The quality of democracies in Europe as measured by current indicators of democratization and good governance

Despite the steady wave of democratization in recent decades, the progress towards and the levels of democracy vary considerably across Europe. Many studies have been conducted to provide a differentiated outlook at the quality of democracy in each individual country; however, very few attempts have been made to aid the aggregation of discrete information in order to provide some comparative yardsticks for the evaluation of continuing developments. A fresh analytical framework broadly defines the quantitative indicators for democratization and good governance, which in turn allows us to draw meaningful distinctions between liberal democracies and non-democracies, and also to identify certain sub-types of democratic and non-democratic cases.