Studying the quality of democracy

What is it about?

This article provides new cross-national measures of two dimensions of democratic citizenship with great import for the study of democratic quality, expressive participation, and intolerance of diversity. Using data from the 2000–2001 wave of the World Values Survey, the paper presents new ways to measure participation and intolerance, as well as a ranking of countries from every geographical region of the world. As discussed, democratic theory provides a firm basis for including these measures when comparing the quality of democracy between nations. No causal claims regarding these concepts are made, but the case is made that political democracies in which citizens expressively participate and exhibit tolerance are of a higher quality than political democracies where citizens do not expressively participate and are intolerant.

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