The study of democratic quality has exploded in recent years. A search of scholarly papers for the phrases “democratic quality” and “quality of democracy” reveals more than 1,000 hits for the former and more than 2,000 for the latter. And this interest is new. As Chapter 1 showed, the phrase was rarely used in scholarly articles before 1999, but has become common currency since then. This outpouring of work suggests that scholars have identified a real empirical phenomenon which has not yet been adequately addressed by political science.

The phenomenon is the performance of new democracies. After studying democratization for two decades, scholars came to realize that the new democracies which emerged from the Third Wave deserved to be studied not only as outcomes or temporary outcomes of a democratization process, but as democratic systems in their own right. When they undertook such studies, they often noticed that these democracies did not resemble the established democracies (or their idealized picture of those democracies). Political life in these countries was not as rosy as they hoped with such flaws as high levels of conflict, dishonest politicians, and dismal economic performance becoming the order of the day. It was disappointment at these failings that has justifiably inspired the field of democratic quality.

Yet, this emerging literature suffers from two problems – one conceptual and one empirical. In the first place, the concept of democratic quality has become vague and all-encompassing.