In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Perhaps no concept is as central to policymakers and scholars. Yet, there is general perplexity about how to measure democracy such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. Skeptics wonder if the task of comparison is possible at all. While this conclusion may seem compelling, one must also consider the costs of not comparing in a systematic fashion. Without some way of analyzing the quality of democracy through time and across countries we have no way to mark progress or regress on this vital matter, to explain it, or to affect its future course. How, then, can this task be handled most effectively? The traditional approach to measurement seeks to summarize a country’s regime status in a single point score, derived from a democracy index which is either binary (democracy/autocracy) or continuous (a matter of degrees). I argue that the traditional approach fails because its self-assigned task is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. For a variety of reasons, it is simply not possible to arrive at a precise and authoritative measurement of “democracy,” tout court. A more productive approach to this topic – as to other large subjects such as governance – is to disaggregate. Rather than focusing on Big-D democracy, we ought to focus instead on democracy’s components. At lower levels of abstraction the concept becomes more tractable, and also more useful – since one can interrogate finely honed issues of descriptive and causal inference that are lost in aggregate point scores. The paper begins by reviewing the weaknesses inherent in the traditional approach to conceptualization and measurement. I proceed to lay out a highly differentiated schema, according to which democracy is broken down into thirteen categories: National Sovereignty, Civil Liberty, Popular Sovereignty, Transparency, Judicial Independence, Checks on the Executive, Election Participation, Election Administration, Election Results, Leadership Turnover, Civil Society, Political Parties, and Subnational Democracy. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential obstacles facing the implementation of a highly disaggregated index of democracy, and its potential benefits.
