Democratic Quality. A Proposal for its Measurement by Experts

Abstract

This article introduces a scale for expert evaluation of the democratic quality
of a political system. It is inspired by the democratic audit conducted
by the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, and consists of 57
items classifi ed into fi ve blocks: citizenship, laws and rights, representative
system, accountable government, civil society, and international dimensions
of democracy. It has been validated twice through a voluntary sample
of more than one hundred experts in Sociology, Political Science and
Economics in two consecutive years. Other latent dimensions have been
discovered by means of exploratory and confi rmatory factorial analysis,
and a reduced version of 14 items has been proposed in order to apply it to
the general population. Finally, high coeffi cients of validity and reliability of
the scales and subscales were obtained.