Pardee Center to Host Conference on Measuring Democracy

A Pardee Center Research Conference on "Measuring Democracy: A Multidimensional, History Approach" will be held at Boston University on May 23 and 24.

The conference is supported by the Pardee Center and a Clinton Global Initiative grant from Kirk Radke. The conference is part of the larger Pardee Center research program on Governance in the Developing World, an initiative led by Prof. John Gerring, a professor of Political Science and a Pardee Center Faculty Fellow.

The conference is part of a larger project focused on developing methods for measuring the quality of democracy among countries throughout history considering various dimensions, such as civil liberty, judicial independence, election participation and administration, and leadership turnover, among other things. Current comparative approaches to democracy typically look simply at whether a country is a democrary versus an autocracy or somewhere along a scale between the two. The larger project aims to develop a democracy index based on a large number of factors that are indicative of the relative strength of democratic characteristcs among various countries over time.

Professor John Gerring will serve as the conference moderator and provide an overview of the project. Adil Najam, Director of the Pardee Center and Professor of International Relations at BU, will deliver opening remarks. This will be followed by discussions on issues related to Election Administration, Election Results, Checks on the Executive, Civil Liberty, Civil Society, Political Parties, Judicial Independence, and the Problems of Measurement and Aggregation.

Project participants and discussants include:
Helmut K. Anheier – UCLA
Jose Cheibub – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Michael Coppedge – Notre Dame University
Jorgen Elklit – Aarhus University, Denmark
John Gerring – Boston University
Allen Hicken – University of Michigan
Chappell Lawson – MIT
Stephen Levitsky – Harvard University
Staffan Lindberg – University of Florida
Daniel Pemstein – University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Anibal Perez-Linan – University of Pittsburgh
Svend-Erik Skaaning – Aarhus University, Denmark
Jeffrey Staton – Emory University
Strom Thacker – Boston University