Performance

Theoretical and Historical Contexts

The idea of evaluating political systems is a core concern in classical political science literature. Criteria of political performance such as liberty and equality dominated the writings of classical political theorists (e.g., Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) in their search for good types of government. Additionally, performance criteria such as the common good and stability served as central yardsticks for scholars of comparative government, from Aristotle to Karl Loewenstein, in describing and comparing different nondemocratic and democratic regimes. This preliminary stage in the debate on political performance, however, is characterized by the fact that its protagonists did not make explicit use of the term political performance. Furthermore, they mainly relied on theoretical arguments and unsystematic empirical observations to assess the merits of different systems.

The first systematic theoretical and empirical work on political performance was not presented until the 1970s. At this point, two crucial obstacles had been overcome. The first obstacle concerns the availability of cross-national data. It became less of an obstacle with the collection and documentation of a wide range of social and political indicators for many independent countries of the world. First editions of several data handbooks appeared during the 1960s (e.g., World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators). The second obstacle concerns the deliberate avoidance of evaluation by empirically oriented political scientists. This was revised when political scientists dared to make explicit and systematic appraisals of concrete political systems on the basis of empirical data. The outset of this phase can be dated to 1971, when Harry Eckstein developed and justified theoretical criteria for evaluating political systems and when Ted Gurr with Muriel McClelland made a first systematic attempt to empirically translate and apply these criteria to a sample of democratic and nondemocratic countries. In 1978, Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell developed the most influential [Page 1850]and lasting concept of political performance emerging from this phase. In the context of systems theory, they suggested their concept of political productivity, enclosing eight different political goods: (1) system maintenance, (2) system adaptation, (3) participation, (4) compliance and support, (5) procedural justice, (6) welfare, (7) security, and (8) liberty. Additionally, they empirically studied the attainment of some of these goods in several democratic and nondemocratic countries. This first and early stage of performance research, however, provoked only a few isolated studies. These studies mainly used systems theory as a frame of reference and analyzed empirically democratic and nondemocratic systems.

...