Measuring of Democracy

Because democracy is an overarching concept that includes the functioning of diverse institutions
which are not easy to measure, strong limitations exist in quantifying and econometrically measuring
the potential effects of democracy or its relationship with other phenomena—whether inequality,
poverty, education etc.
 Given the constraints in acquiring reliable data with within-country variation on aspects of
democracy, academics have largely studied cross-country variations. Yet variations between
democratic institutions are very large across countries which constrains meaningful comparisons
using statistical approaches. Since democracy is typically measured aggregately as a macro
variable using a single observation for each country and each year, studying democracy faces a
range of econometric constraints and is limited to basic correlations. Cross-country comparison of a
composite, comprehensive and qualitative concept like democracy may thus not always be, for many
purposes, methodologically rigorous or useful. [