Rival Strategies of Validation: Tools for Evaluating Measures of Democracy
Year: 2012
Type: preprint
Abstract: The challenge of finding appropriate tools of measurement validation is an abiding concern in political science. This article considers four traditions of validation, using examples from comparative research on democracy: the levels-of-measurement (LoM) approach, structural-equation modeling with latent variables (SEM-L), the pragmatic tradition, and the case-based method. Methodologists have sharply disputed the merits of alternative traditions. We encourage scholars — and certainly analysts of democracy — to pay more attention to these disputes and to consider strengths and weaknesses in the validation tools they adopt. An online appendix summarizes the evaluation of six democracy data sets from the perspective of alternative approaches to validation. The overall goal is to open a new discussion of alternative validation strategies and their role in evaluating measures of democracy.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Authors: Jason Seawright, David Collier
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3122053987