The Dual Seven Democratic Dimensions Index: A Novel and Simplified Metric to Accurately Assess Democracy

Manuel Galinanes, Steffan Bernhardt and Leo Klinkers

Journal of Politics and Law, 2025, vol. 18, issue 4, 19

Abstract: Existing democracy indices often conflate essential democratic principles with governance outcomes, limiting both their conceptual precision and diagnostic utility. This article introduces the Dual Seven Democratic Dimensions Index, a novel framework that disentangles core democratic foundations—such as inclusive suffrage, civil liberties, accountability, and deliberative participation—from broader measures of state performance. The index employs a dual-assessment methodology- it combines a normatively grounded evaluation of legal-constitutional structures with citizen-generated scores reflecting lived democratic experience. By integrating institutional and experiential dimensions, this approach responds to longstanding critiques of minimalism, expert bias, and Western-centrism in democracy measurement. The result is a more transparent, theoretically robust tool for assessing democratic quality across diverse contexts. At a time of global democratic erosion and the proliferation of hybrid regimes, the index offers scholars and policymakers a refined metric for identifying both resilience and vulnerability in democratic systems.

Date: 2025
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