Measuring Democracy: A People-Centered Perspective

Almost every government in the world today claims to be democratic in some fashion or other, but given the wide diversity of political regimes in the contemporary world it seems improbable that all share the same type of political system. In response, various indexes and measures of democracy have tried to sort out analytically where countries fall on a democratic-non-democratic continuum. These indexes generally start with the idea of a minimal democratic threshold and then assess whether a country has met that criterion or identify how close/far it is from doing so. As the arbitrariness of minimally/acceptably democratic thresholds has been rigorously critiqued, this paper applies a maximally democratic approach. Interpreting "democracy" as based on very demanding and inclusive criteria (i.e. a government of, by, and for the people), it offers a people-centered perspective to measuring degrees of democracy based on levels of inclusion as applied to both hypothetical and real-world cases. As demonstrated here most nominally ‘democratic’ countries fall short of a meaningful level of democracy when using a maximal criteria to define democracy. Perhaps not surprisingly we see democratic backsliding in many of these weakly democratic countries.