The problem is that democracy means different things
to different people. Polity [research institute] really cares about constraints
on the elites – how much the president is checked by parliament, for example. (...)
Freedom House [Research institute], on the other
hand, cares much more about individual rights and personal freedoms. (...)
Disagreements like these are less about proper
measurement and more about a philosophical debate on what counts as a democracy
– an inherently complex and contested idea. This is a problem, because it
suggests that there are no easy solutions. The economist, for example, produces
a measure of democracy that sees mandatory voting as bad for democracy because
it infringes on individual rights. If I want to stay home and watch football on
Election Day, that should be my right, goes the argument.
Seva Gunitsky
One of the great challenges for policymakers is taking abstract concepts like “power” or “democracy” and using them to measure concrete policies. Each year, for example, the United States spends several billion dollars on democracy promotion. It would be great to know – not just for government officials, but for all of us – whether this money actually helps to nudge countries toward democracy.
The problem is
figuring out what we mean by democracy. Somewhere in the vast space between
Norway and North Korea is a gray zone composed of countries that are neither
full democracies nor full dictatorships, and sometimes it can be extremely hard
to measure the quality of their government.
A story of two
post-Soviet states can illustrate the difficulty.
(…)
Para continuar a leitura, acesse http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Seva Gunitsky – Assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Toronto. During 2014-15, he is a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton
University. This post is related to his research for a recent edited
volume on state rankings, published by Cambridge University Press – 23.06.2015
IN Monkey Cage, The Washington Post.
