Democracy
Measures of democracy, governance and rule of law: an overview of cross-national data sets
Democracy measures: an overview of data sets
Authors:
G.L. Munck
Publisher:
World Bank, 2003
This paper provides an overview of measures of democracy, governance and rule of law. The focus is on broad cross- national data sets, that is, those data sets that can offer a sense of the overall variation within the relevant universe of cases.
More specifically, it considers only those data sets that encompass more than one region of the world and that extend into the 1990s. This overview shows that researchers have generated data sets of considerable scope that measure a wide array of concepts about politics and political institutions. Therefore, there are choices to be made.
To guide this selection process, this paper places emphasis on the validity of the data and, in particular, on the criterion of content validity, that is, whether theoretically relevant indicators are excluded from, or theoretically irrelevant indicators are included in, the measure of a concept.
The first section of the paper discusses the key conceptual challenge confronted in efforts to measure democracy and related concepts. It suggests that, to avoid potential conceptual confusion, it is useful to distinguish between measures of the concepts of:
- democratic regime
- democratic governance, and
- rule of law.
