Liberal Democracy Measures 1980-1990

最近苏联解体，以及东欧国家以前进行的民主试验和几个拉丁美洲国家恢复民主，都提高了国际社会对民主的兴趣。对于增进我们对自由民主的前因后果--政治制度允许政治自由和民主统治的程度--以及促进民主倡议的政策决定的了解，至关重要的是准确衡量民主。这一延续项目的目标是推进各国自由民主的衡量标准。该项目将完成一个包含自由民主指标的跨国时间序列(1950-1990年)数据集。将开发评估指标有效性、来源偏差和随机误差的测量模型。在这个名副其实的民主化时代，获取本项目开发的数据集将使政治社会学家和政治学家能够对民主在各种政治和经济条件下的原因和后果进行系统的时间序列比较分析。该项目对自由民主指标的测量性质的发现不仅对学术界有用，而且对正在寻找方法评估各国民主发展的一些美国政府和国际机构也是有用的。

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.