Measuring Effective Democracy The Human Empowerment Approach Amy C. Alexander and Christian Welzel Various categorizations have emerged to describe the growing number of ineffective democracies in the hybrid zone between blatant autocracy and fully effective democ- racy.1 Despite differences in terminology, scholars agree that state failure in the enforce- ment of rule of law is the key factor separating effective from ineffective democracies.2 Applying this distinction, categorical approaches prevail that dichotomize effective against ineffective democracies.3 By contrast, only one attempt has been made with gradual data on state deficiencies to produce a continuous index of “effective democ- racy.”4 This index could be a useful tool for democracy assessment at a time when the phenomenon of ineffective democracy is gaining significance.5 However, the conceptual rationales that inform the index of effective democracy have not been outlined in satisfactory detail.6 Nor has a systematic validity test been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the index in comparison to other estab- lished democracy indices. This article fills this gap by explicating the conceptual basis of the index of effective democracy and demonstrating the index’s empirical qualities. Conceptualizing Effective Democracy People Power as the Root Meaning of Democracy In its literal meaning, “govern- ment by the people,” democracy is inspired by the idea of empowering people to govern their lives.7 Against such a common understanding, one might object that democracy has been defined in too many different ways to be subsumed under one definition. Indeed, one cannot dispute variation when scholars define democracy at the level of its concrete institutional manifestations.8 Still, we hold that “people power” is the root meaning that provides the inspirational source of most understandings of democracy. One can sub- stantiate this claim from four perspectives: (1) the views of democracy held by ordinary people around the world, (2) the views of democracy that are evident in the goals for which democracy movements of the past and today struggle, (3) the views of democracy that are manifest in constitutional priorities, and (4) the views of democracy championed by leading theorists of democracy. As concerns the views of democracy held by ordinary people, there is broad evi- dence from the Global Barometer Surveys and the World Values Surveys that what 271 Comparative Politics April 2011 comes first to people’s minds when they think about democracy are the rights that give people choices in governing their personal lives, and a voice and vote to shape public life.9 When confronted with the word “democracy,” be it in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, or Europe, people emphasize, before anything else, the rights that empower people. Examining the goals for which democracy movements of the past and present strug- gle reveals the same meaning. Modern democracy originates in the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century.10 These upheavals became significant through rights-setting acts of epochal importance, such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration des Droits de L’Homme et des Citoyens in 1789.11 These declara- tions entitled parts of the public to assert personal and political freedoms, empowering significant shares of the population to govern their private and public lives. This achievement established partial democracy, where a majority of the adult population remained excluded from suffrage. But even though partial democracy was intended by some to prevent full democracy, it actually paved the way to full democracy. For the empowerment of limited parts of the public encouraged further struggles by extant excluded groups to also push for empowerment, until universal suffrage established full democracies at the end of the nineteenth century.12 Since then, people’s struggles for democracy continue. Within established democracies, civil rights and equal opportunity movements fight to advance democracy’s empowering qualities.13 Beyond established democracies, people power movements pressure to replace autocracy with democracy.14 Looking at the priorities that are evident in the order in which democratic constitu- tions are organized, it is obvious that model constitutions, like those of the United States, France, or the German Basic Law, start with the rights of the people.15 If this ordering is indicative of a priority, it means that the basis of democracy is the rights that empower ordinary people. In political theory, conceptions of democracy vary from Schumpeter’s minimalist definition of “electoral democracy” to Barber’s maximalist definition of “strong democ- racy.”16 Yet, as much as definitions of democracy differ in scope, they all have one thing in common: in the democratic condition, people are more empowered than in the non- democratic condition.17 Different conceptions of democracy operate with widely dif- ferent notions of what people power means; yet they all operate on a notion of people power as the core meaning of democracy. In conclusion, the literal meaning of democracy, the dominant popular understand- ing of democracy, the goals of past and present democracy movements, the priorities of order in model democratic constitutions, and the notions of democracy in political theory are all based on people power as the root meaning of democracy. Popular Rights as First-Order Tools of Democracy The institutional feature most directly instrumental to the idea of people power is popular rights. It is the inherent purpose of rights to empower their beholders by entitling them to practice some form of freedom.18 To have the power to govern their lives, people need two forms of free- dom: the freedom to follow their personal preferences in their private lives and the 272 Amy C. Alexander and Christian Welzel freedom to make their political preferences count in public life.19 The first form of freedom is private and is granted by personal rights; the second form is public and is granted by political rights.20 In an empowerment perspective, personal rights and political rights are distinct but not contradictory. Instead, personal rights and political rights complement each other in granting people the power to govern themselves. Self- governance in state-societies always has a private life dimension and a public life dimension, so rights must be granted in both to empower people.21 From the viewpoint of people empowerment, popular rights constitute the first- order tool of democracy. Other institutional features of democracy, such as political pluralism or an independent judiciary, are second-order. They exist to make a full set of popular rights work.22 For instance, the right to a free vote in elections can only work if candidates compete for votes with alternative policy programs. Thus, political com- petition is instrumental to a genuinely free vote. Likewise, the right to be protected from abuses of executive power can only work if an independent judiciary is accessible to litigate executive authorities. The major point, then, is clear. Institutional features of democracy that do not themselves stipulate rights are instrumental to the functioning of rights. Measuring popular rights is thus a proper way to operationalize democracy when people power is democracy’s root meaning.23 Democracy’s Gradual Nature As long as one can list a substantial number of popu- lar rights, democracy varies by degree. It varies by degree between the entire absence of people power when not a single right is granted and the full presence of people power when each known right is granted. These are endpoints on a continuum that can be scaled in percentages of the known maximum of popular rights. This percentage scale has a natural minimum at 0 when no popular right is granted and a natural maximum at 100 when all are granted. There are some natural cut-off points on this percentage scale, as depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1 People Power as the Percentage of Popular Rights Granted by a State More Autocratic More Democratic Hybrid Zone More More More More Completely Incompletely Incompletely Completely Autocratic Autocratic Democratic Democratic 0 510152025 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100 NO RIGHT EACH RIGHT GRANTED K N O W N P O P U L A R R I G H T S GRANTED 273 Comparative Politics April 2011 The 50 percent mark constitutes an intuitively meaningful cut-off point. Below this point, states ignore more rights than they enact, so they deny the people more power than they grant. This classifies all states below the 50 percent mark as “autocracies.” By contrast, all states above 50 points enact more rights than they deny, so they grant the people more power than they refuse. This classifies states above 50 percent as “democ- racies.” The 25 and 75 percent marks provide equally meaningful cut-off points. The 75 percent mark divides democracies into those closer to the democratic maximum and those closer to the neutral point. This classifies the former ones as “complete democracies” and the latter ones as “incomplete democracies.” Among autocracies, the 25 percent mark operates in similar fashion, separating “complete autocracies” from “incomplete autocracies.” People power differentiates between autocracy and democracy as much as it dif- ferentiates within these categories, accounting for how completely autocratic and democratic a state is. The differences that separate autocracies from democracies and the differences that separate complete from incomplete versions of these regime categories are differences on the same underlying continuum—the scope of rights granted to the people. Rule of Law as the Effectiveness Factor of Popular Rights There are features that define democracy and features that make the defining features effective. Popular rights are the key defining feature of democracy and for that matter establish nominal democ- racy. But even if they are granted to their full extent, in real practice given rights may not be effectively respected.