What is Democracy? A Reconceptualization of the Quality of Democracy (original) (raw)
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What is democracy and how it can be measured? (A long version of the book review) (in English)
The Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) https://russiancouncil.ru/en/, 2019
This review is dedicated to the analysis of the contemporary political science literature that combines the theoretical conceptualizing and an empirical approach to the analysis of modern societies. The main attention is paid to the review of a book of David Campbell “Global quality of democracy as innovation enabler: Measuring democracy for success”, published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens’ Perspective
Politics and Governance
In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy (electoral, liberal, and direct democracy). Second, based on the World Values Survey 2005–2007, an instrument measuring these different dimensions of the subjective quality of democracy is suggested. Third, distributions for different models of democracy are presented for some European and non-Eur...
Conceptualising and Assessing the State of Democracy in the World Today
2020
The roles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the accountability of government have been deliberated throughout history, as evidenced by Greek historian Herodotus and the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in the United States. The incorporation of democratic ideas into regimes and governments has increased in the 20 and 21 centuries as regimes have demonstrated the use of these foundations of governance (IDEA, 2012 and Freedom House, 2013). There has been a transition from a deliberation of abstract ideas of governance to a proposal of models of democracy that exist in current regimes and governments around the world. As governance has been modified and altered in states throughout the world, scholars have sought to conceive a framework for examining regimes that fall outside the scope of classical democratic conceptualisations. Debates about democracy remain in academia because democracy “is a concept, an abstraction, a term with no single precise and agreed me...
Democracy: Significance and Challenges
isara solutions, 2020
The idea of Democracy has existed in the tradition of Western political thought since ancient times. The term ‘democracy’ was first used in the fifth century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus in the sense of ‘rule by the people’. This term is derived from a combination of two Greek words: demos, meaning ‘the people’, and kratien, meaning ‘to rule’. Democracy is not merely a form of government; it is also a form of state as well as society. It is closely associated with participation, competition, and civil and political liberties. Abraham Lincoln’s famous definition of democracy as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ is very close to its literal meaning. Democracy is the Political Empowerment of the People. Democracy originally meant “rule by the people.” An important component of democracy in its original formulation was the ideal of the citizens’ direct participation in the legislative and political decision-making process. Democracy is an idea. It is developed as an analytic concept, a normative ideal, a political presentation, and an empirical description. It’s meaning slide among these usages. The idea of democracy is real in its far reaching consequences. In short, democracy as a form of government implies that the ultimate authority of governance in this system is vested in the ordinary people so that public policy as made to conform to the will of the people and to serve the interests of the people.
Introduction: Perspectives on Democracy
Politische Vierteljahresschrift
This article explores diverse views on both the current challenges and limits as well as the reforms and innovations of existing democracies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. First, it argues that socioeconomic inequality, new populism, new forms of communication, and globalization have stimulated a renewal of interest in analyzing the “frontiers of democracy.” Democracies have reacted with different innovations and reforms in order to meet these challenges. The authors trace the phases of respective research from studies on singular, standalone instances to normative as well as empirical work on participatory (direct democratic and deliberative) systems. Finally, they advocate for combining the conceptual approach of defining democracy by the fulfillment of democratic values with rigorous empirical evaluation of the contributions (old and new) that institutions and procedures provide in order to fulfill these values and meet the mentioned challenges.
What is a "Good" Democracy? Theory and Empirical Analysis
An analysis of the quality of a democracy, that is, an empirical check on how 'good' a democracy is, requires not only that we assume some definition of democracy, but also that we establish a clear notion of quality. The minimal definition of democracy (see e.g. suggests that such a regime has at least: universal , adult suffrage; recurring, free, competitive and fair elections; more than one political party; and more than one source of information. Among those that meet these minimum criteria, further empirical analysis is still necessary to detect the degree to which they have achieved the two main objectives of an ideal democracy: freedom and equality.
Global quality of democracy as innovation enabler: measuring democracy for success, 2019
A fresh monograph of an Austrian and American political scientist Prof. David F. J. Campbell "Global Quality of Democracy as Innovation Enabler" (Campbell 2019) is a comprehensive and conceptual summarizing theoretical and empirical study. The book is published within Palgrave Macmillan series "Studies in Democracy: Innovation and entrepreneurship for growth" and scrutinizes the meanings and tangible manifestations of democracy as a societal trend and mode of political, social and economics regimes in 160 countries worldwide (whether democratic or non-democratic ones) for the period of 2002-2016. The author interprets democracy as a continuum of social, political and economic modus vivendi and modus operandi of contemporary societies along various societal axes and suggests a theoretical matrix and a data-driven framework that allows consistent crosscountry as well as cross-regional comparisons. "Democracies", "semi-democracies" and "non-democracies" are thoroughly analysed in terms of their factual functionality in such areas as social equality, economic and political freedom, sustainability of development and self-organization. David Campbell comes to a conclusion that there exist and co-exist a magnitude of patterns of regimes with various degrees of democratic features and the related modes of securing societal, economic and ecological sustainability. Furthermore, concludes the author, the raising quality of life can be functionally secured also under conditions of "limited" democracy or in non-democratic regimes. At the same time, however, in the post-industrial mode of development, when knowledge becomes a main driver of growth and sustainability, only the countries with prevailing democratic trends along all societal axes would become true winners in the global competition. The latter is exemplified, inter alia, by 35 OECD member countries. David Campbell follows rather a positivist approach that assumes a fact-based investigation and systematic observations using the empirical data. However, a solid theoretical background was elaborated in order to construct a conceptual framework of the matrix for the subsequent and systematic empirical analysis. As a result of the profound and critical theory reviews, the sound empirical data mining and the modelling of a comprehensive analytical matrix, the book can be seen as an unprecedented compendium of up-to-date knowledge about the structural dynamics of modern polities. It provides a reader with clear methodological apparatus, reliable and verifiable data and a wide palette of possible interpretations of yielded data-driven outcomes. In the suggested model, the main components of any political regime that can be empirically measured are (1) the degrees of freedom, were one distinguishes economic and political freedoms; (2) social equality exemplified by income and gender (in-) equalities; (3) control by the government and of the government; (4) sustainability of development measured through the redesigned Human Development Index, Gini index, rate of CO 2 emissions and GDP per capita; (5) political self-organization of a society understood as government-opposition cycles (pp.40-41).