of the error term given by ε*γ. The new error term will probably not
be normally distributed, and the reliability of the measure will suffer.
There is also validity problem related to the rating of corruption and freedom of press and free
flow of information. If the perception of corruption is influenced, even for businessmen and
country experts, by what they are able to access through the media, then democracies might
actually be rated systematically as more corrupt than actually warranted when compared to
authoritarian regimes. A free and functioning media, with allowed flow of information might
contribute to highlighting the need to combat the scourge of corruption in a given country,
and their revelation of large scale scandals might actually drive CPI numbers higher than if
these scandals were not to be discovered. Belgium, France and Italy might suffer relative to
16
Singapore and China because of their democratic qualities. This effect is detrimental for the
validity of CPI as a democratic quality component. Couched in the terms of the equation
above: The expected value of A* γ is not equal to zero. Even if E(ε) and E(γ) are both equal to
zero, E(X*Y) would not be E(A*B).
5) Ordinality, cardinality and multiplication
A variable is said to have an ordinal measurement level, if the numbers assigned to its values
only tells something about the relative ordering of the values, and nothing about the absolute
distance between the values. A cardinal measure on the other hand contains information about
the absolute distance between values. Therefore in the ordinal case, if two units, P and Q, are
assigned respectively 1 and 2 on a variable X, this only implies that Q has “more” of variable
X than P. If X has a cardinal measurement level, Q has twice as much of X as P. The FHI and
CPI are only variables of ordinal measurement level. Even if a country has half the corruption
score or democracy score of another, this does not imply the country is only half as corrupt or
half as democratic in a strict metaphysical sense. There is no obvious yardstick that can
actually decide what twice as democratic actually means. Normalizing measures does not
totally take away the problem either, even if it seems to relieve some contingencies. One
mathematical trait of cardinal measures is that they can be multiplied, and that this multiplied
measure still retains a meaningful interpretation. Two ordinal measures can not be multiplied
together and still be given a meaningful interpretation in the strictest sense. You can not
multiply numbers that only contain information about the ranking on respective dimensions.
This might be brushed of as a concern for pedantic methodologists, but I will below show that
this actually has some serious de facto implications for the validity of the “effective
democracy”-measure. This goes especially for the issue of relative distance between units on
the new variable, but also on the arbitrariness of rank between units. The arbitrariness of the
scoring of the indicators, and the stringent mathematical assumptions underlying the
possibility of multiplication, indicates that more subjective and intuitive evaluative methods
have to be applied in order to actually judge whether the “effective democracy” measure
validly captures reality, or if it is systematically misrepresenting the phenomena of actual
degree of democracy.
4.3
Further considerations on the validity and reliability of the measure
17
The above discussion should have made relatively clear that there are no God-given ways of
measuring “effective democracy”. Contingencies of measurement based upon arbitrary choice
of principles, measures, scaling, variables included and such, make bombastic claims of the
correctness of one single operational variable very problematic. Of course, this should not
give rise to unconstrained intuitionism or discredit any attempt to classify; leading to a
relativist claim that comparison is completely impossible. Theory and empirical
generalizations on the historical functioning of certain institutions and how certain traits
(clientilism and corruption) have in several cases affected the functioning of these institutions
can give rise to a set of possible classificatory principles for “effective democracy”. I will
draw an analogy from philosophical debates when elaborating upon the role of principles and
overarching rules and their relation to the evaluation of specific cases. One illustration is John
Rawls’ (1997: 18-19) treatment of ethical principles versus the evidence of ethical
intuitionism on the basis of single cases in ethics, but others have treated the same problems
in connection with epistemological issues (Quine 1956). Rawls’ point is that not only is our
interpretation of different cases’ characteristics dependent upon which principles and theories
we are operating with, but the intuitive and thorough investigation of the cases themselves
might actually force through a revision of these principles. Rawls suggests that these mutual
revisions of case interpretation and principle revision could go on until we reach some kind of
“reflexive equilibrium”, where principles and case interpretation are in harmony. We saw
above that the operationalization of “effective democracy” could be questioned strongly on
validity grounds. Therefore, according to the “Rawlsian” logic, the more case-based
interpretation of degree of democracy becomes an important factor in settling the case on
whether the measure actually works as a good yardstick for democracy. The ranking of some
cases, and the distance between the cases when interpreted linearly, point to deficiencies in
the measure. Cardinal interpretation, trying to make sense of distances between units, is for
example underlying linear regression analysis. Concerns on rank between cases were voiced
by Hadenius and Teorell (2005), and I will elaborate on the “distance issue”. I will look at
empirical characteristics of the effective democracy measure from 1999 systematically. A
more comprehensive analysis would have looked more years.
Empirical evaluation of the measure
Table 4.2 shows the “effective democracy” scores for some selected countries, and figure 4.1
is a scatter-plot with FHI along the X-axis and “effective democracy” along the Y-axis.
18
Table 4.2: “Effective democracy” in selected countries (1999)
Effective
democracy
100
89
73
61
49
45
43
32
31
30
23
22
10
10
9
6
3
Country
Denmark
Norway
Germany
Spain
Belgium
Mauritius
Italy
South Korea
Latvia
Singapore
Argentina
India
Zimbabwe
Russia
Nigeria
Belarus
China
Figure 4.1: FHI and “effective democracy” (1999)
Denmark
100,00
Iceland
Canada
Australia
Ireland
Austria
United States
80,00
Portugal
France Israel
Spain
Slovenia
Chile
Estonia
Botswana
Hungary Belgium
Taiwan Italy
Mauritius
Namibia
Czech Republic Uruguay
60,00
Effective
democracy
40,00
20,00
0,00
Jamaica Korea, South
Singapore
Philippines El SalvadorLatvia
Brazil
Jordan
India
Argentina
Mexico Guatemala
Morocco
Ecuador
Malaysia Colombia
Ukraine
Venezuela Armenia Honduras
Cote d'Ivorie
Albania
Nigeria
Kazakhstan
Belarus
China
Azerbaijan
Afghanistan
Burma
0,00
20,00
40,00
60,00
Inverted and normalized FHI
19
80,00
100,00
The case of Singapore was put forward by Hadenius and Teorell as an example of a regime
that receives a too high democracy score by the effective democracy measure. The degree to
which the elite in the PAP has controlled political decision and policy making, as well as
curbed civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of association
makes the regime deserve the badge relatively authoritarian, or at least semi-authoritarian.
Singapore exercises elections, but they are arranged in such a way that the opposition has
typically won one or two seats in the 81 seat parliament. This result is also due to several
other aspects of political life like lack of civil liberties and arrest of opposition leaders.
However, the fact that there exist elections, property rights and that corruption is lacking
secures Singapore approximately 30% of the maximal FHI-score. This score is almost kept in
the effective democracy measure because of the success of the PAP in stamping out economic
corruption. However, as the discussion on ordinal measures showed, having 30% of the
maximal effective democracy score is not necessarily the same as having 30% of the maximal
FHI. If one uses the measure in regression analysis, the rank of cases and the distance
between different cases are of utmost concern, and will drive the results.
We cannot assign cardinal values of democracy or corruption, but we can try to make our
measures keep some “intuitive” appeal, when it comes to distance between units and
especially when it comes to rank. Even if democratic rights are rendered less effective by
corruption and clientilism in India and corruption and populism in Argentina, I have a
problem with seeing how one could claim based on a case-by-case understanding of the
politics in these countries that the actual exercise of political and civil rights is larger in
Singapore than these two countries. Countries such as India and Argentina are punished
“twice” because they are first subtracted from deficiencies related to dysfunctional democratic
practices in the FHI, and thereafter by multiplying this score with a low CPI. The same rank
problem appears when claiming that Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was more democratic than
Russia (before Putin) and Nigeria (which admittedly is plagued by corruption, patrimonialism
and shaky democratic foundations). These two latter countries are punished excessively
because of their rampant corruption, and one is therefore underestimating the modest actual
practice of political and civil rights that existed in these societies in 1999. Even if these
countries are not exemplars of societies where the populace determines political decision
making, they are not based on my knowledge worse than Zimbabwe, even if in 1999 the
Mugabe regime had not yet shown its worst antics.
20
The linear interpretation of distances shows even more clearly the validity problems of the
index. Remember that even if the measure is not metaphysically cardinal, one has to give it a
cardinal interpretation if one is to use it in a linear regression. I have no large problem when
interpreting the scores cardinally comparing the score of Singapore with Denmark’s score,
claiming that the degree of popular control over politics in the former is approximately 30%
of the latter (whatever this actually means). However, some of the distances when interpreted
in light of other distances are clearly counter-intuitive, and I believe fall short of empirical
evidence. A closer reading of the political history of Mauritius makes it clear that we are here
dealing with a country where the populace has had relatively large influence over politics,
with well-functioning elections, changes of government appearing smoothly, popular working
class movements coming to power, and freedom of speech and assembly. There has also
existed general responsiveness to popular demands through political channels in areas such as
health care and educational issues (Bräutigam 1997). The Mauritian populace threw out a
government by election when they wanted a change of economic course in the early eighties
(Srebrnik 2002: 280). Even if there are claims of corruption in Mauritian society, it is an
exaggeration to claim that Mauritius is closer in democracy score to Singapore than Spain,
and it is even more disturbing that the distance to Denmark upwards is almost quadruple the
distance to Singapore downwards. Mauritius is also closer in effective democracy to China
and Belarus than to Denmark.
Other examples can be provided. Surely, corruption in Belgium and Italy makes popular
control over politics less efficient, but it is non-sense to place these countries closer to North
Korea, Myanmar and Cuba than some Nordic countries. Either there is a serious validity
problem with the measure, or the reliability is weak, leading for example the score of Belgium
to be driven by relatively arbitrary events. Actually, computing the measure for Belgium in
2005, gives the country an effective democracy measure of 74. According to the measure,
Belgium has in the last six years undergone an “effective democratization” of 25 points. This
is more than Benin could be expected to have undergone if we were to have corruption scores
before and after the overthrow of the Kèrèkou regime in 1989-1990. Benin shifted from an
extremely oppressive and authoritarian regime to a remarkably well functioning democratic
situation with multi-party politics, freedom of speech and assembly, even though it falls short
of a democratic ideal. However, since Benin, when assigned CPI scores receives below 3, this
event of regime change counts as about the same democratization as what Belgium is
supposed to have experienced in the last years. I also have problems seeing how the
21
difference in effective democracy can be larger between Denmark and Norway than between
Yeltsin-Russia and China, and that the difference between Denmark and Germany should be
larger than the difference between Latvia and Zimbabwe.
One general problem of the index is that it comprises all relatively low values. Corrupt
democracies and semi-democracies are far closer to harshly authoritarian regimes than wellfunctioning democracies. Modestly corrupt and semi-democratic regimes receive scores that
are undeservingly low, especially if they go together as they often do (not the least because
the FHI already captures qualitative aspects). The reason behind is the mathematical
multiplicative operation on the two ordinal indexes CPI and FHI. 0,1 squared is 0,01, which is
very close to 0,3 squared (0,09). 0,8 squared (0,64) is however relatively far away from 1
squared. Empirically, we can see the implications by the fact that only 25 countries manages
to rack up scores above 50 on the index ranging from 0 to 100 in 1999. The measure has the
nice property of differentiating well between the relatively effective democracies, but fails to
do so among other countries. The mean score is 31,2 and the median is an extremely low 21.3.
Half the countries are pressed together on one fifth of the interval. This is problematic, when
using the index in a linear regression, since results would tend to represent differences
between the “West” and “the rest”, with the few countries dispersed over the relatively large
intervals on the upper end of the scale driving regression coefficients.
The claim from Inglehart and Welzel is that corruption scores only function as a grading
factor, and that they do not determine “effective democracy” by compensating of political
rights and civil liberties (2005: 194). However, this relatively dichotomized argument does
not explain away the empirical fact that the CPI is actually higher correlated with the
“effective democracy”-measure than the FHI. With a correlation coefficient of 0,95, we could
actually use CPI as a decent proxy for effective democracy. The FHI and “effective
democracy” have a correlation coefficient of 0,84.
Table 4.3
Bivariate correlations between FHI, CPI and “effective democracy” (1999)
FHI
CPI
Effective
democracy
FHI
1
0,67
0,84
CPI
Effective
democracy
0,67
1
0,95
0,84
0,95
1
22
The CPI’s empirical distribution is skewed in a way that makes the mass of countries obtain a
relatively low score. Once again, I must remind that there is no strict cardinal interpretation of
“corruption scores”, how corrupt is for example a 5? The median score for the 1999 survey is
a low 3.2, and a score above 5 is only given to 26% of the countries. This explains much of
the fact that “effective democracy”-index had a lumping together of countries at the bottom
values. By using a multiplicative measure, a below 5-score in corruption guarantees that a
country is not going to get more than half the score for “effective democracy”, no matter what
the FHI-score should be.
5.0
Conclusion with suggestions for measuring “effective democracy”.
When estimating a political regime’s “democratic” characteristics empirically, the need to go
beyond the counting and classification of formal institutions and constitutional articles seems
obvious to proponents of substantial democracy-definitions. The measure of effective
democracy proposed by Inglehart and Welzel takes the issue of actual functioning of political
institutions and the degree of popular control over them seriously. However, there are some
serious flaws with the measure, indicating that the search for a measure of “true democracy”
has not ended. All operationalizations and indexes have their validity and reliability problems.
If there is no alternative measure available, the second best option is not to revert from
measuring at all, but to be seriously aware of the problems of the index when analyzing and
interpreting results from studies using the measure. This is especially important if the
construction of the index can lead to systematic biases in the relationship under study.
Another option is to use different measures in the analysis, and report the results stemming
from usage of different operationalizations.
One should not give up on finding a better measure of “actual” or “effective” democracy. One
very interesting alternative is the “democracy audits” introduced by Beetham, and also argued
by many to be very appropriate in contexts where the “deficiencies” of formal democratic
institutions, like Africa, seem obvious (Baker 1999). In stead of relying on the a priori
multiplicative assumption of formal democracy interacting with corruption, this approach is
more empirical and somewhat more nuanced, asking a large amount of check questions,
where the rating is clearly and explicitly related to the actual functioning of rights, liberties
and institutions. Actors’ capacities can also be incorporated directly. Its drawback is the
23
amount of work needed to construct scores, the difficulty in securing comparability across
countries, when country experts probably are needed in the scoring, and that measures could
be less parsimonious, incorporating more than 80 questions (Beetham 1997). If one however
wants to stick to a type of parsimonious framework like Inglehart and Welzel’s, one could
improve upon the effective democracy measure as well, by making some adjustments. If the
claim that FHI underestimates the degree of effective democracy as practiced by citizens still
holds, but that one recognizes that Freedom House to a certain degree incorporates this
functioning, one could weigh FHI stronger, for example by using a formula like X= FHI(2/3) *
CPI(1/3). This would of course move away from a clean and intuitively appealing formula, but
it should be clear by now that this formulation in any case gives arbitrary results, given the
fact that we are not dealing with cardinal measures. This suggested formula would give
rankings and differences in empirical democratic characteristics that make more intuitive
sense than the originally proposed effective democracy measure: India would be somewhat
further away from China, Singapore would be ranked lower, and Italy and Spain would again
be somewhat closer to their other OECD partners. Another clear improvement would be
taking the recognition that not only corruption affects the quality and actual practice of
democratic rights and institutions. Instead of letting CPI be the quality component in an
interactive measure, one could introduce a weighted index, where corruption could be
incorporated, but also accompanied by other crucial variables like “responsiveness of elites”,
“political power distribution” and other “rule of law” indicators. Even if less parsimonious,
such a measure would clearly exhibit superior validity in capturing the actual functioning of
democracy in a country.
24
6.0
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XXXXXX Political regime types and economic growth – Are democracies better at
increasing prosperity? XXXXXXXXX; 2006.
i
There are of course several different ways to measure equality, or if one wants the spread of a good over a
population. Therefore, it is not always clear in principle whether a situation A incorporates a more egalitarian
distribution of a resource (power, wealth etc) than another situation B, and especially how much more. However,
in practice one can at least often rank two situations relatively determinately. Whether political power resources
is more equally distributed between citizens in Norway and Sweden is debatable, but this is not the case when
comparing Norway and Togo, independently of measure.
ii
See Goodman (1962) for the specific expressions and approximations of variances of products. The article
treats both the special case where the variables that make up the factors of the product are independent, and also
when they are not.
26