Democracy, Interpretation, and the “Problem” of Conceptual Ambiguity: Reflections on the V-Dem Project’s Struggles with Operationalizing Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem—nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. By contrast, ambiguity and contestation over what democracy actually means is key both to normative theorizing and to the capacity to re-examine and reimagine democratic practice during moments of crisis. Rather than attempting to pin down and measure democratic quality, we highlight instead the value of ambiguity to normative democratic theory and interpretive political science. We offer four reflections on V-Dem based on examples from the literature on deliberative democracy, which is the discipline’s most prominent attempt to reinvent and reinvigorate democratic practice amid crisis and disaffection. Our aim is not to reignite the paradigm wars or fundamentally question the validity of projects like V-Dem, but rather to illustrate how a more plural approach might augment their theoretical and empirical contribution. We conclude by offering concrete illustrations of what this might look like in practice.