Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

2024/01/11 by Carl Henrik Knutsen, Kyle L. Marquardt, Brigitte Seim +7 · 1 voice · 15 citations
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Political Conflict and Governance #Politics and Society in Latin America

paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s104909652300077x

Abstract

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding. 1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions.

Citations

• Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach
• When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown? Uncertainty and Opposition Strategies in Democracies at Risk
• How Great is the Current Danger to Democracy? Assessing the Risk With Historical Data

Cited by

• Experts, coders and crowds: An analysis of substitutability
• Democratic Resilience in the Twenty-First Century: Search for an Analytical Framework and Explorative Analysis
• Enhancing Transparency and Replicability in Data Collection: Lessons from the Construction of Three Education Datasets
• Successful liberal democracy as a self-reinforcing condition
• Failing through success? How stable liberal orders become self-destabilising
• Dimensions of State Capacity and Modes of Democratic Breakdown
• Quality Assessment of the Academic Freedom Index: Strengths, Weaknesses, and How Best to Use It
• Concepts in Context: Ontological Coherence in Political Science Research
• China Watchers
• Can ChatGPT accurately identify the position of parties? A validation study with an expert survey in France
• Future Challenges of Public Administration
• Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy: A New Approach
• Public support for political conditionality in Africa
• Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings
• Large Language Models Are Democracy Coders with Attitudes

Discussions

• Very happy to have worked on this PS article with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @acrowinghen.bsky.social, @medzihorsky.bsky.social, @danpemstein.bsky.social, @silindberg.bsky.social and four other colleague [bsky, 38 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Measuring Democratic Backsliding
• Measuring Backsliding with Observables: Observable-to-Subjective Score Mapping
• Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding
• How to study democratic backsliding
• Large Language Models Are Democracy Coders with Attitudes