Quality of Democracy and the “Sustainable Governance Indicators”

Relating the Sustainable Governance Indicators
to the Quality of Democracy

Paper for the Workshop “Measuring Democracy”. IPSA Research Committee on the Quality of Democracy, DVPW-Arbeitskreis Demokratieforschung, Frankfurt/Main, 29 September – 1 October 2013

The Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) are a set of 147 detailed items and two aggregated indices that measure the quality of democracy (QoD), policy performance and executive governance in OECD member states. Two editions have been published since 2009 by the Bertelsmann Foundation, an NGO based in Germany. The SGI consist of qualitative expert assessments, country reports and data retrieved from official statistics. As the name suggests, the SGI have been designed to measure the quality of governance, a concept that overlaps with concepts of democracy or QoD, but has its distinct origins, ideational references and discourse communities. read more

Post-Communist Capitalisms after Crisis

Scenarios for Central and Eastern Europe against the Backdrop of Economic Recovery and European Integration

in: Central and Eastern Europe Beyond Transition: Convergence and Divergence in Europe, ed. by European Science Foundation, Strasbourg: European Science Foundation 2012, 23-34 (Co-author: V. Pettai)

BeyondTransitionScholars of post-communist change in Central and Eastern Europe have continually faced an analytical challenge as to whether to stress convergence or divergence when interpreting social, economic and political transformation in the region. Across many systemic categories, the imperative has been to highlight patterns of convergence. All the countries of the region were encouraged to build democratic institutions, develop market economies and rebuild social cohesion. And indeed within a few short years a number of indicators across these domains showed signs of approximation with Western European levels. Free market exchange became well established, democracy was nearing consolidation, and social decline appeared at least arrested. read more

Making Reform Happen

Towards a Diagnostic Framework

Keynote paper for the SELLER Network Conference, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, 21-25 May 2012, Budva

Abstract

The present paper suggests a conceptual framework that disentangles the “politics of policy reform” as a chain of delegation and accountability relations. This framework shall help reformers and consultants to analyze weak links in the chain. The proposed approach overlaps with the notion of a policy cycle, but focuses on political actors and their interdependence, while avoiding the temporal, institutionalized sequence associated with the cycle idea. read more