Abstract
The movement toward democratic political systems in many nations in the 1980s has renewed interest in measurement of political democracy. This paper calls attention to the problems that surround both the definition and measurement of political democracy. The main conceptual problems are the failure to develop an adequate theoretical definition of this concept, the confounding of the concept with others, and treating democracy as a binary rather than a continuous concept. Four problems of measurement are: invalid indicators, subjective indicators, ordinal or dichotomous measures, and the failure to test reliability or validity. The paper offers several suggestions to improve measurement as well as a warning about the danger of repeating past errors.
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Kenneth A. Bollen is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His major research interests are in international development and statistics. He is the author ofStructural Equations with Latent Variables (1989), published in John Wiley's Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics.
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Bollen, K.A. Political Democracy: Conceptual and Measurement Traps. St Comp Int Dev 25, 7–24 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02716903
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02716903