[governance] NY article expresses surprise at US walkout in Dubai

[Norbert Bollow]

Michael,

maybe you are right that a careful investigation would find that the
correlation comes from the "democracy index" having been measured by
means of checking for the presence of values and institutions which are
e.g. more directly related to willingness to follow US leadership than
to democracy itself. That in itself would be a significant insight, as
it would point to a need for developing a better set of indicators for
the quality of democratic structures.

Another potential result could be that certain kinds of socioeconomic
conditions make it hard to implement good governance systems of any
kind (which would inevitably lead to low scores on the "democracy
index") and that in such kinds of situations, "follow the kind of
leadership that is currently offered by the US" is not likely to be a
promising strategy for economic improvement.

In any case, I think that democracy is so extremely important that all
kinds of related topics deserve a careful treatment. And I agree with
the need to look "upstream from the kind of information that we have
been presented with in these charts".

Greetings,
Norbert


Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> Norbert, I think it all depends on how you define "democracy"...
> given the right set of definitions I/you/anyone could find a
> correlation between anything and anything... This doesn't mean that
> these types of exercises aren't useful, some are and some aren't, but
> it does mean that if you want to understand what is going on you have
> to move quite a bit upstream from the kind of information that we
> have been presented with in these charts.
> 
> M
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org
> [mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Norbert
> Bollow Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 10:55 AM
> To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> Cc: McTim
> Subject: Re: [governance] NY article expresses surprise at US walkout
> in Dubai
> 
> McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > As for matching democracy indices, these are spins being put that 
> > > are unnecessary
> > 
> > Unnecessary does not mean "not revealing".
> 
> I would suggest that a correlation (as certainly seems to be present
> in this case) does not in itself reveal anything besides a *question*
> of what causes the correlation.
> 
> If someone were to seriously investigate this question, I would be
> very interested in reading the resulting paper.
> 
> Greetings,
> Norbert
> 
> 
> 


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