Search

This paper analyzes several key advantages and disadvantages of measuring regimes through the judgment of experts. Using results from the Survey of Experts on Provincial Politics carried out by the author to assess levels of democracy in the 24 provinces of Argentina, the paper discusses the following advantages: 1) the possibility to assess many and diverse dimensions of democracy, 2) the particular aptitude of the method to identify hybrid regimes, a regime type of increasing prominence that poses special measurement challenges, and 3) the possibility to estimate measurement reliability through inter-rater (or inter-expert) agreement statistics. Two disadvantages are discussed: 1) the problems of comparability brought about by relying on unit-specific (i.e., provincespecific): there may be systematic inter-provincial differences among the experts in terms of knowledge, neutrality, and evaluative standards, and 2) the inevitable inter-unit differences in levels of measurement error. Finally, the dimensions of democracy measured by the expert survey are compared to objective indicators of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]