Measuring Liberal Democratic Performance: an Empirical and Conceptual Critique

Joe Foweraker and Roman Krznaric

Political Studies, 2000, vol. 48, issue 4, 759-787

Abstract: Liberal democratic performance is understood as the delivery of liberal democratic values, and not as regime longevity or government efficacy. Measuring it is a matter of how far liberal democratic governments achieve in practice the values they endorse in principle. It is recognized that the performance of liberal democratic governments varies widely. But extant attempts to measure this variation suffer problems of reliability and validity, and the object of measurement is often unclear. By defining the range of liberal democratic values we demonstrate that performance is multidimensional and that trade‐offs across different values can create distinct performance profiles. The narrow gauge of the extant meaures – usually of just one or two values – is often disguised by single scales that masquerade as summary performance indicators.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00282

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:48:y:2000:i:4:p:759-787

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().