Bowman, et al. Reach across Regions to Improve Measures of Democracy
November 18, 2003
by Kirk Bowman, Fabrice Lehoucq, James Mahoney
A recent example of cross-regional collaboration in development research comes from the program of this year's meeting of the American Political Science Association, produced by researchers from Mexico and the US. In a paper on "Measuring Political Democracy," Georgia Tech's Kirk Bowman, Fabrice Lehoucq of Mexico's Center for Economic Research and Instruction (CIDE), and Brown University's James Mahoney work to refine measurements of regime/policy type, a key topic in current analyses of development. Studying the countries of Central America over the 20th Century, the authors observe that "[c]ountry and regional experts are often skeptical of the scores offered by large-N, over-time indices of democracy. They worry that these indices incorrectly score 'their' cases. This paper provides an empirical basis for believing this skepticism is well-founded."
While most studies of cross-national scales for democracy concentrate on issues of conceptualizing democracy, operationalizing democratic precatice(s), and aggregating indicators of dmeocracy, Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney observe that "miscoding derived from poor knowledge of cases threatens [such measures'] validity more than [these] more commonly discussed problems." Furthermore, while their analysis focuses on the states of Central America, the authors warn that similar concerns likely compromise measurements for states beyond this region -- many states "share two features characteristic of Central America," namely identification as a "small state," or as a state engaged in a transition away form one-party socialist rule. Drawing on the full range of historical sources and adaptation of expert case knowledge, the authors employ iterated-fitting techniques and fuzzy-set tools to enhance democracy measurements for Central America, and suggest new approaches for worldwide indices.
Link: /file/289_Bowman et al. Measuring Democracy.pdf [313 KB PDF]
Keywords: democracy, measurement, operationalize, Central America, indicator, method