The Myth of Measuring Democracy
11th May 2021
The studies are all part of a political science cottage industry that purports to “measure” democracy, often with support from government-funded NGOs. Freedom House and the Polity Project—funded by Congress and the CIA respectively—have both devised widely used indexes for quantifying democratic performance, as has the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute. Linking these indexes together is the idea that democracy is not just in the eye of the beholder; it’s something scholars can measure empirically.
But in practice, most political scientists just seem to be measuring their own biases, which are then passed off as impartial, statistical truths. Beneath each metric of democracy is an implicit definition of it, an account of what democracy is or should be. And when the media report on these metrics, they often omit the assumptions and values underpinning them—reinforcing the veneer of objectivity the metrologists project.