Measuring Nation States’ Deliberativeness: Systematic Challenges, Methodological Pitfalls, and Strategies for Upscaling the Measurement of Deliberation
| Author | Dannica Fleuß,Karoline Helbig |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719890817 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719890817
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(2) 307 –325
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719890817
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Measuring Nation States’
Deliberativeness: Systematic
Challenges, Methodological
Pitfalls, and Strategies for
Upscaling the Measurement of
Deliberation
Dannica Fleuß1
and Karoline Helbig2
Abstract
A theoretically reflected and empirically valid measurement of nation states’ democratic quality
must include an assessment of polities’ deliberativeness. This article examines the assessment
of deliberativeness suggested by two sophisticated contemporary measurements of democratic
quality, that is, the Democracy Barometer and the Varieties of Democracy-project. We feature two
sets of challenges, each measurement of deliberativeness must meet: First, it must address the
methodological challenges arising in the course of conceptualizing, operationalizing, and aggregating
complex concepts (see Munck and Verkuilen, 2002). Second, attempts to measure nation states’
deliberativeness are confronted with specific conceptual and systematic challenges which we derive
from recent deliberative democracy scholarship. We argue that both Democracy Barometer and
Varieties of Democracy-project provide highly sophisticated assessments of democratic quality,
but ultimately fail to capture nation states “deliberativeness” in a theoretically reflected and
methodologically sound manner. We examine the methodological, pragmatic, and systematic
reasons for these shortcomings. The crucial task for measurements of nation states’ deliberativeness
consists in providing a conceptual approach and methodological framework for “upscaling” existing
meso-level measurements (such as the DQI). The concluding section presents conceptual and
methodological strategies that can enable researchers to meet these challenges and to provide a
theoretically grounded and empirically valid measurement of nation states’ deliberativeness.
Keywords
deliberative democracy, deliberation, measurement of democracy, measurement of democratic
quality, deliberative systems, upscaling deliberation
Accepted: 5 November 2019
1Department of Political Science, Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg, Germany
2WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany
Corresponding author:
Dannica Fleuß, Department of Political Science, Helmut-Schmidt-University, Holstenhofweg 85, Hamburg
22043, Germany.
Email: dannica.fleuss@hsu-hh.de
890817PSX0010.1177/0032321719890817Political StudiesFleuß and Helbig
research-article2020
Article
308 Political Studies 69(2)
Introduction
Deliberative democratic theories formulate a major contemporary paradigm of demo-
cratic legitimacy (Dryzek, 2015; Elstub, 2015). According to deliberative democrats,
democratic self-legislation manifests not only in institutionalized electoral procedures,
but is realized first and foremost in society-wide, free and unrestrained “taking and giving
reasons” about politically relevant issues. From this perspective, civil society communi-
cations and the corresponding bottom up-input that is fed into empowered, decision-
making institutions are crucial for political systems’ democratic quality (Dryzek and
Niemeyer, 2010: 11). This normative claim may be all but undisputed among theoretical
and empirical scholars. Nevertheless, all major theoretical paradigms presupposed in
established indices of democratic quality agree on the functional value of deliberative
practices for inclusive and egalitarian democratic decision-making.1 The merits of delib-
eration for democratic quality are increasingly acknowledged by practitioners worldwide
who consider deliberation as a means for tackling the most pressing issues of today’s rep-
resentative democracies: The Belgian G1000 project employed deliberative mini-publics
to overco me “the limits of represen tative democracy” (G1000, 2012; see Caluwaerts and
Reuchamps, 2015). In Ireland, “We the Citizens” was established with the purpose to
“enhance [. . .] democracy” in the context of citizens’ decreasing trust in established politi-
cal institutions (We the Citizens, 2011). “America in One Room” is supposed to tackle inner-
societal polarization and to provide a democratic alternative to populism and technocracy
with a view to the 2020 presidential election (Fishkin, 2018: 3, 70; see America in One
Room, 2019).
For a long time, measurements of democracy did not reflect this widespread acknowl-
edgment of the significance of deliberative procedures in their empirical assessments:
Neither the Index of Freedom in the World nor Polity IV or Vanhanen’s Polyarchy Index
integrate deliberation at a conceptual level (not to mention: measure it in a systematic
manner) (Freedom House, 2019; Marshall and Jaggers, 2018; Vanhanen, 2000). In recent
years, two measurement instruments have been developed that explicitly aim at providing
a more differentiated measurement of democratic quality2 that is grounded in democratic
theory:3 The Democracy Barometer (DB) represents its own procedure as “basically the-
ory-driven” (Bühlmann et al., 2012: 116; see Jäckle et al., 2012) and the V-Dem integrates
extensive reflections of different democratic theory-paradigms in conceptualizing “dem-
ocratic quality” (c.f. Coppedge et al., 2016c: 9–21, 2018b: 4–14).
This article’s point of departure is the premise that measures of democracy should
include an assessment of nation states’ overall deliberative quality (for short: “delibera-
tiveness”) in order to achieve valid and empirically meaningful measurements (see Fleuß
et al., 2018). From a democratic theory perspective, measurements must not only con-
sider the processes of public opinion and will-formation that are ultimately conveyed into
decision-making, but also provide a measurement of their quality. This task does, how-
ever, prove demanding from a conceptual as well as from a methodological point of view:
First, there are several competing theories of deliberative democracy (Elstub, 2010).
Accordingly, there are multiple definitions of deliberation and deliberative quality that
would suggest divergent normative criteria for evaluating democracies’ deliberativeness
which, in turn, would lead to different operationalizations and strategies of measurement.
Second, real-world deliberative procedures occur in various spaces or sites of a political
system (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010; Mansbridge et al., 2012). Especially informal delib-
erations in the civil society and so-called “everyday political talk” (Mansbridge, 1999)
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