Indicators of Democracy and Good Governance as Measures of the Quality of Democracy in Africa: A Critical Appraisal
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Indicators of Democracy and Good Governance as Measures of the Quality of Democracy in Africa: A Critical Appraisal Dirk Berg-Schlosser Institut fu¨r Politikwissenschaft, Universita¨t Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Current measures of levels of democratization, such as those by Freedom House, Jaggers and Gurr, or Vanhanen, for example, are often mistaken to be an indication of the ‘quality’ of democracy in a more comprehensive and normatively more demanding sense. The same is true for some of the current criteria and indicators of ‘good governance’. This paper points out some of the limitations and weaknesses of these indicators and shows how, in spite of such limitations, they can be used to provide more coherent and readily available information on the state of affairs and the ‘quality’ of democracy in African countries. Acta Politica (2004) 39, 248–278. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500065 Keywords: indicators of democracy; good governance; democratisation in Africa; quality of democracy; performance of political systems
Introduction Attempts to establish meaningful and reliable economic, social and political indicators over a wide range of issues for most countries in the world have been made at least since the early 1960s. Among the early protagonists were, for example, Karl Deutsch and his associates and the different editions of the ‘World Handbook of Social and Political Indicators’ published by them (see, e.g. Russett et al., 1964; Taylor and Jodice 1983). Somewhat later, the United Nations Research Institute (UNRISD) has also been very instrumental in this respect (see: International Social Science Journal (ISSJ), 1995). Since 1978, the World Bank has regularly published its ‘World Development Report’ (see World Bank, 1998ff) and, with a somewhat different emphasis, since 1990 the UNDP publishes its ‘Human Development Report’ (UNDP, 1990ff ). Similar efforts with specific concerns have been made in the last few years by the African Development Bank (1998), and institutions like Transparency International, Social Watch and a number of others. The need for such indicators, apart from their intrinsic value for the social sciences, also has become more apparent and urgent, because, increasingly with
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the end of the Cold War and the dominance of super power rivalry in world affairs since the early nineties, such measures have been employed as criteria for assessing the ‘quality’ of political regimes the world over and their performance with regard to their level of ‘democraticness’, respect of basic human rights, ‘good governance’, etc. These criteria have since then become major yardsticks and benchmarks in international relations, basing international loans and development aid by the IMF, World Bank, EU, but also major bilateral donors on such a ‘political conditionality’ (see Clarke, 2002; World Bank, 2002). In this article, I will first point to some of the common problems associated with such indicators and then d
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