Qn. 23: What measurable and quantifiable criteria are available in political science to evaluate political behaviour? (1999/I/3/60)
Measurable and quantifiable criteria available in political science to evaluate political behaviour can be studied under the following categories:
Measuring public opinion: Informal ways of measuring public opinion include elections, interest groups and lobbying, the media, letters, messages and calls, online feedback, protests, strikes and boycotts, straw polls, exit poll, referendum, plebiscite, inter alia. These methods do not necessarily represent the public opinion as a whole. Formal ways to measure public opinion include formal quantitative methods such as sampling, interviewing, statistical analysis, scoring, scaling, mail surveys, online surveys, survey research, experiments, focus groups etc.
Measuring political participation can be done by measuring criteria such as party membership, voting registration, electoral turnout, ballot results, online activities, participation in voluntary organisations and social activities etc. If possible/feasible, study distribution of participation according to politically significant parameters such as region, gender, age, other social stratifications et al.
Mapping political preferences can be done via two dimensions:
- Economic left-right dimension – refers to state intervention in economic freedoms of citizens. Includes issues such as attitudes toward welfare state, taxation and market regulation. Left believes the political majority should intervene, the right, does not.
- Social left-right dimension - refers to state intervention in social freedoms of citizens. Includes issues such as minority rights, lifestyle choices and post-material issues.
Measuring democracy: One of the most widely used and widely accepted measures of democracy is a substantive one called ‘ Polity IV’. This provides an annual measure of democracy and autocracy for 184 countries from 1800 to the present day, giving it the longest time-series and the most number of countries of any of the measures of democracy used in political science. It is comprised of five separate measures which, when combined, capture whether the substance of democracy is present or absent within a system. The five measures it uses are:
- Competitiveness of executive recruitment.
- Openness of executive recruitment.
- Constraints on the executive.
- Regulation of political participations.
- Competitiveness of political participation.
Measurement of political trust or people’s feelings of trust towards government can be found by using quantitative methods to measure their propensity to pay taxes, willingness to comply with collective obligations, trust in risk management, trust in the healthcare system, confidence in the legal system, confidence in the political system, societal unease, interpersonal trust, dispositional trust, trust in political efficacy, political cynicism, democratic norms, democratic support and system justification.
How political behaviour is measured plays a vital role in connecting what the people want with what the government does, strengthening citizen-policy linkage, influencing political will, guiding electoral and governmental reforms, determining political legitimacy, making realistic political analyses and so on.