Published in:Veröffentlichung / Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Sozialer Wandel, Institutionen und Vermittlungsprozesse, Abteilung Institutionen und sozialer Wandel ; Bd. 01-203
Description:
"Today democracy is seen as the only legitimate form of government almost all over the world. That it can be institutionalized differently leads to the question which kind of democracy might be better or worse. This question can be answered normatively, but also an the basis of different performances that can be determined empirically. The latter requires an adequate theoretical conceptualization of types of democratic regimes and the operationalization of these types in the form of indices. This is the subject of the analysis. Types and indices of democratic regimes that figure in the current comparative and empirical research an democracy are compared against the background of a theoretical framework. They are categorized as presidentialism-parliamentarism-approaches or veto-player-approaches. Thereby, the analysis implies a comparison of these two basic approaches to the construction of types and indices of democratic regimes." (author's abstract)