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T HE Q UALITY OF L OCAL D EMOCRACY : T OWARDS A N EW C ONCEPTUAL F RAMEWORK
Luís de Sousa
Gulbenkian Fellow, RSCAS/European University Institute
Paper prepared for the panel GT 2.3.
Gobernanza local e innovación del gobierno y la democracia coordinated by David Sweeting (University of Bristol) and J. Ignacio Criado (U.
Autónoma de Madrid) under the auspices of the X Congreso Español de Ciencia Política y de
la Administración “Repensar la democracia: inclusion y diversidad” .
Málaga 23-25 September 2009
E-mail: luis.desousa@eui.eu
1. Introduction
Local government is at the core of the western-type of democracy (Loughlin
1996; Loughlin 2001). John Stuart Mill (1861) emphasised the educational qualities of local government. He believed the skills and virtues necessary for taking part in national government were to be developed in local affairs. In fact, an increasing large portion of national political elites across Europe (40% upwards), have previously held a local mandate (Cotta and Best 2000: 505).
Efficiency arguments for local self-government also are part of the story
(Sharpe 1970; Kersting and Vetter 2003). An emerging system of multi-level governance (Goldsmith and Klausen 1997), where public authorities enter into network relations with each other and with private-sector actors, has led to a renewed interest in local government (Carmichael 2005). Moreover, local government has been particularly important to the development of local communities and the consolidation of democracy in Southern Europe
(Almeida 2008; Alfonso 1991).
Local government is going through a series of structural transformations: from the introduction of New Public Administration instruments, the rise of new modes of governance, to changing relations between tiers of government and the declining importance of political parties. The diversity of institutional arrangements across European local government systems leads to different
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Kersting and Vetter 2003; Denters and Rose 2005). However, two processes have been common to all local government systems: the rise of new modes of governance and the increased autonomy of local politics.
The catchphrase “from government to governance” has been used to describe an alleged transformation of the local political arena increasingly involving unelected and unconventional actors (policy networks/communities and pressures groups of various kinds) that interact with municipal actors and decision-making processes. Whether these new forms of governance have strengthened the quality of democracy or actually threatened its basic tenets is something highly debatable (Loughlin 2001: 20; Geissel 2008: 365-6).
In most European countries, sub-national democracy has become an autonomous and preponderant political feature and not just a mere second order arena where national issues and politics inflict and are discussed. As
Loughlin (2001: 7) put it, ‘national governments no longer hold the same monopoly in democratic governance that they once did’. The rise of localism is, to an extent, a symptom of the perceived incapacity of national representative democracies to respond to the pressures of Europeanization and globalization. By the early 1990s, the pressure which European nationstates were facing from below and from above, led national political elites, academics and experts to reinvent democracy or, in other words, to redemocratize democracy by bringing it closer to the people. New forms of democratic participation and practice were put in place at different levels and various degrees, blurring the dividing line between the electors and the elected (Geissel 2008: 365).
All the above transformations impacted on the role of traditional local government actors, institutions and processes, urging decision-makers, democracy promoters and academics to devise means of framing and assessing the quality of local democracy (QoLD). Much of the literature on the quality of democracy (Beetham 1994, 2005; Vanhanen 1997; Altman and
Pérez-Liñán
2002; Andreev 2003, 2005;
O’Donnell et al. 2004; Diamond and
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Morlino 2005; Hutcheson and Korosteleva 2006; Morlino 2006; Berg-
Schlosser 2006) focuses on institutions and processes at the national level.
There has been little systematic theoretical work and empirical comparative research on the quality of democracy at the local level across countries with different political and administrative traditions and levels of development.
This paper is not discussing research data. At this stage we content ourselves with the humble task of making a state of the art regarding quality of democracy studies, comparing their strengths and weaknesses and extrapolating from the mainstream literature a series of dimensions of analysis that help us to conceptualize a framework for assessing democratic performance at the local level.
The paper is organized in three parts: the first deals with the concept of quality of democracy; the second discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the most relevant measurements done so far; the third raises a key number of methodological and substantive issues that could help us to frame a new comparative assessment of QoLD.
2. What do we mean by quality of democracy?
In recent years, scholars of comparative politics studies have turn their attention to the quality of democracy. With the progress of the Third Wave of democratization, scholars were shifting their focus from democratic transitions to democratic consolidation: ‘from the ways in which democratic regimes come into being to the ways in which they can be rendered stable and secure’
(Plattner 2005: 77). Today, the fear of regression to authoritarianism seems to have vanished forever in the mindset of politicians and citizens of these democracies. This does not mean, however, that the study of the dynamics of democracy has lost its appeal. On the contrary, with the end of the Cold War
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Draft Version Please do not quote and the expansion of liberal democracy world wide, 1 academics and practitioners begun to reflect upon its quality(ies), in other words, what makes a democracy good or bad and how can it be improved and strengthened
(Diamond and Morlino 2005; Morlino 2006).
Any measurement on the quality of democracy needs to start with a definition of the two terms that make this complex and multidimensional concept: democracy and quality.
Democracy is by no means a consensual concept. In his famous work
Democracy and its critics , Robert Dahl sets seven principles of his ideal type democracy, which he terms “polyarchy” (1989: 221):
1. The existence of constitutionally bound elected officials who control government decisions about policy;
2. The regular practice of free and fair elections as a mechanisms to oppose and vote out the highest officials in government conducted in which the use of coercion is comparatively uncommon;
3. This suffrage must be universal and inclusive : practically all adults have the right to vote ( active electoral capacity
) and…
4. To stand for elective office ( passive electoral capacity ), though for some elective offices, such as presidential ones, we may have higher age limits for eligibility than we may have for the capacity to vote;
5. The existence of freedoms and guarantees , that enable citizens to express themselves without fear of reprisals or severe punishments on their political ideas and positioning, including their criticism of officials,
1 ‘At mid-century, there were 22 democracies accounting for 31 percent of the world population and a further 21 states with restricted democratic practices, accounting for 11.9 percent of the globe’s population. By the close of our century liberal and electoral democracies clearly predominate, and have expanded significantly in the Third Wave, which has brought democracy to much of the post-Communist world and to Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa. Electoral democracies now represent 119 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 58.2 percent of the world’s population. At the same time liberal democracies— i.e. countries Freedom House regards as free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law — are 85 in number and represent 38 percent of the global population’ (Freedom
House Democracy's Century Report , 1999. Available online: http://www.freedomhouse.org/reports/century.pdf).
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6. Citizens must also have the right to seek for alternative sources of information which must be regulated and protected by law;
7. And they have equally the right to form relatively autonomous associations , including independent political parties and interest groups, to achieve their various rights, including those listed above.
The definition has been enriched by other contributions (Schmitter and Karl
1991; Morlino 2004), but its essence has remained unaltered: Dahl’s poliarchy offers a minimalist-proceduralist conceptualization of democracy. However, as a system of government, democracy is not simply characterised by a set of basic rules and procedures establishing who is entitled to take collective decisions under what processes; it is also a set of fundamental values and a complex mixture of institutions which historically have put those principles into practice wi th greater and lesser success (Bobbio 1988; Beetham 1994; Mény
1999). In this sense, we could argue that Dahl’s polyarchy is not the arrival but the departure point. As Michael Coppedge put it, polyarchy is ‘a minimal accep table degree of democracy’ (2004: 240).
By “quality” Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino (2005: xi) suggest three meanings with different implications to its measurement: procedure quality , in which the quality of a product ‘is the result of an exact, controlled process carried out accord ing to precise, recurring methods and timing’; content quality , i.e. quality that results from ‘the structural characteristics of a product, such as its design, materials, or functioning’; and result quality , the quality of a product or service ‘directly indicated by the degree of customer satisfaction with it, regardless of how it is produced or its actual content’.
Following on these definitions, the authors co nceptualize “quality democracy” as a regime whereby citizens are granted ‘a high degree of freedom, political equality, and popular control over public policies and policy makers trough the legitimate and lawful functioning of stable institutions . In this line, a ‘good’ democracy is primarily a broadly legitimated regime that satisfies citizen s’
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‘good democracy’ is also one in which its citizens, associations, and communities enjoy extensive liberty and political equality (quality in terms of content ). Finally, a
‘good’ democracy is a regime in which citizens have the sovereign power to evaluate whether the government provides liberty and equality according to the rule of law. Citizens, their organizations and parties participate and compete to hold elected officials accountable for their policies and actions. They monitor the efficiency and fairness of the application of the laws, the efficacy of government decision, and the political responsibility and responsiveness of elected officials. Government institutions also hold one another accountable before the law and the constitution (quality in terms of procedure )’ (Diamond and Morlino 2005: xi).
Diamond and Morlino’s operationalization of the quality of democracy raises three immediate problems: first, the authors start with the presumption that the various dimensions of democratic governance they enumerate
– (five procedural) rule of law, participation, competition, vertical an horizontal accountability, (two substantive) freedom and equality, and (one results) responsiveness
– perform in an harmonious way, evolve together and converge into a system, creating an ideal type polity (2005: xxxi). Once confronted with the lessons from the case studies, the authors admit the possibility of empirical inconsistencies of, and tradeoffs between, the different dimensions of democratic quality: ‘To be sure, all good things do not go together smoothly. […] A high-quality democracy thus is not indefinitely high in every democratic quality’ (2005: xxxii-iii). Historical evidence shows that no democracy can be equated to such ideal type polity; it also teach us that the majority of democracies display different combinations of democratic and non-democratic elements product of their singular institutional development.
Democracy is a sufficiently elastic concept and political reality to deal and live with these inconsistencies product of unfinished modernisation processes. As
Mény put is succinctly: ‘What we traditionally and readily call “democracy” is a system that closely blends democratic and non-democratic elements in combinations that vary in time and space, subject continually to an
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Draft Version Please do not quote examination of their legitimacy before the elites in particular and the people in general’ (1999, 115).
Second, the authors also believe (wrongly) that there is a common understanding of these standards in society. When assessing the quality of democracy, one should bear in mind that cognitive levels about the structure and process of democracy are substantially different across different social groupings, in particular between those who hold office and those upon who authority is exercised. Citizens organize their knowledge about democracy through abstract mental frames, fed by a variety of sources (in the forefront the media, but also social groups of all kinds, books, internet, etc.), with different degrees of sophistication and consistency. These mental frames represent their understanding of the way democracy is organized and operates. In other words, people resort to schemata to organize current knowledge and provide a framework for the understanding of the future of democracy. By contrast, the perceptions of politicians are endogenous to the political system and for that reason tend to express a more elaborate and informed vision of its modus operandi. This contrast in cognitive levels is fundamental to the understanding of support for and legitimacy of democracy.
It is important to distinguish between perceptions on the performance of democratic rule held by an actor with direct (even if loose) responsibilities for its functioning from those held by citizens at large, who are largely kept at bay from politics and are only asked to interact with it during elections (and only exceptionally via referenda or other direct forms of democracy).
Third, scholarly definitions of “quality democracy” do not reflect people’s expectations, hence it is not surprising that a given democracy may score high in the eight dimensions of quality proposed by Diamond and Morlino
(2005), but still citizens may feel dissatisfied with their regime’s performance.
Here the authors become once again tautological in their explanation. They believe that such discrepancy can be explained by the citizens’ lack of cognitive capacity to understand policies/politics, their vulnerability to media sensationalism, the diversity of interests and concerns (and their variable aggregation) in society and the inherent tendency of citizens to always be
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Draft Version Please do not quote unsatisfied with what they get. They have not pondered that the explanation for such discrepancy might reside in the fact that the quality measurement they have used, based on their own scholarly notions of democracy, may not match citizens’ preferences and perceptions. As Plattner alert us, the process in which standards are selected for the purposes of measuring or auditing the quality of democracy is often biased, because it imposes the particular political preferences of scholars ‘as objective standards of quality’ upon native citizens from those regimes under scrutiny (2005: 78, 81). Citizens may display partial, distorted and less sophisticated notions of democracy, but every single individual has a vision of the regime or society they would like to live in, which may be less “democratic” or expressing a different sort of democracy than the one scholars would have expected. Having said this, we should not “over relativize” concepts, leaving to untrained citizens the task of defining what researchers want to measure or we run the risk of not knowing what we are trying to measure. Instead, as Michael Coppedge suggests, resear chers are responsible for converting citizens’ interests and visions of democracy into analytical useful socioscientific concepts ‘and by deciding which of these concepts can be naturally articulated in a coherent theoretical framework’ (2004: 241).
3. On the measurement of the quality of democracy
Notwithstanding these difficulties concerning the conceptualization of democracy and the choice of indicators to measure its performance, there is an increased interest for democratic assessment from a variety of actors
(decision-makers, democracy promoters, community of academics, etc). This has partly to with the rapid expansion o f regimes (self)labelled as “democratic” in the world since the end of the Cold War, and the need to disclose the differences in quality among them; and partly due to fact that democracy has since then become “the only player in town”, urging an introspective evaluation of its qualities, at a time when its basic tenets (parties and representative institutions) are scoring low levels of public support, thus reducing democratic legitimacy.
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There are essentially three major interests in measuring democratic performance: an informative interest , citizens and decision-makers want to know how strong their democracy is; a comparative interest , they also want to know whether the regime they live in is more or less democratic than those of their neighbours; and a policy interest , decision-makers and democracy promoters want to know how their democratic institutions and practices respond to popular aspirations and what aspects are underperforming in order to implement the necessary reforms and adjustments.
From the practical standpoint, the exercise of assessing the state, performance or quality of democracy is ‘a useful innovation that can aid citizens evaluating their own democracies’ (Plattner 2005: 31). Regardless whether the operational definition adopted matches citizens’ understandings or visions of democracy, this does not stop them from judging the quality of their own democracy when confronting its modus operandi with the mechanisms and performances of other regimes. This evaluation is not simply across space but also in time. Citizens may believe that certain “ways of doing things” are dated and that democracy needs to be “modernized”. Other than being a disputed concept, democracy is a process in constant redefinition hence the need to establish valid, meaningful and reliable ways to measure and assess democratic progress is quintessential to both decision-makers at citizens at large to evaluate in which direction their democracy is evolving
(Diamond and Morlino 2005).
Before making an overview of what have been the major empirical exercises in this growing field of research, perhaps it is worth to distinguish between measuring democratic consolidation (CoD) and measuring the quality of democracy (QoD). Measuring democratic consolidation is about assessing the behavioural, attitudinal and structural foundations that explain both the deepening of a fully liberal democracy or completing of a quasi-democracy
( positive dimension of CoD) or the avoidance of the breakdown of whatever minimal kind of democracy we have in place ( negative dimension of CoD)
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(Schedler 2007: 19). In practice, the measurement of the degree of CoD has focused on the second dimension, that is, to assess when is a democratic regime sufficiently stable and secure from breakdown. The positive dimension comes closer to what has become termed QoD. Diamond (1999) and
Coppedge (1997; 2004) conceived the QoD as the relative degree of democratization among countries that we already label as polyarchies. In a similar line, Svetlozar Andreev also defines QoD with the process of consolidation in mind: ‘as a relatively stable and legitimate arrangement, which conforms to the basic principles of democracy: competition, participation and representation, as well as to accountability and political equality’ (2005: 3).
Not surprisingly, some of the early studies on the quality of democracy tended to focus on democratic innovations, mostly in the form of participatory measures. Whilst democracy was expanding world wide, everywhere citizens where showing signs of disenchantment. The alleged crisis of representative democracy stems from two interconnected dynamics: a deficit in supply
(parti es regarded as unrepresentative, insensitive to people’s problems and not trustworthy) and a deficit in demand (low interest in politics, low turnout, low mobilization, low trust in political actors and institutions). The increased concern about the quality of democracy was fundamentally a concern about the lack of citizens’ knowledge, interest and participation in politics. Not surprisingly, most of the local democratic innovations witnessed since the first half of the 1990s are primarily directed towards increasing and improving citizens’ involvement in political life, such as: direct democracy (e.g. referenda and petitions) through which citizens express their positioning/preferences concerning certain public policies; network/deliberative governance (e.g. participatory budgeting) through which ordinary citizens decide to allocate part of a municipal or public budget; consultative procedures (e.g. 1992 UN
Agenda 21), through which different stakeholders (civil society organizations, businessmen, professionals, local populations, etc) are consulted by decisionmakers prior to take a decision on a given policy matter or public investment; electoral reforms (e.g. directly elected Mayors) aiming at reinforcing vertical accountability in local politics (Geissel 2008: 366).
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Other reflections have focused on particular elements or standards of democratic governance. In a edited volume organized by Larry Diamond and
Leonardo Morlino (2005), initially published as a special issue of the Journal of Democracy in 2004, Gu illermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer and G. Bingham Powell, Jr. discuss and even provide proxy measurements for various procedural and substantive dimensions of democratic quality – the rule of law, accountability, inequality and responsiveness respectively – but fail to provide a general framework for measuring the quality of democracy and explaining observable regularities and variations. By contrast, David Beetham, in the same volume, starts from a substantive dimension of democratic quality – i.e. freedom – to propose a fourstep theoretical framework to assess the quality of a country’s democracy:
‘The model […] to assess the quality of democracy has four stages: first, identifying for empirical investigation and analysis the relevant items that together comprise a “good” democracy; second, comparing those items against international standards of best practice; third, checking the items for typical subversions, combined with an appraisal of how their practice is perceived by citizens themselves; and fourth, analyzing how well the protective agencies guard against these typical subversions. These four stages are not necessarily separate in practice, but rather form part of an iterative or reflexive process’ (Beetham 2005: 42).
Bettham’s
Democratic Audit framework was utilized for the first time in the
United Kingdom and Australia 2 in 2002. The framework was then further developed under the auspices of the International Institute for Democracy and
Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm. IDEA tested the framework in eight countries including New Zealand and updated its methodology and indicators to include other dimensions of analysis, which were not foreseen in the initial model. For instance, more attention was paid to institutions of federalism and
2 Since 2002, a team at the Australian National University has been conducting Audits to assess Australia’s strengths and weaknesses as a democratic society
( http://arts.anu.edu.au/democraticaudit/ ). From early 2008 the Audit has been based at the
Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, with continuing input from researchers at ANU and other universities ( http://democraticaudit.org.au/ ).
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Further to this more qualitative case-by-case analysis, there has been a proliferation of large N measurements, which have developed indicators or indexes of democratization and good governance of some kind. These (proxy) measurements have focused on particular aspects of democratic governance
(for instance, a country’s capacity to combat corruption 3 or its handling of civil liberties and political rights) or have attempted to measure governance itself, as the ensemble of traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. Out of the array of contributions available (Vanhanen 1997; Altman and Pérez-Liñán 2002; Andreev 2003, 2005; Berg-Schlosser 2006), two deserve our attention because they have been repeated in time and enjoy increased popularity amongst decision-makers, democracy promoters and academics: the Freedom House annual country ratings of civil liberties and political rights and the Daniel Kaufman/World Bank’s Worldwide Governance
Indicators (WGI).
Further to other more important democracy promotion activities, Freedom
House has published on a regular basis since 1972, a standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties across the world. Freedom in the World , which includes both survey ratings and comparative country narratives, soon became Freedom House’s flagship publication partly due to the level of debate and politicization that country ratings and large N indexes raise. The ratings are determined by a checklist of
25 questions, 10 addressing political rights and 15 addressing civil liberties, which are then grouped into sub-categories 4 :
 Political rights : Electoral Process (3 questions), Political Pluralism and
3 In the last two decades, several indexes and barometers to measure different aspects of corruption and anti-corruption have been developed: at the forefront the Corruption
Perceptions Index (CPI), the Bribe Payers Index (BPI), and the Corruption Barometer, all developed under the auspices of Transparency International ( http://www.transparency.org/ ); the Public Integrity Index developed by Global Integrity/the Center for Public Integrity
( http://www.globalintegrity.org/ ); or the Opacity Index developed by the Kurtzman Group
( http://www.kurtzmangroup.com/opacity_index_2009.php
).
4 For more information on the methodological aspects of the Freedom in the World ratings, please consult Freedom House’s website: http://www.freedomhouse.org
.
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Participation (4 questions), Functioning of Government (3 questions);

Civil liberties : Freedom of Expression and Belief (4 questions),
Associational and Organizational Rights: 3 questions (12 points), Rule of Law (4 questions) and Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights (4 questions).
Freedom in the world does not provide an index of democracy, but it has been taken by many comparative studies as proxy in this respect (Berg-Schlosser
2006: 34).
Similarly, Daniel Kaufmam/World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators
(WGI) do not measure the quality of democracy per se, but the less controversial but more ambiguous concept of governance. According to
Daniel Kaufman’s research team, governance includes ‘the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them’ 5 . The Worldwide Governance Indicators
(WGI) project 
 reports aggregate and individual survey indicators 6 for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996
–2008, for six dimensions of governance: 1) Voice and Accountability; 2) Political Stability and Absence of
Violence; 3) Government Effectiveness; 4) Regulatory Quality; 5) Rule of Law; and 6) Control of Corruption.
Trading complexity for ambiguity enables Kaufman and his team to assess a series of survey indicators across a large number of regimes of a different nature and levels of legitimization. In doing so, they ignore the fact that the values underpinning governance might have a complete different meaning in democratic and non-democratic contexts. The understanding of governance
5 Definition extracted from the WGI website: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp
available on 5 July 2009.
6 The aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. The individual data sources underlying the aggregate indicators are drawn from a diverse variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations.
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Democracy is built upon the doctrine of open governance, which holds that the business of government, public administration, NGO and corporate sectors should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight. Transparency can only be achieved if the constitutional freedoms
(of speech, of information, of rally and protest) are universally guaranteed and widely applied. If the activity of all state departments and agencies are openly scrutinized there will be a lot of questions, protests and demands/suggestions coming from media and the public at large. Transparency is inevitably linked to political accountability. If people demand to know, is because they are aware of their right/capacity to judge and reward/punish the incumbent as appropriate. Such power or faculty is not freely, universally and openly granted to citizens in non-democratic contexts. The principle of accountability runs counter to the logic of public order in those regimes. Non-democracies are incapable of allowing random change to occur as a consequence of the choices of the people.
In their hard and endless task of mapping and explaining the quality of democracy, ‘scholars and practitioners have adopted a number of strategies to measure democracy, including categorical measures (democracy vs nondemocracy), scale measures (e.g. a rating on a 1 to 10 scale), objective measures (e.g. voter turnout and party share of the vote), hybrid measures of democratic practices, and perceptions of democracy based on mass public opinion surveys’ (IDEA/Landman 2008). The fact that there is a great deal of uniformity across these various ratings (Berg-Schlosser 2006) does not add much to the understanding of the differences and similarities found across countries. What these large N studies do is to state the obvious (in some cases reinforcing stereotypes) without providing plausible causal explanations for what is observed. Moreover, the quest for comparability and broad temporal and spatial coverage, however, has often meant the sacrifice of context-specific features of democracy and internal variations at the micro level.
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Most assessments have tended to focus mainly on national politics. The quality of local democracy was simply regarded as a function of national democratization dynamics. The question ‘whether the legitimacy of subnational government emanates from national government or whether it has a basis of legitimacy in its own right’ (Loughlin 2001) is not a minor one.
The autonomy of the local arena from the national one has largely to do with the institutional arrangements, in particular the way the representative role of
Mayors and councillors is structured by the electoral system and the competences devolved to local government.
Carrying out democratic assessments at the local level is a much more complex task, but has the advantage of overcoming some of the scientific limitations of country-based audits. National assessments on the quality of democracy suffer from an unavoidable problem, i.e. the ‘synchronic’ or
‘photographic’ nature of the audit. As Michael Coppedge alerts us,
‘Dimensions cannot be analysed unless variation exists, and variation is difficult to find when a single observation is made about a number of indicators’ (2004: 244) in a given country at a given time. Assessing the quality of democracy at the local level overcomes one of these problems, i.e. the spatial dimension of analysis, because the vast number of municipalities and districts offer the degree of variation needed to test the strength of the indicators chosen.
In response to this methodological and theoretical deficit in assessing the quality of local democracy, a multinational team of researchers from Central and Eastern Europe led by Gábor Sóos took the task of adapting David
Beetham/Freedom House’s democratic audit framework to the specificities of local government systems in Baltic, Visegrad and South Eastern countries
(Soós 2006). This is perhaps the first large-scale comparative measurement
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7 The study is structured in three dimensions of analysis each of which subdivided into thematic sections:
1. Performance of Local Government . This dimension focuses on the internal functioning of local government. Section 1 addresses the level of local jurisdictional, fiscal and political autonomy; Section 2 deals with the respect of the rule of law and the guarantee of civil and political rights; Section 3 tackles one of the most sensitive issues of local democratic governance in CEE countries, i.e. the degree of transparency and accountability in the functioning of local government; finally, Section 4 assesses the effectiveness of local governments through three interrelated dimensions: resource control, decisionmaking capacity, and output control;
2. Representation in Local Government . This dimension deals with the relationship between citizens and their local elected leaders, including concepts such as social and political representation, vertical accountability, delegation, responsiveness, deliberation and inclusive decision-making. Section 1 tackles a series of issues concerning representative and direct democracy; Section 2 deals with the electoral process itself; Section 3 focuses on party organizations at the local level, their role and factions in local decision-making bodies; Section 4 assesses the role of local representatives (mayors and councillors) by focusing on their social and political background, social capital, attachment to democratic values and attitudes toward representation;
Section 5 addresses the inclusiveness, responsiveness, and accessibility of local decision-makers.
3. Local Civil Society . This dimension assesses the political quality of local communities by focusing on the role and performance of three civil society stakeholders: the local media, NGOs and citizens. Section
1 surveys the general infrastructure of civil society in local politics;
Section 2 concentrates on the actual role of civil society organizations in local politics, i.e. the relationship between the media/NGOs and local
7 The project is now in its second edition: the framework was initially applied to Latvia,
Poland, Romania and Hungary and it was then extended to Estonia, Slovakia and Bulgaria
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(their interest in and knowledge about politics, their involvement and participation in local politics, their identification with the local community, and their support and attachment to the principles and institutions of the local government system.
The more general analysis of the quality of life, which some conceptual definitions try to embrace (Svetlozar 2005: 9), was left outside the scope of this study, since it would increase disproportionally complexity without bringing more clarity to the analysis (Soós 2006: 6). Besides, narrowing the focus to a key number of procedural aspects and administrative or policyrelated processes has the advantage of making the measurement ‘much more manageable’ (Soós 2006: 7).
The study fulfils the more general objective of its sponsors: to assess and understand the performance of local governments in CEE countries 8 . It offers an excellent and detailed account of many aspects concerning the state of local democratic governance on a country per country basis, but fails to provide a measurement of the quality of local democracy across the municipalities in each country. Moreover, the authors made a clear methodological choice not to use scores rating local political entities and processes, because they believed these are imprecise and too reductionist
(Soós 2006: 7).
4. Towards a new conceptual framework for assessing QoLD
We share the same concerns about reducing highly complex questions to a very simplified and quantifiable presentation, but contrary to our central and eastern European colleagues, we propose a new conceptual framework based on six interrelated dimensions of local democratic governance to be
8 The project was initially set by the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative of the Open Society Institute to help decision-makers and activists in CEE countries to understand local political developments.
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Participation, support and ownership
A battery of indicators will address the degree and type of participation in local politics, citizens’ support for local democratic institutions (legitimization) and their sense of ownership of these processes (cognitive and identity issues).
What are the institutional arrangements enabling citizens’ direct participation in local affairs and how does that participation take place and in what forms?
How supportive are citizens of the principles and institutions of their local democracy? To what extent local populations are heard by local and national governme nts and “own” the decisions affecting their lives?
Although our conceptual framework is centred on the performance of local government bodies and formal decision-making processes, civil society political agents such as the local press, business associations and CSOs, are not excluded from the assessment. On the contrary, we will be assessing how local stakeholders interact with decision-makers and are able to influence the conduct of the policy process at its various stages: during the agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation (Brewer and deLeon 1983; May and Wildavsky 1978; Jenkins 1978; and Anderson
1975; Fischer et al. 2007).
The current discussion about the quality of local democracy is also or primarily a dis cussion of the quality of “ local governance
” (Bache 2007;
Diamond and Morlino 2005; Bukowski et al. 2003; Teune 1995). Measures such as participatory budgeting, binding local plebiscites and town meetings to foster direct, meaningful contact between councils and the citizen are proposed for examination. Whilst traditional forms of political representation and participation have been negatively affected in recent years, new forms of political participation are taking shape. There are also examples of reforms aiming at increasing the influence of citizens by using local referenda and initiatives, strengthening citizens in their role as users of municipal services or through the use of consultation procedures (Ribeiro 2007). A common denominator of many of these reforms is the tendency to bypass the political
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Draft Version Please do not quote parties and perhaps thereby also the political representative body. Hence this dimension will assess the compatibility between traditional representative democratic procedures and deliberative innovation in the context of local politics.
Digital government and democracy
A second dimension that our QoLD conceptual framework gives special attention is the introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in local government. We admit that this dimension may not be as relevant to CEE municipalities as it is for western European ones, but we cannot ignore the fact that where ICT has been introduced in local governments, the volume of interaction between citizens and their administration has increased substantively, making them more conscious of their rights and more aware of how their local administration works.
At first, these local democracy innovation measures were conceived as a twin-spear solution to the empowerment-accountability gap in the new clientoriented model of public administration: on the one hand, they were expected to bring public decisions and processes closer to citizens’ needs ( two-way communication channel ) and more open to their participation ( greater stakeholders’ involvement and accountability
); on the other hand, they were sought to improve bureaucratic efficiency and efficacy, not only by informing citizens of daily council businesses ( transparency ), but also by providing them faster and more effectible services and addressing their complaints ( citizens’ feedback into service delivery ). More recently, decision-makers, democracy promoters and academics are exploring the potential of ICT for the betterment of local representative institutions with the ultimate intent of fostering citizens’ direct involvement and support for their local democracy, reducing the growing representative deficit between elected officials and voters and strengthening the overall performance of local deliberative processes
(Castells 1989).
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Draft Version Please do not quote
Even if there is no clear evidence that the introduction of ICT has improved levels of political participation, the new forms of public protest, watchdog initiatives, public forums on local problems, which are being developed and sustained via these new Internet instruments abound and deserve our special attention (Neves and Felizes 2007; Sussman 1997; Schwellach and Hagen
2004; Hill 2004; Grabow 2004; Reinermann 2002; Hanssen 2008).
Interest mediation and representation
Local democracy in European countries is representative democracy. At the institutional level, this conceptual framework intends to analyse the quality of local democratic governance by focusing on three key roles in the equation of representation: 1) the role of local politicians; 2) the role of local representative institutions; and 3) the role of local citizens and other stakeholders. From a normative perspective the rationale for focusing on this triad of representation is their crucial position in the construction of local democracy (Klausen and Magnier 1998, Mouritzen and Svara 2002).
Given that Mayors have a preponderant role in many local government systems, it would be unreasonable not to take their visions of democracy on board. In this sense, Manuel Alcantara’s observation seems as opportune for local as country QoD assessments: ‘in many countries strong leadership by elites is significant when it comes to understanding where the country is going; thus, the matter is not so much to know what citizens expect but what its elites do’ (2004: 237). Local Mayors and executives have been described and analysed more regularly 9 than local councillors, partly due to the diversity of institutional arrangements and variable dimensions of the latter. Here the framework proposes to address a series of institutional features such as the recruitment and careers of local politicians, their working conditions and their role conceptions: What is the balance between the roles as representatives of the population and as decision-makers and managers of municipal
9 There have been two major European projects on local Mayors: the UDITE-project and The
European Mayor Research.
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Draft Version Please do not quote administration? How is the role as representative conceived by the officeholder and by citizens at large? How discrepant those evaluations are?
Because local democracy is fundamentally representative democracy, political parties stand as the major (but no longer sole) mediators of interests in local politics. Their importance varies greatly between and within local government systems. In many countries traditionally municipalities have not been party politicised. Party politicisation proceeded with democratisation. In some countries this process is still underway. In other countries the party system has matured to the point of becoming overripe. Throughout Europe, however, party structures at the local level are weakening and this poses a real challenge to the quality of local democracy. In Southern Europe, few parties have actually managed to develop strong local party structures. These have essentially operated as agglomerates of personalities and often dominated by local families/clans with little internal renovation of elites. Strong charismatic leaderships and deep embedded clientelist arrangements have populated much of southern local politics.
In many local democratic systems, the introduction of independent candidacies has been a learning process for both for voters and parties themselves. Not only have these contributed to reduce the deficit of representation/mediation, they have also served for party defections and purged candidates (mainly on ethical grounds) to endure in politics and contest local party structures (Meirinho Martins 2003, 1997). Power alternatives and alternation in office are not simply product of good institutions: there is also an issue of political culture . Voters have not appropriated the rules of the game, the standards underpinning democratic governance and the role of alternation in a similar fashion or degree across the national territory.
Models/formats of organization
In this dimension we intend to assess various institutional features concerning the organization of local government: the type of leadership (strong versus weak Mayors), the type of executive formation (presidential executives directly
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Draft Version Please do not quote elected versus collegial ones emerging from the local deliberative assembly in analogy with the formation of most national governments in parliamentary regimes), the type of power relationships between the executive and the local administration, not only in terms of horizontal accountability, but also in the way authority is exercised (concentrated, through a rigid hierarchical structure versus diffused, granting the local administration a greater degree of initiative and autonomy in implementing policy), etc.
Assessments on the quality of democracy have tended to focus on formats more than functions. Because different institutional formats may perform equal tasks with the same degree of quality, the criteria for assessment must derived from clearly defined democratic principles and functions.
Discussions on the models of organization immediately raise a series of other related issues that require our attention, such as the reorganization of local authority boundaries and the number of councils (what is the minimum size necessary to have functioning representative institutions?), the recalculation of the number of councillors (in function of devolved competences), and the professionalization and independence of the local administration (How to ensure its operational autonomy from the executive? How to increase internal accountability without reducing the capacity to deliver of the policy process?).
These qualitative assessments need to take into consideration historical and context-specific features and strengthened by quantitative measures where appropriate. The question is not so much that of defining an ideal model of local government – because each case is sui generis, product of specific patterns of institutional and historical development – but to put in place a diagnosis framework that combines a commitment to the fundamental principles and functions of democracy and a comprehensive range of institutional formats to put them into practice.
Local electoral systems and governability
One of the recurrent discussions about representative local democracy concerns its degree of autonomy in relation to national politics. Multi-level
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Draft Version Please do not quote governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001) implies ‘multiple arenas for political competition, strategic opportunities for political actors, and possibilities for electors to use their votes tactically’ (Pallarés and Keating 2006). The term
‘second-order elections’ originally developed in reference to European
Elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980) has now been adapted to explain electoral behaviour in local elections (Freire 2004). On the one hand, voters are mobilised and issues are mastered by political parties in view of their current or future positioning in national politics. On the other hand, voters use these elections to punish or reward the current national governing parties. This interpretation of local elections is not consensual. Some believe local elections are part of a multi-level electoral competition system, but they have their own logic, modus operandi, and agenda, and these are not always determined by national issues (McLean et al. 1996; Heath et al. 1999;
Rallings and Thrasher 2005).
Players and voters know how to distinguish both levels of political action. The interdependence of local, national and European political issues/interests and the interplay of parties/representatives across the different arenas affect citizens’ perceptions about politics, their political behaviour and value frames or expectations. The autonomy of the local arena from the national one has largely to do with the institutional arrangements, in particular the way the representative role of councillors is structured by the electoral system and the competences devolved to local government.
There is also a question of governability to be addressed (Meirinho Martins
2007, 1997). Local government coalitions are probably more common than national government coalitions. What could explain variation regarding the existence, the timing and the composition of a governing coalition? To what extent the local electoral systems produce strong majorities? Are coalition executives less capable than single party majorities? Are councils under coalition less governable? How can political programmes be implemented under local coalition governments and how do such (formal or informal) arrangements affect the stability of local government? There is a vast research carried out on coalition formation and performance (Michel and
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Draft Version Please do not quote
Nyblade 2008; Timmermans 2006; Moury 2005). But there are still various blind spots in the available theoretical explanations. Further qualitative research is needed to understand the dynamics and qualities of local coalition governance.
Empowerment and responsibility
Much of the discussion about the municipalities’ lack of capacity to deliver evolves around the problem of power devolution and absence of financial/fiscal autonomy.
A large number of municipalities around Europe live on budget transfers, which represent the large bulk of their finances and for that reason are constrained by government priorities and the development of national politics.
Mayors willing to stand for re-election work under pressure for visible results
(“work done”), hence the capacity to deliver becomes a major concern to most of them. Financial constraints have forced decision-makers to become imaginative and entrepreneur opening the door to a series of risks to democratic governance. The need for local government flexibility and imagination in service delivery has led to the search of alternative solutions, some of which beyond legality. The proposed conceptual framework gives special importance to the problem of corruption and the performance of ‘local integrity systems’ (Transparency International 2004).
The quality of local government and democracy is largely related to the need for a proper balance between competences and funding. Autonomy in fund raising increases local discretion and accountability. However, there is little consensus on how best to achieve such autonomy. At the same time, central government has been gradually devolving various functions to local government, partly as an effort to reduce the omnipresence of the State, partly as an indirect consequence of europeanization. The process has essentially been top-down, thus pending negatively on the relationship of trust between central and local government.
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Draft Version Please do not quote
Central government can, in time, transfer appropriate functions and responsibilities to local control, but without a parallel increase of local finances, devolution is interpreted by Mayors as a poisonous gift. The proposed conceptual framework aims to address to what extent the quality of local democratic governance depends, on the one hand, on a balance between devolved decision-making (i.e. the negotiated transfer of functions from central government to the municipal level) and fiscal autonomy, and on the other hand, on a balance between empowerment and responsibility. An increase in municipal competences and greater financial autonomy require the development of stronger internal and external checks-and-balances.
In assessing these various dimensions, our conceptual framework suggests a multidisciplinary and multidimensional analysis using different approaches, methodologies and research tools:
 A structural analysis looking at the local economic, cultural and organizational context in which the quality of democracy is to be measured;

An attitudinal and behavioural analysis relying on both elite and public mass surveys to assess and contrast representations of democratic local governance; and

An institutional or systemic analysis dealing with the format and performance of democratic institutions: how they frame and regulate political conduct and the relations between voters and their representatives; and how they act as incentive structures, encouraging or discouraging democratic practice/behaviour (Saward 2007: 35).
This conceptual framework of QoLD fills a gap in knowledge about the institutions and processes of local democracy. With the help of a variety of survey, profiling and content analysis techniques the project seeks to investigate the relationships between institutional arrangements, contextual change and the attitudes, values and behaviours of local actors. In doing so we are not merely concerned with the (mis)match between formal roles and procedures and their actual practice, but also cultural understandings of those
25

Draft Version Please do not quote same roles and procedures that we often take fo r granted as being ‘overall accepted’ or ‘routinized’. As Manuel Alcantara put it, ‘independently of institutional and economic factors, other factors of a cultural nature can explain the absence of standards for agency in human beings who, in their cultu ral codes, fail to “step forward” as political participants by making themselves candidates’ (2004: 236). The same can be said, for example, of the citizens’ understanding of power alternatives and alternation in office. Do they all value pluralism and change in government as a good thing for democracy?
Conclusion
The diversity of institutional performances and political cultures makes the study of the quality of local democracy very interesting and of enormous complexity.
In this paper we attempted to sketch a draft conceptual framework for assessing the quality(ies) of local democratic governance. We discussed the conceptual problems, contending approaches and the strengths and weaknesses of different empirical assessments on the quality of democracy done so far.
Very little research efforts have been made with regard to measuring comparatively the quality(ies) of local democracy. In response to this perceived lack of empirical research on the dynamics and performance of local democracy, this paper proposes a new conceptual framework to measure QoLD based on six interrelated dimensions of analysis.
Similar to the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, the proposed conceptual framework David Beetham/IDEA’s Audit approach serves as a source of inspiration. There are a good number of questions on the quality of democracy already field-tested in various countries that can be adapted to the nature and dynamics of local political systems. However,
26

Draft Version Please do not quote contrary to our Central and Eastern European colleagues, the conceptual framework proposed in this paper is not primarily meant to provide a general overview of the state of local democracy on a country-by-country basis, but to create a series of comparative qualitative indicators that enable us to assess variations of QoLD across the various municipalities in a given country and across countries. Our unit of analysis is the municipality. These indicators can be repeated in time as to allow for a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of
QoLD.
The proposed conceptual framework is based on six interrelated dimensions of local democratic governance which are meant to be assessed through different quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including specialized surveys (elite, mass and expert surveys), institutional diagnostics and openended interviews to local elective officials and party leaders. This methodology will enable us to create a permanent and dynamic database of knowledge about the organization and performance of local democracy that can be updated regularly every five years (in order to take into account performance improvements which may result with electoral cycles and changes in office).
Like all experiments, the conceptual framework for the assessment of QoLD discussed above suffers from an initial dose of inflated expectation, which is likely to fade as we start digging on the various dimensions of analysis.
Choosing the right indicators and measurement categories, as to avoid ambiguous or unwarranted generalizations is the challenge that lies ahead.
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