In the comparative politics literature different concepts of performance and quality of a political system are employed; for example it is written about democratic performance, government performance, political performance, quality of democracy and quality of government. However there is no common standard as to what the different concepts mean and what they stand for since the concepts have been understood and treated in different ways. This paper makes an effort to clarify how concepts like performance and quality of a political system are related to each other and suggests that they may be subsumed under the common heading of evaluating political systems. In the first part of this paper I will attempt to clarify and categorize a few important concepts in comparative politics. In the second part of the study the main focus will be to examine in more detail what the concept quality of democracy is and what it stands for. Briefly, the aim with this study is twofold, 1) to categorize different conceptions of performance and quality employed in comparative politics 2) to differentiate the concept quality of democracy from similar concepts. The thesis put forward here is that democratic performance is best understood as an aspect of the input process of the political system whereas government performance is best understood as an aspect of the output process of the political system.
