Who Are the People? Defining the Demos in the Measurement of Democracy
| Author | Mathias Koenig-Archibugi |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720966481 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720966481
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(2) 402 –424
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720966481
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Who Are the People?
Defining the Demos in the
Measurement of Democracy
Mathias Koenig-Archibugi
Abstract
Large-scale efforts to measure the democratic nature of polities across space and time are most
useful when they reflect the variety of conceptions of democracy developed by political theorists.
Traditionally, the attention of political theorists as well as political scientists focused on what
it means for the people to rule, to the neglect of the equally important question of who the
relevant people should be. In recent years, however, an increasing number of political theorists
have tackled the problem of defining the demos and offered a wide range of answers. The article
argues that empirical democracy measurement projects should take into account the variety of
conceptions of the demos debated today instead of assuming consensus on this dimension. It also
discusses how this can be done systematically. The arguments are developed with reference to the
most ambitious and comprehensive democracy measurement project yet: Varieties of Democracy
(V-Dem).
Keywords
democracy, problem of the demos, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), measurement, political
theory and political science
Accepted: 18 September 2020
Introduction
Interest in the spread, causes, consequences and decline of democracy is intense and
shows no sign of abating. It is accompanied by strong demand for sources of information
that can help researchers compare levels of democracy across space and time. The demand
is met by an array of datasets that provide democracy indicators in a standardized format.
Nearly two decades ago, Munck and Verkuilen (2002) were able to identify and assess
nine systematic measurement projects devised by scholars of democracy, and since their
exercise further measures have been developed and made available to users.
Several of these democracy datasets are attempts to operationalize concepts developed
by political theorists, with the work of Robert Dahl being particularly influential. Until
recently, however, there has been a major imbalance in the amount of attention
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London
WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: m.koenig-archibugi@lse.ac.uk
966481PSX0010.1177/0032321720966481Political StudiesKoenig-Archibugi
research-article2020
Article
Koenig-Archibugi 403
that political theorists have given to two different but equally important dimensions of
democracy, understood as rule by the people: most efforts were devoted to spell out what
it should mean for the people to rule, while the question of who the relevant people should
be was attracting much less attention. If we decompose the Greek word δημοκρατία into
δῆμος (the commons, the people) and κράτος (power, rule), we obtain two handy labels
for these dimensions: the demos problem and the kratos problem. In 1970, Dahl (1970: 60)
himself pointed at the imbalance: ‘Strange as it may seem to you, how to decide who legiti-
mately make up “the people” – or rather a people - and hence are entitled to govern them-
selves in their own association is a problem almost totally neglected by all the great
political philosophers who write about democracy’. Nearly 40 years later, Robert Goodin
(2007: 41) could still write that ‘[v]irtually all democratic theorists find they have surpris-
ingly little to say on the topic’. But things have changed considerably since then. An
increasing number of political theorists stress that the assessment of the democratic nature
of a polity depends on how the people are defined, in addition to whether and how they
govern themselves.1 If the imbalance of attention is being rectified in political theory,
political scientists’ efforts to measure democracy empirically need to be reconsidered too,
instead of implicitly or explicitly assuming a consensus on the demos question that does
not exist. In this article, I argue that such a reconsideration is necessary and offer some
suggestions for doing it in a systematic way.
I approach this task by discussing a specific measuring project: the Varieties of
Democracy (V-Dem) datasets released from 2014 onwards (Coppedge et al., 2011, 2020).
I focus on this project for two reasons. First, its methodological rigour as well as breadth
and depth of expertise (it is designed and managed by over 50 scholars worldwide and
relies on the input of more than 3000 country experts) is rapidly making V-Dem a stand-
ard point of reference in political science and beyond. Second, and most importantly,
because the V-Dem project is already exceptionally sensitive to the diversity of positions
on the nature of democracy found among political theorists and it offers a sophisticated
approach to handling this diversity in empirical research. The starting point of the V-Dem
project is the recognition that scholars of democratic theory disagree on what exactly
democracy entails: ‘There is no consensus on what democracy writ-large means beyond
a vague notion of rule by the people’ (Coppedge et al., 2019b: 4).2 Accordingly, users of
V-Dem data are not forced to accept a single definition of democracy, but they can and
should combine indicators in a way that maximizes the fit between their preferred con-
ception of democracy and the empirical data available to assess its trends, antecedents
and effects. The V-Dem project team made extensive use of the work of political theorists
to identify five broad understandings of democracy, which it labelled the Electoral,
Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative and Egalitarian conceptions. Each of these concep-
tions is reflected in separate indices that result from the aggregation of over 400 fine-
grained indicators, with both the aggregated and disaggregated data being available to
users. Crucially, this theoretical breadth and depth do not come at the expense of cover-
age, since whenever possible the data cover every country in the world since 1789.
The key argument of this article is that, given that political theorists are as divided on
the demos problem as they are on the kratos problem, any exercise that aims for compre-
hensiveness, such as V-Dem, is incomplete if it does not provide users with information
on how well polities meet the criteria postulated by different conceptions of the demos.
To mention just one example that is discussed at length later, the information provided in
the V-Dem dataset allows users to decrease the democracy score of a polity whose auton-
omy is limited by another polity, for instance because it is subject to colonial rule, but not
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