Political openness: an assessment of democracy

This paper is a critical reflection on the inconsistencies between current operationalisation of democracy and the concepts behind various operationalisation attempts. The criticisms concern two aspects:

• First, there is the frequent lack of a conceptual definition supporting the technical index construction, which puts too much weight on the operational dimensions. This causes confusion on whether democracy as an all-encompassing concept is reducible to a single number
• Second, there is a lack of consistency between the applied definitions of democracy and their operationalisation, which increases the confusion on the actual entity that is being measured

Building on these criticisms, the authors develop an alternative approach as a compromise between the two approaches. The new approach conceives political openness as a measure of degree of democracy. It does not imply a radically different conceptualisation of democracy, but rather tries to focus on its procedural aspects. Besides, it pays attention to the concept-measure consistency and the relationships between the different dimensions of political openness.

The political openness approach can be conceived as a continuum and it integrates six sub-dimensions, namely, electoral participation, competition, transparency, accountability interfaces and rule of law. The six dimensions are integrated on the basis of a family resemblance approach into a single index.

The approach, however, has certain limitations:

• Since it is a fairly raw measure, it cannot be used to qualify individual countries according to their position, but to investigate the relations between political openness and other variables from an aggregate perspective
• The scarcity of adequate data hampers the process of index construction
• The question remains open on which minimum value a country should attain on the index in order to be classified as procedurally democratic