This article introduces a discussion on defining, measuring, and assessing the quality of democracy. Providing a short overview of the papers of the Symposium, it places them within a broader context of current academic debate on various methodological, theoretical, and policy outreach dimensions of the topic.

This articles sets out the main principles, mediating values, and pillars of the democracy assessment framework developed by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA). It discusses the tradition of democracy assessment, the efforts at measuring democracy, lays out the key strengths and differences of the IDEA framework, and reflects on its application in over twenty-five countries. The article argues that in addition to an assessment function, the framework has been useful in initiating and sustaining democratic reform in a number of countries.

Diamond and Morlino (2005) propose a quality of democracy framework that includes eight dimensions, but they restrict use of opinion data to measuring only one of these: ‘responsiveness’. However, we argue that citizen experiences and evaluations are essential pieces of data that may also enable us to capture valid ‘insider’ measures of procedural and substantive dimensions that may be missed by expert judges and macro-level indicators. We develop indicators based on public attitude data for all eight dimensions of democracy. Substantively, this mass perspective on the Quality of Democracy gives us insight into what Africans themselves want out of democracy, and how they prioritise its various components. As we explore the places where citizen and expert evaluations diverge, we conclude that both individual and expert assessments of the quality of democracy deserve to be carefully interrogated. We cannot conclude that either experts or ordinary citizens provide the ‘true’ or ‘correct’ assessment, but rather that both perspectives are essential to fully understanding today's democratic experience, and the shape of the democratic future, on the continent.

This article shows the outcomes of the first project in Spain aiming to measure the quality of its democracy. The research, led by the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC), is based on a survey allowing citizens to evaluate the performance of their democracy. The analysis is based on eight dimensions of democratic quality, following the normative framework proposed by Morlino (2009): rule of law, electoral accountability, inter-institutional accountability, participation, competition, liberty, equality and sensitivity (or responsiveness).

Democracy measurement is an ever growing and increasingly important research area. Nevertheless, lively discussions concerning the qualities of different measurement approaches are seldom combined with an adequate perspective on the underlying methodological framework. This article argues that a substantial theoretical perspective is only a sufficient condition for improving contemporary democracy measurement. Theoretical considerations have to be accompanied by an equally well-developed measurement concept. On the basis of examples taken from prominent approaches, potential for improvement becomes obvious. Any improvement is not just an end in itself but necessary if these measures are used as variables in all areas of research.

Measuring characteristics of democracy is not an easy task, but anyone who does empirical research on democracy needs good measures. In this article, we present the Democracy Barometer, a new measure that overcomes the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of previous indices. It allows for a description and comparison of the quality of thirty established democracies in the timespan between 1995 and 2005. The article examines its descriptive purposes and demonstrates the potential of this new instrument for future comparative analyses.

In its rational, organisational, historical and discursive varieties, the new institutionalism research agenda is arguably the most successful paradigm in comparative politics and public policy analysis. However, neo-institutional practice applied to comparative policy analysis reveals four pitfalls, that is, ‘institutional determinism’, ‘drop in the box’, ‘second best residual explanations’ and ‘theoretical conjectures without foundational mechanisms’. We illustrate and examine the pitfalls and consider the conceptual and methodological implications for the comparative analysis of policies. In the conclusion, we present options for rescuing institutional analysis from bad practice.

The aim of this article is questioning the commonly held assumption that Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is necessarily good for students. Drawing on the experience of teaching a postgraduate module about terrorism and the media as a case study, it shows that PBL can definitely benefit the Political Communication curriculum. However, this is only part of the story. PBL, in fact, appears to have an ‘amplifier’ effect on the learning outcomes of a module: the achievement of outstanding results for those who are committed to the coursework; lower achievement than would have been gained through more ‘traditional’ learning methods for those who do not fully engage with it. As the case study suggests, students’ individual expectations and previous experiences of coursework, although currently overlooked, appear to make all the difference within the learning process.

The results from the first foray into the research quality in Australia, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), were released in 2011. This article critically assesses the methodology of ERA and its application to the discipline of political science. It uses two other assessments of research quality in the discipline to confirm that the results for political science provide a credible result, as the rank order of departments is broadly compatible with these earlier exercises. The article then shows how the overall assessments for disciplines reflect the methodology employed, and that the average score for the discipline does not provide a credible benchmark against political science globally. While research funding decisions within disciplines are likely to be made according to within-discipline ranks, the use of descriptors relating the numerical score to ‘world class’ have undervalued the quality of the discipline relative to other disciplines and this risks affecting the perceptions of policymakers and impacting funding for the discipline as a whole.