Studies on the performance of democracy have not been very precise in their field. Contemporary efforts have built on this tradition by defining, measuring, and assessing democracy, democratic performance and the ‘quality’ of democracy. It is now more than fifteen years since a large number of indices to assess political regimes have become popular. All of them try to evaluate the quality of democracy with a quantitative methodology. The methodology employed to gather this information is based mainly on expert surveys, objective data and lastly on citizens surveys. In the last four years, we have developed a project based on expert surveys for measuring the quality of democracy in Spain. It is inspired by the democratic audit conducted by the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex and consists of 57 items classified into five blocks: citizenship, laws and rights, representative system, accountable government, civil society and international dimensions of democracy. In this paper we want to present an analysis of the expert surveys methodology. This paper sets out to further explore the pros and cons of web-surveys as a tool for conducting web-based elite/expert surveys. We pay special attention to problems in the sample, the field work and the consistence of the views of the experts. Finally, we compare the different meanings of democracy for both experts and citizens.
