The African Financial Review July-August 2014 | Page 35

have relayed on the conceptualization of Lijphart and Arend
(1999).

Moreover, even the indices that are derived from a
common conceptualization may experience differences, because
the authors of these indices adjust their indices according to a
particular aspect of the original conceptualization. For example,
the conceptualization of Dahl (1971) of democracy contains two
specific concepts:

The concept of participation, which reflects the following
criteria: Freedom to form and join organizations, freedom of
expression, right to vote and eligibility for public office.And the
concept of contestation, which includes the following criteria: The
right of political leaders to gain political support to compete with
other parties, the existence of alternative sources of information,
free and fair elections and the presence of institutions whose role
is to make government policies dependent on votes and other
expressions that reflect citizens’ preferences.

When an index focuses on the concept of contestation, as
is the case of the Polity IV index of Marshall and Jaggers (2001),
and another emphasizes the concept of participation, both indices
will not provide the same measure of the democratization degree
of a given country.

These differences in the manner to quantify this concept
had an effect in the empirical results which look into the impact
of democracy on development indicators or other governance
indicators ( like protection of property rights, level of corruption,
quality of bureaucracy, degree of political stability ...) and were
the cause of theoretical divergences.

This controversy sheds light in the importance of the quality
of democracy indicator and the influence of this choice on the
likelihood of the econometric results and theoretical conclusions.
For the purpose of this paper, we will go beyond the comparative
analysis of indices. However, we will present some arguments
that demonstrate the validity of the “Voice and accountability”
democracy index of Kaufmann et al. (2012). This index, among
other governance indexes, was prepared for the account of the
World Bank.

Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi present estimates of six
dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories.
These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables
measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data
sources constructed by 18 different organizations (Kaufmann et
al., 2010).
The governance estimates (including ‘voice and
accountabilit