Democracy Index, 2006
Publisher: Center for Democracy and Human Rights (CEDEM), Montenegro
Date: May 2006
Volume: 66 pages, pdf
Description
The idea to measure democracy is certainly not new and in that respect, our attempt is not original. There are 5 parameters in the USA, based on which this index is being formed, with basic goal to set the rating of all USA states. However, this index relates only to aspect of political participation, meaning that just one criteria with five aspects is being used. In the surrounding countries, there have been similar attempts. Croatia has formed ‘open society index’, which in its essence is in fact a kind of democracy index. Croatian experience was useful to us when creating our index, although there are significant differences. Israel is also one of the countries where attempts have been made to use the index and measure the democracy within society, and we took into account even these experiences when designing our model. Finally, as widely known, Freedom House has a number of different indexes used for measuring the ‘situations’ in certain social areas, so we have used these procedures and experiences when selection our indicators. However, all in all our model has number of specific features, and we also believe advantages, with respect to other models we mentioned (as well as with respect to ones we didn’t mention). Time will tell whether our assessments and our satisfaction are realistic. In any case, looking from theoretically- methodologically, and empirically point of view, this represents grandiose attempt to measure the state of democracy in Montenegrin society in a summary way