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

[michael gurstein]

No, the issue isn't "methodology"--the issue is how one defines "democacy"
i.e. what one chooses to identify as the attributes of democracy against
which one decides to attribute a value.  Looking at the list (from the
Wikipedia site) I have no doubt that I would overall have a preference for
the attributes that the EIU chose, but chose they did; and, at least based
on the article they made those choices based on their (unattributed)
values/prejudices etc. It wasn't that long ago that the German Democratic
Republic was around and presumably presenting a quite different set of
definitional attributes for their notion of "democracy" -- and given
resources and interest one would expect that they could/would have developed
their own index based on those attributes with the result being I would
guess, rather different than that determined by the EIU. Less in keeping
with our understanding and desires re: democracy but presumably consistent
with theirs.

In a peer reviewed index of "good governance" that I developed with
colleagues we used as our normative anchor i.e. the basis for our
identification of the attributes we used to construct our index a definition
of "good governance" developed by the UN Development Program which at least
had the advantage of being developed by a (presumably neutral, independent
and global) third party.

http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/448/410

http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=24963

M

-----Original Message-----
From: Norbert Bollow [mailto:nb at bollow.ch] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 2:18 PM
To: McTim
Cc: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; michael gurstein
Subject: Re: [governance] NY article expresses surprise at US walkout in
Dubai

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> read all about it here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Thanks a lot for this link!

I've also read what they write about their methodology in the actual report
for 2011; it looks reasonable enough to me.

So unless someone points out flaws that I have missed, I'll dismiss the
possibility of the correlation with democracy not being real but an artifact
caused by invalid methodology in the determination of "democracy".

The big question is of course what the causalities are...

Greetings,
Norbert


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