Scholars and policy analysts are eager to distinguish democracies from non-democracies, usually to be able to demonstrate and investigate correlations between states that espouse liberal democratic institutions, traditions and norms and certain desired outcomes, including – for example -- peace, economic prosperity, and sustainable development. The drive to "prove" that democracies are not only "good" but instrumentally useful for a host of other positive outcomes is clear. Studies that seek to demonstrate such correlations are overwhelmingly carried out by experts who quantify indicators of democracy and use numerical scores as the basis for evaluations.
There are several problems with this approach to studying democracy. First, there is no scholarly or policy-oriented consensus regarding the definition and precise set of indicators of democratic systems. Second, democracy is complex, which often leads to an over-simplification of the concept, especially in studies that seek to show correlations between democratic systems and desired outcomes. Leaning into that complexity is challenging, though, because of the problems involved in attempting to operationalize the myriad possible indicators of democracy. Third, the approach can be limiting because of the tendency to focus solely on national level indicators, which masks the myriad democratic systems, relationships and structures at sub-national or supra-national levels. In fact, when non-democracies are able to achieve certain desirable outcomes, they are quickly dismissed as exceptions, with warnings that their successes mask serious problems and that the unique circumstances contributing to their success cannot be reliably replicated. Fourth, seeking to narrowly define and quantify democracy has proven unreliable and biased, as most recently noted by Andrew Little and Anne Meng (2023).
Bias can operate at two levels. The first is with regard to definitions. Academic experts who have been trained in the same or largely similar paradigms will think of democracy in the same (overwhelmingly liberal and western) ways, making it impossible to recognize alternative forms of democracy. A second type of bias may exist with regard to experts’ positions in the societies they are evaluating. It is unlikely, for example, that relying solely on expert views will produce analyses of democracy that reflect the lived experiences of marginalized groups.
What happens, however, when we democratize democracy assessment? If, at its core, democracy is meant to reflect the people’s will, it is necessary to consider how those people evaluate their own institutions. One way to do that is to re-center democracy assessment around the views and lived experiences of the most marginalized groups in a given society. If these groups cannot access the benefits of democracy, it calls into question a fundamental promise of democracy: that of equality. This paper investigates the views of marginalized communities across a selection of countries across the globe to elucidate how the evaluations of democratic institutions and norms differ among these groups and why those gaps matter for longer term policy reform related to democratization.
