{"id":131205,"date":"2020-02-28T09:28:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T14:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=131205"},"modified":"2020-03-06T09:20:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T14:20:29","slug":"the-lesson-i-look-forward-to-giving-democracy-a-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/02\/28\/the-lesson-i-look-forward-to-giving-democracy-a-number\/","title":{"rendered":"The lesson I look forward to: Giving democracy a number"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lesson: <\/strong>Conceptualizing and measuring democracy <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Course: <\/strong>\u201cGovernment and Politics in Global Perspective\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor: <\/strong>Clarisa P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz, Associate Professor of Politics<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is democracy? And how do we measure how democratic a country is? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democracy is a \u201cfoundational, fundamental concept\u201d in political science as well as day-to-day life, says Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz, yet researchers can spend their entire careers trying to measure it \u2014 assigning to individual countries labels or numbers that can influence real-life foreign policy decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no agreement on what democracy even means, and yet we\u2019re claiming we can measure it from one to seven or even \u2018yes\u2019 or \u2018no,\u2019\u201d she says. 

To show how tricky defining and measuring an abstract concept like democracy can be, P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz has her students do exactly that. <\/p>\n

\"Associate<\/a>

Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz meets with David Quintero ’20 of Oxnard, Calif. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of two or three class sessions and the intervening homework, her students divide into groups and choose a specific country. They come up with questions that would indicate how democratic a country is: How are elections set up? How robust are individual rights, civil liberties, and media freedom? How effective are checks and balances? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once they\u2019ve tried to answer those questions, they classify their country based on an existing measure, such as Freedom House\u2019s categories of free, partly free, or not free<\/a>; or the same organization\u2019s scale of one to seven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students quickly realize that measuring democracy, or even coming up with a good method, is as fraught as can be. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIn the classroom you can\u2019t teach everything, but you can teach students to become aware of what they don\u2019t know.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, what do analysts miss if they only read English-language sources? How would, say, an American scholar\u2019s evaluation of Russia differ from a Russian\u2019s? How do you figure out if a country\u2019s constitution actually reflects what\u2019s happening on the ground? What if the laws promise free and fair elections, but opposition party leaders are being jailed? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was definitely real awareness of sources and bias, and some humility,\u201d P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz says. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to say, \u2018Wow, I really need to be an expert.\u2019 There\u2019s even some question of, \u2018When do you become an expert?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Associate<\/a>

Associate Professor of Politics Clarisa P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz says she’s noticed a fundamental change in how students define democracy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can take a professional analyst months or years, of course, to come up with and implement a democracy measure, whereas Bates students only have a couple of days. P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz therefore grades the assignment primarily based on the quality of the questions students come up with and critiques of existing indicators, rather than the results they present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the classroom you can\u2019t teach everything, but you can teach students to become aware of what they don\u2019t know,\u201d she says.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz, who joined the Bates faculty in 2009, has noticed a marked shift in how her students conceive of democracy, which she attributes to generational changes in students\u2019 values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you asked a student to put it concretely, 10 years ago they were more likely to say that democracy is a system of government where people choose their leaders through elections,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToday, they\u2019re more likely to say, \u2018Democracy is a governing system where people\u2019s rights are protected.\u2019 They talk a lot more about equality and outcome-oriented things as opposed to process-oriented things.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This perspective could have implications down the road, especially for a college whose mission statement promises \u201cinformed civic action\u201d among its graduates. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important for students to think in the classroom about deceptively basic concepts like democracy, and to reflect on how those concepts impact their own lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf [the traditional definition of democracy] isn\u2019t good enough for you, that\u2019s okay,\u201d P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz says. \u201cTrust in yourself, and be really rigorous and critical.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If scholars can’t agree on what democracy even is, can democracy in a given nation be ranked? Students of politics professor Clarisa P\u00e9rez-Armend\u00e1riz give it a shot. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":131314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11146,2875,10770,12088],"class_list":["post-131205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","tag-clarisa-perez-armendariz","tag-democracy","tag-politics","tag-the-lesson-i-look-forward-to-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131205"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131421,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131205\/revisions\/131421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}