Assessing Progress Toward Democracy and Good Governance Summary of a Workshop (1992) / Chapter Skim
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Lessons Learned
Lessons Learned
Pages 13-15
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From page 13... ...
at the cost of missing nuances in the phenomenon being measured; and the result of sensitivity analyses showing that alternative weighing systems for components of indexes may make little difference in terms of altering statistical relationships among the indexes. Robert Dahl concluded the discussion with the comment that the researchers who work on measuring democracy do not have all the answers, and there will be inevitable frustrations for practitioners asking for tools that can function effectively as decision aids.
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From page 14... ...
Their particular concern was the concept of "governance." They concluded that it would be better to invest independent effort into developing better understanding and measures of the newer concept, rather than conflating it with indicators of "human rights" and "democracy," for which there is far more consensus on their meaning and how to go about measuring them.2 A new lesson emerged from the observation that there is a discrepancy between the relatively high levels of agreement found for indicators of key elements of democracy and the lack of a compelling theoretical framework about its causes and development that could 2There are other statistical methods, such as multidimensional scaling or factor analysis, that would enable donors to explore these concepts simultaneously. However, these tend to be used inductively, that is, to explore relationships among variables in the attempt to find underlying dimensions rather than to test a set of theory-based relationships.
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From page 15... ...
Overall, the workshop participants generally agreed that the indicator systems currently available or under development can contribute to practitioners' interests in several ways. They provide the basis for ranking and comparing the relative standing of different countries, taking regional variations into account.
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