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01.02.2011 | Symposium: Measuring Democracy

The Measurement of Democracy and the Means of History

verfasst von: Monty G. Marshall

Erschienen in: Society | Ausgabe 1/2011

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Abstract

The issue of measurement has seized the public eye more than ever before. The computer, communication, and information revolutions have produced a veritable flood of facts and observations on every imaginable topic and subject from every nook and cranny on earth, and beyond. Information overload challenges both our sensibilities and our abilities to process and organize knowledge; everything must be measured, compared, rated, and ranked. The demand for informational order has grown far faster than the ability to deliver. The public obsession with order and ordering to the minutest detail can be both consuming and obscuring. On the surface, inaccurate and inappropriate measures command the same allusion to mathematical precision as the more accurate and reliable measures. The focus of measurement in the social sciences is on identifying common metrics that accurately capture the essential quality of key factors and attributes that define complex, social phenomena. Objective and subjective assessments must be separated to the degree possible. Similarly, in social processes, means and ends must be distinguished in order to gauge performance. Governance and social order are, to a greater degree than any other social phenomena, based in commonalities of collective action and response. These constitute the means of history and should be distinguished from the ends so we can better understand how the past got us to the present and what we might make of the future. From a secular perspective, the purpose of democracy is to define and refine democratic purpose, the success of which can be measured as a conflict management function. Factionalism and the polarization of dissent present major impediments to the consolidation of democracy.

Vorheriger Artikel Managing Disagreement: A Defense of “Regime Bias”

Nächster Artikel The Modern Slaves: Specialized Knowledge and Democratic Governance

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Initially (1788–89 and 1792) popular voting in presidential elections in the United States involved only about 1.6% of the “free population” with only 6 of 10 states holding popular elections to choose Electors for the Electoral College (a further check on “populism”). Popular vote for the presidency in the United States, even within a highly restricted franchise, did not become the common form of choosing Electors until the 1828 election, when only Delaware and South Carolina chose Electors in their state legislatures (South Carolina continued to hold out until after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865). In the 1872 presidential election, about 16% of the population cast ballots in the presidential election.

Enfranchisement in the United States progressed through a series of Constitutional Amendments, including the 15th (1870), extending the vote to all (male) persons regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude;” 19th (1920), extending the vote regardless of sex; and 24th (1964), prohibiting the denial on abridgement of the right to vote “by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”

Ironically, France was one of the last major countries to adopt universal female suffrage; this took place in 1944 (Switzerland only instituted female suffrage in 1971). Also of interest in this regard is the fact that the defeated Central Powers in 1918 were the first emerging democracies to operate under the tenets of universal suffrage; this, of course, included the German Weimar Republic.

The principal of “subsidiarity” derives from political economy; it maintains (positively) that administrative authority is most appropriately and efficaciously situated at that level of administration closest to and most knowledgeable of the activity being organized and conducted and (negatively) that higher levels of administration should not take on authority over matters that can be handled efficaciously at lower levels of administration.

While the societal act of “voting” does not ensure democracy, it does provide critical evidence of the quality of democratic process. Elections stimulate the mobilization and activism of the various constituencies that comprise the society and engage the state in the organization and regulation of mass political activity. Elements of both the state and civil society reveal practical aspects of their organizational and relational nature during the election procedure. In short, there is a reflective confluence of public attention and political observables concentrated in the election period; this is the real value of elections to the definition of authority: elections “open a window to the soul” of a societal-system.

In my own theoretical work, I argue that the “social identity group” is the universal basis for social action, that complex societies are comprised by an integrated network of myriad such associations, and that each group is governed by a “societal elite” who form a “proto-state” that governs that group and defines group relations with other groups. See, Marshall 1999.

The only current alternatives to states in the world system of states are the supra-state such as the European Union, which is simply a larger state; an international policy regime such as the World Trade Organization, which is simply a specialized administrative mechanism of which states are members; and failed (anarchical) states such as that observed in Somalia currently. See, also note 5 (above).

Alternative measurement techniques derive from alternative perspectives and these are particularly important sources of cross-validation and illumination in measurement and robustness and greater confidence in analysis in complex systems.

Freedom House provides broad coverage of political rights and civil liberties in countries and these are often equated with qualities of governance; however, these indicators do not directly assess governance or political institutions.

The Polity IV Project is hosted by the Center for Systemic Peace; materials are accessible online (www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm)

See, Hannah Arendt’s 1970 essay “On Violence.”

Shawn Trier and Simon Jackman provide an example of the “giggle test” principle in their 2008 article in the American Journal of Political Science, titled “Democracy as a Latent Variable,” in which they claim that by applying “formal, statistical measurement models” to the Polity IV data, they find that the “latent error” in the Polity measure makes it impossible to confidently distinguish the level of democracy in “roughly one-half” of the countries in the world from that of the United States in 2000 (p. 210).

The Polity IV Country Report series was designed to provide both transparency in the coding of particular cases and a contextual basis for the particular Polity codings. The individual reports include both quantitative and narrative interpretations.

Also of note, the hegemonic one-party authority systems that characterized governance in the “Eastern bloc” countries were considered autocratic in the Polity scheme, despite communist ideological professions of “egalitarianism democracy” and the regular holding of formal elections.

We examine only the contemporary period due to constraints on the quality and consistency of information prior to the end of the Second World War and limits on the relevance of historical circumstances to inform our understanding of democratic transition and consolidation going forward. The refinement process has also reexamined the set of consolidated (+10) democracies to reassess whether there have been periods during which the institutionalized use of coercive manipulation by the state and/or civil society had diminished the quality of democratic governance. For example, in reexamining the quality of United States’ governance, we determine that it should be recoded to reflect greater reliance on coercive tactics during the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the 1960 s and early 1970 s when political interaction neared polar factionalism. When completed, the refined Polity data will be released to the public as a new edition in the series, Polity V.

Systematic Polity reexamination and recoding of all countries over the period, 1946-present, using primary source information (Keesings Online) is currently progressing; the refined coding will be issued in 2011 as a new edition in the data series, Polity V. Preliminary comparisons of countries completed (seventy-three) show that the refinements result in changes to about 25% of the data points; however, Polity IV and Polity V index scores for this set of cases correlate at 0.974, also confirming the general veracity of the Polity data series.

Several of the attributes Ringen lists in these two categories of democracy “delivery” are either not directly observable, such as “strength/durability of democratic consolidation” or the “protection of democratic processes from transgression by economic power,” or unobservable, such as “trust in government” or “confidence in the future of freedom.”

See note 14 (above).

In discussing “conflict management” as a primary function of governance, we must recognize that “conflict” is a inherent, strategic dynamic in societal-systems, whereas “armed conflict” is a contingent, tactical dynamic. The conflation of these conceptually distinct forms of social interaction underlies many of the claims made by scholars that references to conflict “contaminate” our understanding and measurement of governance; (see, for example Vreeland 2008). The Polity IV measurement scheme considers “armed conflict” as evidence of “polity fragmentation;” as such, groups using armed conflict to reject state authority are considered to operate outside the polity and, so, are not included in the assessment of institutionalized authority “inside” the governance regime.

Executive constraints include not only the main governance institutions, legislative and judicial, but also administrative institutions (bureaucratic, military, and police agencies), civil society institutions (political parties, trade unions, business and professional lobbies, interests groups), and, in some cases, informal and uncivil sectors.

In order to be considered an elected executive in the Polity scheme, an executive must have initially gained office through both a competitive electoral procedure and a peaceful transfer of executive authority. Persons who initially gain executive office by non-electoral means and subsequently retain office following victory in an election are not considered to be an elected official, although they may be denoted as guiding a transition to elected authority. The executive electoral procedure must be substantiated by a peaceful (de facto) transfer of office.

There is a very broad body of research related to the so-called “democratic peace proposition” noting that democracies rarely if ever engage in direct warfare with one-another. Some researchers have suggested that this “empirical law” may be largely due to an alliance of mutual interest and self-preservation during the autocracy-preeminent period in world politics. On the other hand, warfare between autocracies and democracies has been quite common and, often, quite intense.

Contemporary “globalization” has created large, non-citizen, immigrant and refugee populations in many countries; exclusion of these groups is often explained according to presumptions of temporary residence. However, many of these populations are remaining in host countries for extended, and even generational, periods of time, creating large communities of “unenfranchised” persons.

The “fifth element” in complex, innovative societal-systems, that is, “uncivil society” does not directly factor into the governance scheme. Criminal and anti-social individuals and groups are separate by the nature of their activities and form of their relationship to both the state and society. The relative strength of “uncivil society” is a function of the quality of relations between the four other elements.

There have been some democracies that have emerged in poor countries; these have almost invariably been predicated on a depoliticized and/or unmobilized populace that defers to a, usually, urban elite. In effect, these situations resemble limited, stakeholder political processes that appeared in early democracies. These democracies almost always begin to struggle or fail as the population becomes more politicized and organized.

The association between civil war and (polar) factionalism is even clearer when one includes autocracies as factionalized polities (the majority of civil wars take place in exclusionary, autocratic states).

For a discussion of the importance of democratic “entrenchment,” (see Held 1995)

The most troubling of such “indirect” enforcement alternatives has been extrajudicial “disappearances” and “unexplained deaths” in apprehension or custody of “criminals.”

Boulding, K. E. 1962. Conflict and defense: A general theory. Harper and Row.

Coser, L. A. 1956. The functions of social conflict. Free Press.

de Soto, H. 2000. Mystery of capital. Basic Books.

Goldstone, J., Bates, R. H., Epstein, D. L., Gurr, T. R., Lustik, M., Marshall, M. G., Ulfelder, J., & Woodward, M. 2010. A global model for forecasting political instability. American Journal of Political Science, 50(1), 190–208.CrossRef

Gurr, T. R. 1974. Persistence and change in political systems, 1800–1971. American Political Science Review, 68, 1482–504.CrossRef

Held, D. 1995. Democracy and the global order: From the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Stanford University Press.

Marshall, M. G. 1999. Third world war: System, process, and conflict dynamics. Rowman & Littlefield.

Marshall, M. G., Cole, B. R. 2010. Global report 2009: Conflict, governance, and state fragility, Center for Systemic Peace and Center for Global Policy, George Mason University. (www.systemicpeace.org)

Sen, A. 1999. Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.

Vreeland, J. 2008. The effects of political regime on civil war: unpacking anocracy. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 52(3), 401–25.CrossRef

Yunus, M. 1999. Banker to the poor. Public Affairs.

Titel: The Measurement of Democracy and the Means of History
verfasst von: Monty G. Marshall
Publikationsdatum: 01.02.2011
Verlag: Springer-Verlag
Erschienen in: Society / Ausgabe 1/2011
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Elektronische ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-010-9390-7

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