Democracy and Dictatorship - Evaluating measures of democracy and dictatorship
3 important questions on Democracy and Dictatorship - Evaluating measures of democracy and dictatorship
Which particular measure is appropriate will depend heavily on the specific objective or research question. We also often evaluate measures in terms of their:
- Conceptualization
- Validity
- Reliability
- Replicability
The three measures differ in their conceptualization of democracy and dictatorship, in regard to whether they employ:
- A minimalistic or substantive view of democracy
- A dichotomous or continuous view of democracy
Validity refers to the extent to which our measures correspond to the concepts that they are intended to reflect. Three issues arise:
- Attributes: which and how many attributes are determined that make up the abstract concept under consideration.
- Aggregation issues: how to aggregate or combine these attributes into a single measure of the concept (adding etc)
- Measurement level:
- Nominal: classifies observations into discrete categories that must be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (DD)
- Ordinal: rank-orders observations along some dimension
- Interval: places observations on a scale so we can tell how much more or less of the thing being measured it exhibits (Polity IV and Freedom House).
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