Abstract
Whereas the measurement of the quality of democracy focused on the rough differentiation of democracies and autocracies in the beginning (e.g. Vanhanen, Polity, Freedom House), the focal point of newer instruments is the assessment of the quality of established democracies. In this context, tensions resp. trade-offs between dimensions of democracy are discussed as well (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy). However, these approaches lack a systematic discussion of trade-offs and they are not able to show trade-offs empirically. We address this research desideratum in a three-step process: Firstly, we propose a new conceptual approach, which distinguishes between two different modes of relationships between dimensions: mutual reinforcing effects and a give-and-take relationship (trade-offs) between dimensions. By introducing our measurement tool, Democracy Matrix, we finally locate mutually reinforcing effects as well as trade-offs. Secondly, we provide a new methodological approach to measure trade-offs. While one measuring strategy captures the mutual reinforcing effects, the other strategy employs indicators, which serve to gauge trade-offs. Thirdly, we demonstrate empirical findings of our measurement drawing on the Varieties of Democracy dataset. Incorporating trade-offs into the measurement enables us to identify various profiles of democracy (libertarian, egalitarian and control-focused democracy) via the quality of its dimensions.
Highlights
One unresolved question of the measurement of democracy is the existence of trade-offs between dimensions, that is to say, whether their relationship is characterized by tensions and conflicting goals, which result in trade-offs between them
Giebler and Merkel (2016, p. 602) state, based on the Democracy Barometer data, that in contrast to the “traditional libertarian fear of a trade-off between freedom and equality..., we find that the two core principles of democracy possess a mutually reinforcing association”
We find strong evidence for a control-focused profile and a libertarian profile
Summary
One unresolved question of the measurement of democracy is the existence of trade-offs between dimensions, that is to say, whether their relationship is characterized by tensions and conflicting goals, which result in trade-offs between them. We argue that there are at least two reasons: on the one hand, these measures lack a deep discussion of the conceptual foundations of trade-offs missing the detection of concrete realization of trade-offs and their interconnectedness with different abstract conceptions of democracy. This means that current measures of democracy content themselves with only a short remark about trade-offs on the highest aggregated level (dimensions or principles) but do not consider these conceptual consequences for lower or mid-level components of democracies (institutions). This article tackles these two conceptual and methodological problems: how can we understand trade-offs conceptually and how can we successfully incorporate them in a measurement of the quality of democracy?1
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