Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

of law, scholars became more and more interested in the quality of democracy. Together
with the concern to find reliable and valid empirical assessments for democracy and
democratization (for overview and discussion, see among others Beetham 1994;
Vanhanen 1997; 2000; Bollen and Paxton 2000; Lauth, Pickel and Welzel 2000;
Schmidt 2000; Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Berg-Schlosser 2002), this interest has
contributed to the emergence of a new and young discipline – measuring democracy
(Lauth 2003: 2). In this context, Freedom House has become a widely accepted and
frequently used source for empirical comparative studies. 24
Strictly speaking, Freedom House is not aiming at assessing the quality of democracy
but of political rights and civil liberties (Gastil 1991; Karatnycky 1999). However, these
two scales cover central elements of democracy, such as prevailing political liberties and
equality, or political and judicial control (Lauth 2003: 4). Moreover, the scales are
designed to evaluate not only the constitutional requirement but also how these given
rights and rules work in reality on a day-to-day basis (Schmidt 2000: 409; Karatnycky
2003: 102).
According to the earlier definition, political participation needs to be a voluntary
activity. Consequently, there is an obvious reason to limit the study on elite-challenging
action to countries that adhere to fundamental democratic rules. Democracies are similar
in the basic functioning of the democratic process and the role that is given to citizens
within this process. The opportunity to articulate own interests and to participate at
one’s own discretion is the mechanism that links people to the political system and
constantly contributes to its democratic legitimacy. Only this mechanism ensures that
political decisions can, in principle, be traced back to people’s will. If this is not the
case, mass participation serves a fundamentally different purpose (like for example in
authoritarian or totalitarian regimes). Levels of participation can hardly be interpreted in
a meaningful way. Voter turnout, for example, has been highest in communist countries
with non-competitive elections where people did not experience electoral freedom
(Nohlen 2002, chapter 1). Along similar lines, non-democratic regimes have frequently
23 Freedom House formulated additional criteria for electoral democracies. They can be found in
Appendix A4-1.
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