Measuring Effective Democracy: The Human Empowerment Approach
Measuring Effective Democracy: The Human Empowerment Approach
复制标题
衡量有效的民主：人类赋权方法
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2390571
复制
发表时间：
2011
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
C. Welzel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Amy C. Alexander;C. Welzel
民主的核心理念是赋予人民权力。要衡量民主，以体现其赋予权力的本质，就必须关注民众权利，并将法治作为一种使这些权利有效的国家品质加以考虑。基于这一前提，我们描绘了一个“有效民主”的指数，并对大约150个国家的6个民主指标进行了测试。我们发现有效民主指数最能代表民主的授权性质，因为它最清楚地反映了民主在更广泛的社会授权条件中的嵌入。具体来说，有效的民主被证明是最牢固地植根于(a)赋予人们实践民主的社会经济条件，以及(b)赋予他们愿意这样做的社会文化条件。根据这些发现，赋予人民权力似乎是赋予社会条件权力和赋予政权特征权力的统一，后者是有效民主指数最能描述的。
The core idea inspiring democracy is to empower people. To measure democracy in ways that capture its empowering nature one must focus on popular rights and take into account rule of law as a state quality that makes these rights effective. Based on this premise, we portray an index of "effective democracy" and test its qualities against six alternative indicators of democracy for some 150 states. We find the index of effective democracy to best represent the empowering nature of democracy because it most clearly captures democracy’s embedding in empowering conditions in the wider society. Specifically, effective democracy is shown to be most firmly embedded in (a) empowering socioeconomic conditions that make people capable of practicing democracy and (b) in empowering sociocultural conditions that make them willing to do so. In light of these findings, people empowerment appears to be a unity of empowering societal conditions and empowering regime characteristics, the latter of which are best depicted by the index of effective democracy.