Democracies come in many shapes and sizes, and their political, economic, and social contexts shape their functioning. What all democratic systems share, however, is a commitment to citizens’ rights to equality and freedom of association, thought, speech, and assembly, and to the free and fair exercise of their votes. It is these freedoms that allow democracy to be a system of government in which the people are represented and the decisions made by elected representatives reflect the people’s collective will.
In the world today, democracy seems a fragile concept, with some questioning whether the European Union is really a democracy, or whether the United States is one at all. Moreover, there are many people who have lost faith in the ability of democracy to address their concerns and provide them with an economic and social life in which they can thrive.
To be consolidated, democracy needs a ‘broad and deep legitimation, whereby all significant actors at both the elite and mass levels believe that the democratic regime is the best available option for their society, better than any realistic alternative they can imagine’ (Diamond, Reference Diamond1999: 65). The elaboration of such a definition of democracy has been the subject of much debate amongst scholars and theorists.
One approach has been to define democracy merely as a form of government that guarantees substantial equality in the distribution of political power. In contrast, other definitions have focused on the social conditions that are necessary for a democracy to function, and include the notions of transparency, accountability, and civil liberties. These social requisites of democracy are widely considered to be indispensable for the existence of a democratic regime, and include a range of aspects such as pluralism, a free press, the right to protest, and an open and competitive electoral process.
There are also many different indicators used to evaluate democracy. Survey methods can be particularly useful for this purpose, because they can provide a wide range of evaluations on individual components of a democratic regime. These can be weighted to generate synthetic measures, allowing the underlying uncertainties in those indicators to be accounted for. For example, aggregating items on different dimensions of democracy allows the extent to which respondents feel that their country’s governance is effective and in accordance with their preferences to be evaluated.
Using survey data, we can evaluate the various dimensions of democracy that have been defined by scholars and others. For instance, we can measure how well a government’s policy choices align with citizen preferences by looking at the correlation between the governing party’s policies and their evaluation by voters. The first of these dimensions of accountability relates to the extent to which citizens can punish governing parties for their policies, and has a fairly large slope and factor loading in our model, meaning that it is a very important component of the latent variable of democracy. This dimension of accountability is complemented by the third, which measures whether governing parties explain their decisions to citizens.