Assessing Progress Toward Democracy and Good Governance

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of a particular political or economic situation depends on multiple sources of information, including, but not limited to, the comparative data provided by judgments based on rating scales. With regard to interventions arid specific project designs, George Lopez suggested that some may be better designed...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of a particular political or economic situation depends on multiple sources of information, including, but not limited to, the comparative data provided by judgments based on rating scales. With regard to interventions arid specific project designs, George Lopez suggested that some may be better designed and evaluated by specialists, such as community and organizational consultants, including community-rights organizers, than by researchers. Additional concerns voiced by the practitioners at the workshop made evident a possible two cultures problem. Many of the practitioners were concerned about the possibility of too much quantification in a scheme, wondering just what to do with the many highly detailed schemes put forth in the literature. George Lopez elaborated this concern by noting that even the best indicator systems could be quickly outdated: the scholarly community lags behind real-world events; many data-gathering categories do not capture some events or the pace of change that occurs in social and political institutions. On the positive side, although noting the difficulty of comparing, for example, different judicial systems, a number of the practitioners found rating scales useful as points of departure or as starting points for further work. They also found them useful for focusing attention on major differences between countries and within a country over time. It was generally agreed that minor differences uncovered by the ratings may be attributed to sampling error. The discussion returned to a consideration of technical issues of measurement. Featured in this discussion were a concern about the quality of the sources for judgments, the merits of combining several partially correlated indicators into a single aggregated unit, the way that different compon...