Democracy, Quality

What is Quality?

There are at least three main streams of literature dealing with this topic. A first group of scholars have been working on democratizations, consolidation, and crisis and in their analyses of democracy have also pointed out aspects related, directly or indirectly, to the topic. Among them are Guillermo O'Donnell with his notion of “delegative democracy,” Arend Lijphart with his thesis on the superiority of consensual democracy vis-à-vis majoritarian democracies in terms of implementing democratic quality, and David Altman and Aníbal Perez-Liñan who refer to three aspects that draw on Robert Dahl's concept of polyarchy (civil rights, participation, and competition). The second group of scholars focused on established democracies, especially those belonging to the Anglo-Saxon tradition—that is, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Among them, David Beetham (see especially David Beetham, Sarah Bracking, Iain Kearton, & Stuart Weir, 2002) developed an analysis in terms of audit—that is, a systematic assessment of institutional performance against agreed criteria and standards. The auditing procedure should follow four steps:

• 1.
  Identify appropriate criteria for assessment.
• 2.
  Determine standards of good or best practice that provide a benchmark for the assessment.
• 3.
  Assemble the relevant evidence from both formal rules and informal practices.
• 4.
  Review the evidence in the light of the audit criteria and defined standards to reach a systematic assessment.

A number of authors followed Beetham by implementing his framework in other countries, such as Canada and Australia (see, e.g., Marian Sawer, Norman Abjorensen, & Phil Larkin, 2009; see also Todd Landman, 2006).

The third stream is formed by a number of data banks, such as those of Polity IV, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, World Bank, and also the Bertelsmann Index, which provide measures of aspects related to democratic performance and, more generally, to the quality of democracy. The different data banks are massive efforts to provide scores and rank orders of a large number of countries or, in some cases (first and foremost Freedom House), of all existing independent countries on key aspects such as rule of law and freedom.

Thus, phenomena such as democratization processes and political science research paved the way for the development of a more systematic theoretical analysis of the quality of democracy, where a [Page 566]key point is spelling out a clear notion of quality. A survey of the use of the term in the industrial and marketing sectors suggests three different meanings of <>

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