Lesson: Conceptualizing and measuring democracy 

Course: “Government and Politics in Global Perspective”

Professor: Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, Associate Professor of Politics

What is democracy? And how do we measure how democratic a country is? 

Democracy is a “foundational, fundamental concept” in political science as well as day-to-day life, says Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, yet researchers can spend their entire careers trying to measure it — assigning to individual countries labels or numbers that can influence real-life foreign policy decisions. 

“There’s no agreement on what democracy even means, and yet we’re claiming we can measure it from one to seven or even ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” she says. 

To show how tricky defining and measuring an abstract concept like democracy can be, Pérez-Armendáriz has her students do exactly that. 

Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz meets with David Quintero ’20 of Oxnard, Calif. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Over the course of two or three class sessions and the intervening homework, her students divide into groups and choose a specific country. They come up with questions that would indicate how democratic a country is: How are elections set up? How robust are individual rights, civil liberties, and media freedom? How effective are checks and balances? 

Once they’ve tried to answer those questions, they classify their country based on an existing measure, such as ; or the same organization’s scale of one to seven. 

Students quickly realize that measuring democracy, or even coming up with a good method, is as fraught as can be. 

“In the classroom you can’t teach everything, but you can teach students to become aware of what they don’t know.”

For example, what do analysts miss if they only read English-language sources? How would, say, an American scholar’s evaluation of Russia differ from a Russian’s? How do you figure out if a country’s constitution actually reflects what’s happening on the ground? What if the laws promise free and fair elections, but opposition party leaders are being jailed? 

“There was definitely real awareness of sources and bias, and some humility,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “It’s nice to say, ‘Wow, I really need to be an expert.’ There’s even some question of, ‘When do you become an expert?’” 

Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz says she’s noticed a fundamental change in how students define democracy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It can take a professional analyst months or years, of course, to come up with and implement a democracy measure, whereas �ֲ���ý students only have a couple of days. Pérez-Armendáriz therefore grades the assignment primarily based on the quality of the questions students come up with and critiques of existing indicators, rather than the results they present. 

“In the classroom you can’t teach everything, but you can teach students to become aware of what they don’t know,” she says.  

Pérez-Armendáriz, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2009, has noticed a marked shift in how her students conceive of democracy, which she attributes to generational changes in students’ values.

“If you asked a student to put it concretely, 10 years ago they were more likely to say that democracy is a system of government where people choose their leaders through elections,” she says. 

“Today, they’re more likely to say, ‘Democracy is a governing system where people’s rights are protected.’ They talk a lot more about equality and outcome-oriented things as opposed to process-oriented things.” 

This perspective could have implications down the road, especially for a college whose mission statement promises “informed civic action” among its graduates. That’s why it’s important for students to think in the classroom about deceptively basic concepts like democracy, and to reflect on how those concepts impact their own lives. 

“If [the traditional definition of democracy] isn’t good enough for you, that’s okay,” Pérez-Armendáriz says. “Trust in yourself, and be really rigorous and critical.”  

Facing the worst economic crisis in generations and an unpopular war in Iraq, President Barack Obama arrived in Washington shattering racial barriers and promising momentous change in the way the United States conducts itself at home and abroad. Reporters from around the globe have descended on the nation’s capital to document the unfolding historic drama.

American newspapers, meanwhile, are pulling their correspondents out.

Wracked by declining readership and advertising revenues, daily papers in every major American city have scaled back their Washington bureaus or closed them altogether. It is the latest sign of a decade-long financial skid in the American news industry, where austerity measures have become commonplace.

But as Washington correspondents vanish, troubling questions arise. If Thomas Jefferson was right that “a well-informed citizenry” is necessary for a healthy democracy, what happens when the American public is unaware of their elected officials’ work in Washington? Could the result be pay-to-play journalism, where information is increasingly available only to those able and willing to pay top dollar for it?

Brian McGrory ’84, metro editor at The Boston Globe and the paper’s former White House correspondent, explains the watchdog role of Washington-based reporters.

“Residents elect people to represent them in Washington, so we don’t want those politicians going off and forgetting where they came from,” he says. “We ought to keep close tabs on how they are spending their campaign money, who is giving them contributions, and whether they are fulfilling their campaign promises. To pull out of Washington and leave these guys uncovered would be a travesty.”

Yet few newspapers have been spared from the current cutbacks. The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Diego Union-Tribune have pulled their reporters out of Washington. Cox Newspapers, which had 30 people in its Washington bureau including correspondents for The Austin (Texas) American-Statesmanand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced it will close its D.C. operation in April.

The Tribune company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, combined the Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, cutting in half a staff of what had been 70 people only a year ago. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post even reduced the width of their papers to save money on newsprint.

My own former employer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, is keeping a two-person Washington operation intact even as its owner, the publishing giant Newhouse, closed its D.C. bureau in November.

To save money, newspapers fill their pages with stories from subscription wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters. Yet wire services are designed to get news out broadly, not explain what a new federal budget means for public education, environmental protection, or police capabilities in, say, Lewiston.

“If you look at newspapers today, they are mostly wire stories that are national or international,” says Jeremy Pelofsky ’97, who covers Congress for Reuters. “You have to wonder if the interests of a city are being served by a wire report. And that’s coming from a wire reporter!”

The result of newspaper cutbacks will not be a news blackout, however. Quite the opposite. News of the Obama presidency and the work of the 111th Congress will explode out of Washington in such overwhelming volume that it will be impossible for all but the most dedicated hermits to ignore.

What will be lost is context and meaning. The main task of Washington correspondents has always been to stand at the center of power, politics, and policy and tell the folks back home what it all means to them. At their best, Washington correspondents aren’t merely reporters, but explainers, experts who “understand how the system works in D.C. and can apply that understanding to the issues and the political players most relevant to readers back home,” says Carolyn Ryan ’86, deputy metro editor at The New York Times.

Those explainers are the people who are losing their jobs.

At this writing, President Obama is talking about kick-starting the economy with a public works building spree reminiscent of FDR’s. It is a Washington correspondent’s job to find out which bridge and road projects back home will get green-lighted — and which won’t. It also falls to the Washington correspondent to see if the money is being disbursed equitably, what role politics is playing, and whether someone’s brother-in-law is getting a sweetheart deal to do the paving.

The value of a Washington bureau was never more evident to me than after Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005. With The Times-Picayune‘s downtown New Orleans offices flooded and abandoned, it fell to the Washington bureau to collect stories from reporters in the field and post them on the newspaper’s Web site. After the storm, the Washington bureau was also charged with tracking what Congress and the Bush administration were doing — and not doing — to aid in the recovery and the awesome task of rebuilding a major American city.

Former newspaper journalist Bill Walsh ’86 is now a senior strategic adviser for AARP in Washington, D.C.

Les Campbell, a leading expert on the development of democracy, visits �ֲ���ý College to speak about the necessity and difficulty of building democracies in the Middle East at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Democrats, the event is open to the public at no charge.

Campbell’s speech will touch on high-profile democracy-building efforts, including the controversial democratization process in Iraq.

Campbell is a senior associate and regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Washington D.C.-based , where he has directed the Institute’s democratic development programs in those regions since 1996.

Campbell has overseen the expansion of NDI’s programs in the Middle East with the establishment of 10 permanent offices that furnish assistance with political, civic and governance reform and development throughout the Arab world. In addition, he has organized election-observation missions around the region, and provided training in the skills necessary for political candidates, government officials and voters to participate in democratic life.

A frequent guest and commentator on Middle East issues for major broadcast news outlets, including CNN, ABC, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Fox News and several international organizations, Campbell is quoted regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and many other publications.

Campbell has also been a guest speaker and/or lecturer at American University, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Georgetown University, the University of Toronto, and several chapters of the World Affairs Council. He has been a member of task forces and study groups at the Council on Foreign Relations; the School of Advanced International Studies; the United States Institute of Peace; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among others.

Campbell is a fellow at the Queen’s University Center for the Study of Democracy and sits on the board of directors of the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Before joining NDI in 1994, he was chief of staff to the leader of the New Democratic Party in the Canadian House of Commons.

Campbell earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University and a B.A. with honors from the University of Manitoba.