Measuring Effective Democracy: The Human Empowerment Approach

The core idea inspiring democracy is to empower people. To measure democracy in ways that capture its empowering nature, one must focus on popular rights and take into account rule of law as a state quality that makes these rights effective. Based on this premise, an index of "effective democracy," tested for 150 states, best represents the empowering nature of democracy because it most clearly captures democracys embedding in empowering conditions in the wider society. Effective democracy is shown to be most firmly embedded in (a) empowering socioeconomic conditions that make people capable of practicing democracy and (b) empowering sociocultural conditions that make them willing to do so. People empowerment appears to be a unity of empowering societal conditions and empowering regime characteristics. Research for this article has been supported by the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine; the Center for the Study of Democracy (Zentrum fiter Demokratieforschung) at Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany; and by a research grant for transatlantic cooperation by the Alexandervon-Humboldt Foundation, Germany. We thank Matthijs Bogaards, Ferdinand Mueller-Rommel, Wayne Sandholtz, and the anonymous reviewers of Comparative Politics for helpful criticism and comments on earlier versions of this article.