Liberal Democracy Measures 1980-1990

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Most recently the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but also the preceding experiments with democracy by Eastern European countries and the return to democracy in several Latin American countries have heightened international interest in democracy. Essential to advancing our knowledge of the causes and consequences of liberal democracy--the extent that a political system allows political liberties and democratic rule--as well as to policy decisions facilitating democratic initiatives is the accurate measurement of democracy. The goal of this continuation project is to advance the measurement of liberal democracy of countries. The project will complete a cross-national time series (1950-1990) data set containing indicators of liberal democracy. Measurement models to estimate the validity, source biases, and random errors in the indicators will be developed. In this veritable age of democratization, access to the data set developed in this project will permit systematic comparative time series analyses by political sociologists and political scientists of the causes and consequences of democracy on a variety of political and economic conditions. The project's findings on the measurement properties of the indicators of liberal democracy will be useful not only to the scholarly community, but also to a number of U.S. government and international agencies that are seeking ways of assessing democratic developments in countries.