Metagora: An Experiment in the Measurement of Democratic Governance

Abstract

Today more and more institutional actors are turning toward applied statistics and quantitative indicators as a means for developing an evidence-based assessment of human rights implementation, democratic processes, and improvement of governance. A notable set of human rights institutions, international organizations, development agencies, national policy makers, and civil society are looking for reliable figures and robust analysis that will empower their work in the fields of monitoring, reporting, advocacy, or policy design. Even if their growing interest for quantitative methods is neither universally shared nor clearly defined with regard to the scope and effective application of those methods, their interest attests to an increased awareness of the need for proper and robust tools that would enhance the reliability, the comprehensiveness, and the efficiency of existing reporting and monitoring mechanisms. Such an increased awareness is leading to new and promising forms of collaboration between statisticians, human rights practitioners, and institutional actors—a collaboration that marks a significant difference from the reluctance and lack of communication that prevailed during last decades. Indeed, the feasibility and relevance of “measuring” human rights, democracy, and governance have long been controversial both in the human rights community and also in the international statistical community. The potential of statistical analysis for enhancing rigor and reliability of reporting on human rights was first evidenced by pioneering studies and work undertaken in the 1980s, in particular by David Banks, Richard Claude, Thomas Jabine, and Herbert Spirer, as well as by a series of successful projects conducted in the 1990s in different countries by the statisticians of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Human Rights Program.1 Nevertheless, it was only in 2000 that the issue was broadly debated on the occasion of the Montreux Conference on Statistics, Development and Human Rights, attended by policy analysts, human rights practitioners, professional statisticians, and governmental officials from 123