A Short History of Contestation

and Participation

Vanessa Boese
Matthew Wilson

January 2022

Working Paper
SERIES 2022:130
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 A Short History of Contestation and Participation∗

Vanessa Boese Matthew Wilson

University of Gothenburg University of South Carolina
[email protected] [email protected]

∗
Authors are ordered alphabetically. Funding: This research was made possible through financial
support by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Grant 2018.0144; as well as by the European
Research Council, Grant 724191.
Abstract
Contestation and participation are commonly viewed as the two constituent dimensions
of electoral democracy. How exactly have these two dimensions been conceptualized
and measured in the literature? Are they empirically observable and do they matter
for democratic development and stability? This paper answers the first of these
questions and considers their implications for the second by reviewing the literature
on democracy’s dimensions. We highlight three issues that affect conclusions about
dimensions of democracy and their relevance for understanding democratic development:
First, conceptual ambiguities — substantive overlap between the two concepts — obscure
the meanings of each of the two dimensions. Such ambiguities led to a second issue, which
is concept-measurement mismatch. The conceptual contributions were never really met
with an empirical equivalent that would allow us to properly measure the two dimensions.
Scholars continue to invoke theoretical understandings from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
however, but represent them using measures that were not explicitly concerned with
measuring them, which presents the third issue of concept reification. As a result of
these three issues, inference about how democracy has developed and their relevance for
democratic stability or for transitions to democratic rule has been difficult. Based on
these issues, we provide three suggestions for future research on dimensions of democracy.

Keywords: Contestation, participation, measurement, conceptualization,

inference
1 Introduction
The questions of whether democracy consists of multiple dimensions and how they work
together have been of theoretical interest to scholars well before empirical measures of
democracy became widely available. As political science became more quantitatively
oriented, research on the topic sought to bear out the ways in which democracy has
changed over time and to relate them to overall democratic development. On the whole,
however, such works share little consensus on the defining attributes of democracy and
how they characterize political progression.
This article reviews the early theoretical and more recent empirical work on
two popular dimensions of electoral democracy. We focus on the concepts of
contestation and participation, which have long been treated as generalizable features
of electoral democracy. These features originated with Robert A. Dahl (1956; 1971;
1989)—specifically, in Polyarchy (1971)—, who characterized democracy as the product
of institutional guarantees that formed two varying attributes representing the extent of
competition and inclusiveness.1 Dahl (1971) argued that historical developments in the
two features shaped a country’s prospects for stable democracy. Scholars have carried
forward these ideas by continuing to invoke the concepts of contestation and participation
to depict democratic development, which raises the question of how our understanding of
them has fared over time (Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado 2008; Miller 2015; Böhmelt
and Ward 1996; Wong 2021).
In separate sections devoted to conceptualization, measurement, and inference, we
consider how original ideas about contestation and participation have been translated into
measures and empirically evaluated. First, we argue that contestation and participation
are fairly open to interpretation. Dahl acknowledged that there was substantial overlap
between the two components (Dahl 1971, p.4), and institutional innovations since the
“third wave” of democratization have made it difficult to neatly distinguish between
the two (Haggard and Kaufman 2016). Conceptual ambiguity — the lack of

1
We follow Dahl (1971) and others, and refer to competition and contestation interchangeably (see Dahl
1971, footnote 2, p.4). Similarly, we also refer to participation and inclusiveness interchangeably.

1
clearly delineated definitions for each concept — complicates a shared understanding of
democracy’s dimensions by making it unclear how to discern between the two concepts.
On a measurement level, some of the first “quantitative” measures of democracy
(e.g., Gurr 1974) focused on identifying differences in authority patterns rather than
measuring contestation and participation. Additional datasets on democracy that
followed were only partially concerned with the notions of contestation and participation
and did not use the same indicators to represent components of democracy. Subsequent
crossnational work based on those measures nevertheless used them to evaluate arguments
about changes in contestation and participation, which represents a divergence between
conceptualizations regarding dimensions of democracy — the motivating theory — and
the criteria used to judge them. This occurred despite broad debates about concept and
meassurement validity on the topic (Munck and Verkuilen 2002). There is, therefore, some
concept-measurement mismatch between early theoretical notions of contestation
and participation and the multiplicity of measures by which scholars have represented
components of democracy.
Taken together, conceptual ambiguity and concept-measurement mismatch strongly
impair our ability to draw inferences on whether there are empirically observable
dimensions of democracy and if so, how they matter for democratic development.
Research on democratic development has largely been influenced by a persistent
conceptualization of it (the interplay of ambiguously defined contestation and
participation being a driving force) that did not perfectly correspond to the empirical
approaches used to measure it. This divergence has had lasting impacts on scholars’
conclusions about democracy across countries. The ideas of contestation and participation
continue to be invoked because they are intuitively appealing but they lack a clear
conceptualization and empirical support, which presents a third issue of concept
reification. The intuitive appeal of those concepts and scholars’ continued reliance on
them, we argue, can in part be explained by the ease with which different results can be
interpreted as supporting them.
The issues that we discuss affect international and comparative political
development because they shape conclusions about important outcomes such as economic
growth and the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic survival (Armijo and
Gervasoni 2010; Boix and Stokes 2003; Miller 2015; Przeworski et al. 2000; Wright 2008b).

2
Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2005), for example, argue that political participation in the
form of multiparty competition—rather than the means of executive recruitment—may
matter more for reducing human rights abuses.2 Improvements in the conceptualization
of democracy, the measurement and construction of continuous indices, and methods for
validating the dimensionality of the data encourage scholars to more carefully consider
whether contestation and participation are distinct dimensions and, if so, how they
have changed over time. To this end, we offer three suggestions for future research on
dimensions of democracy that may help shed light on how they contribute to important
outcomes related to democratic development.

2 Concepts
The idea of democracy consisting of multiple dimensions is closely tied to the concept of
democracy itself. Although disagreement about the precise concept of democracy persists,
a modern-day consensus emerged on a definition of electoral democracy that saw it as a
competitive struggle for votes (e.g. Schumpeter 1943; 1950). This accepted ‘minimalist’
definition emphasizes regularly held elections to fill positions of authority—namely, the
executive and legislature—in which a majority of citizens choose between candidates
(Przeworski 1991; Elliot 1994). Others have argued for a more ‘substantive’ or
deeper conceptualization of democracy that accounts for the freedoms that enable truly
competitive and participatory elections to occur (Jacobs and Shapiro 1994; Morlino 2004).
The substantive view treats democraticness as a quality that can vary in one or more ways.
Dahl (1956; 1961; 1971)’s contributions connected the minimalist focus on
competitive elections and widespread suffrage with more a substantive conceptualization
based on supporting conditions. This went beyond thinking about democracy as
the formal institutions associated with it to include elements that encouraged greater

2
“Elections (indexed as the highest score on the executive competition dimension) neither make a
democracy nor are they inherently the best place to begin statebuilding. Instead, elections are effective
when other institutional changes that ensure accountability are put into place” (Bueno de Mesquita
et al. 2005, pg. 456).

3
engagement and an enhanced competitive environment (Mackie 2009). To that end,
Dahl characterized democracy as an unreachable, ideal type based on “continuing
responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens” (Dahl 1971, p.1).
In their view, a polyarchy was the closest empirically observed approximation of this
ideal type (Dahl 1971).
Dahl (1956; 1971) reasoned that eight institutional guarantees were necessary
components of a polyarchy. They argued that these guarantees were required for citizens
to be able to formulate and signify their preferences and to have those preferences weighted
equally in the conduct of government. These guarantees include the freedom to form and
join organizations, the freedom of expression, the right to vote, the right to be eligible
for public office and compete for political support, alternative sources of information,
free and fair elections, and institutions that are dependent upon votes and the expression
of preferences. Together, the eight conditions “increase the size, number, and variety
of minorities whose preferences must be taken into account by leaders in making policy
choices” (Dahl 1956, p. 132). Thus, in their view, a central quality of democracy is
enabling minorities to organize and lobby as well as the presence of elected representatives
responding to them.
Dahl (1971) argued that the eight institutional guarantees were divisible into two
dimensions — contestation and participation. Differences in the level of contestation
and inclusiveness (participation), Dahl (1971) reasoned, represented different types of
regimes with polyarchies, or the most democratic regimes, exhibiting high levels of
both contestation and participation.3 Moreover, they theorized that differences in the
development of each dimension provided a basis for explaining differences in outcomes
such as democratic transition and survival. According to Dahl (1971), increasing
participation first or together with contestation was more difficult because it entails a
need to reconcile the preferences of a large number of people. Distributive pressures
should also be greater as well, which increases the threat of dissolution and conflict (Boix
2003; Huntington 1968). Instead, increasing contestation first—i.e. elites settle the terms

3
Closed hegemonies exhibited low levels of contestation and participation, whereas competitive oligarchies
had high levels of contestation and low levels of participation and inclusive hegemonies had the opposite.

4
of contestation before including the broader public—follows an easier trajectory towards
polyarchy. Dahl (1971) anticipated greater stability in the contestation-first pathway to
polyarchy, arguing that it should be easier to first establish political consensus among a
small group of people with relatively homogeneous preferences and then open up political
space.
Contestation and participation became widely accepted dimensions of democracy.
This is evident in the way that subsequent datasets aggregated indicators to
represent components of democracy. In a review of democracy measures, Munck and
Verkuilen (2002) wrote that “‘the decision to draw [on Dahl’s] influential insight that
democracy consists of two attributes—contestation or competition and participation or
inclusion—has done much to ensure that measures of democracy are squarely focused
on theoretically relevant attributes” (pg. 9).4 They also remained theoretically relevant
through efforts to empirically verify them. A number of works assessed whether changes
in contestation and participation characterize political development over time and their
potential impacts on outcomes (e.g. Dahl 1971; Coppedge and Reinicke 1990; Coppedge,
Alvarez and Maldonado 2008; Miller 2015; Wong 2021).
In sum, contestation and participation came to be seen as fundamental aspects
of democratic institutions and of theories of democratic development (Mayhew 2015).
The theoretical appeal of these concepts may be explained in part by their vagueness.
This is something that Dahl (1971) readily acknowledged. As a result, contestation and
participation have meant different things to different scholars who apply the concepts to
explain democratic outcomes. Boese et al. (Forthcoming) discuss how such ambiguities
continue to affect empirical measurements of democracy to this day. This overlap and
lack of clear delineation between the two concepts has been a central issue for the
conceptualization of contestation and participation.

Issue 1: Conceptual Ambiguity — The conceptualizations of contestation and

participation are not clearly defined and still subject to a large degree of overlap.

4
We argue below, however, that variation among the datasets suggests otherwise.

5
 The question of how parties and the broader public fit into the two dimensions
serves as a good example to illustrate such ambiguities. For example, it is not clear how
the broader electorate contributes to the contestation dimension. Dahl (1971) has been
interpreted as presenting an elite-biased view of democracy in which the institutional
guarantees initially applied to a few (Krouse 1982). In earlier writings (Dahl 1956; 1961),
they describe an inherent tension between democracy and the ‘authoritarian-minded’
nature of the ordinary citizen (Kendall and Carey 1968; Krouse 1982). Under competition
that is largely restricted to elites, “the rules, the practices, and the culture of competitive
politics”5 as well as “[t]olerance and mutual security”6 were more likely to develop, Dahl
argued.
Implicit in this argument is the idea that well-regulated, circumscribed competition
and established authority constitute the foundations of further institutional development.
The histories of many advanced democracies in Western Europe and some of the more
stable countries in Latin America, in combination with election failures among newly
independent countries, led a number of scholars to assert that limiting participation was
a necessary step for inducing stability in new democracies (Diamond, Linz and Eds.;
Dix 1994; Huntington 1968). As such, Dahl (1971) has been described as “a thinly
veiled apology for the elite domination and mass apathy that suffuse the politics of
Western liberal democracies” (Krouse 1982, p. 444). The emphasis on contestation
for elected offices being restricted to a select few overlooks the mobility that enhanced
competitiveness offers to ordinary citizens to enter and influence politics.
With respect to participation, Dahl (1971) openly acknowledged these ambiguities.
They treated suffrage as the core feature but then went on to characterize participation
as something more complex. For example, they recognized that “as the electorate grows,
the traditional, mainly informal arrangements that worked well enough with a tiny group
of voters... are simply inadequate” (pgs. 24-25) and that “the need to mobilize a bigger
electorate triggers off the development of ‘modern’ party organizations” (pg. 24). Dahl
(1971) further acknowledged that “[t]he right to vote in free and fair elections...partakes of

5
Dahl (1971), p. 36.
6
Dahl (1971), p. 37.

6
both dimensions” (Dahl 1971, p.4) and that “the right to participate... [is] a characteristic
that cannot be interpreted except in the context of other characteristics” (Dahl 1971, p.5).
How do mass-based parties fit into the delineation of the two concepts and
what are the defining features of participation, then? If Dahl (1971) was primarily
thinking of contestation as elite-based competition—with citizens only choosing between
candidates—then greater mass involvement (e.g. a stronger civil society and party
institutionalization) represent expanded participation. To this end, Coppedge (2002)
argued that “inclusiveness should be more than just voting” (pg. 36). If, on the other
hand, participation includes suffrage only, then the concept of contestation is much
more heavily loaded as an explanatory factor since it includes the ways in which citizen
preferences are aggregated and articulated (such as mass-based parties and civil society
organisations). An important question therefore concerns whether participation refers
solely to the ability to choose between competitors or whether it also represents the
ability to be involved in determining the outcomes of elections in other ways.
This conceptual ambiguity has important theoretical and empirical consequences.
For one, it affects interpretations about the importance of those concepts for explaining
outcomes. One interpretation might be that contestation-first development contributes
to democracy by ensuring that potentially destabilizing actors first agree on the terms
and make bargains that preserve government against pressures from below. If so,
it underscores the importance of elite pacts as a key element of statebuilding and
democratization—the need for agreement between parties before citizens choose between
them (Higley and Burton 1989; North, Wallis and Weingast 2009; O’Donnell and
Whitehead 1986; Razo 2008). Multiparty competition may matter here for organizing
constituent preferences and preventing unrest. If, however, party development represents
expanded participation by citizens, then the implications of contestation-first development
might be different. It could be that contestation-first development makes democracy more
likely by engendering rules, regulations, and norms that constrain the capacity of those
parties to dominate or destabilize elections once citizens become more involved. This
recognizes their capacity to serve as vehicles for co-optation, cultivating mass support to
establish electoral dominance (Hellman 1998; Levitsky and Way 2010; Magaloni 2008).
To the extent that the nature of participation has changed, it also raises the question

7
about whether election irregularities constitute worsening contestation or restrictions on
participation (Boese et al. Forthcoming).
What scholars think composes each dimension also has downstream implications
for how contestation and participation might be measured. For example, previous efforts
to demonstrate changes in contestation and participation included the role of political
parties under contestation and treated participation as synonymous with suffrage, for
which it was often omitted (Coppedge and Reinicke 1990; Miller 2015; Wright 2008a).7
Though Dahl (1971) theorized that democracy may be divisible into two dimensions,
other scholars suggested that it might be more complex. Coppedge (2002) argued that
“[t]he first dimension..., contestation, has hidden qualities that have been ignored or taken
for granted” (pg. 36) and that “inclusiveness itself may consist of two dimensions” (pg.
37, emphasis ours). Thus, despite their appeal for describing patterns and explaining
outcomes, contestation and participation remain rather ambiguous concepts.

3 Measurement
The ability to bear out early claims about political development and the dimensionality
of democracy was limited by, among other things, the novelty of empirical approaches and
the lack of available data at the time. Within a few years of the publication of Polyarchy
(Dahl 1971), however, notable contributions to the measurement of democracy occurred
(Gurr 1974; Eckstein and Gurr 1975). Gurr (1974) was initially not concerned with
characterizing democracy, but with identifying the patterns of authority that induced
political stability within a polity. They differentiated between the openness of executive
recruitment, decision constraints on the chief executive, extent of political participation,
scope of governmental control, and complexity of government structures. Gurr (1974)

7
Wright (2008b) was concerned exclusively with political competition, which they measured as the way
in which participation is structured (PARCOMP from the Polity IV project). Coppedge and Reinicke
(1990) resorted to focusing on contestation alone due to the observation that “[e]ighty-five percent of
all countries in 1985 provided for universal suffrage, whether they held meaningful elections, approval
elections, or no elections at all” (pg. 55).

8
nevertheless argued that differences in authority patterns enabled one to distinguish
between democratic and autocratic polities, respectively characterizable by “multiple
institutionalized centers of power” versus “the institutionalized monopolization of power”
and anocratic polities, which lack power and institutions.
Gurr further developed this notion of authority patterns, leading to the creation of
the Polity dataset. Gurr (1974) suggested that the category labels—e.g., “competitive”
versus “ascriptive” forms of executive recruitment—could be used to create scales, given
assumptions about their relative ordering. They advocated using the categories to develop
indicators of “degree” and offered one approach, but noted that “many quite different
operationalizations of the dimensions are equally or more appropriate” (Gurr 1974, p.
1486). Based on the ordering of qualitative attributes related to the competitiveness of
political participation, the openness and competitiveness of executive recruitment, and
constraints on the executive, Eckstein and Gurr (1975) created an eleven-point Democracy
scale as well as a similar scale for Autocracy that also accounted for the regulation of
participation. The annual codings of authority traits gained traction in the 1980s to
quantitatively represent democracy and autocracy (Harmel 1980; Lichbach 1984) and
especially so in the 1990s.8 In a subsequent update and extension of the Polity data,
Jaggers and Gurr (1995) subtracted the autocracy and democracy indices to create a
single index that was employed to explain outcomes such as regime change (e.g., Gurses
2011) and conflict (e.g., Chiozza 2002).
A number of other continuous measures and indices of democracy proliferated in the
1990s, examples of which include Arat (1991), Coppedge and Reinicke (1990), Hadenius
(1992), and Vanhanen (1990).9 Contestation and participation remained prominent
attributes of democracy among emerging democracy measures—see, for example, Munck
and Verkuilen (2002); Gates et al. (2006)—, but a widening gap developed with time

8
Examples highlighted by Jaggers and Gurr (1995) include Bremer (1992), Bremer (1993), Dixon (1993),
Dixon and Moon (1993), Gleditsch (1995), Gurr (1993), Mansfield and Snyder (1995b), Mansfield and
Snyder (1995a), Maoz and Russett (1992), Maoz and Russett (1993), Modelski and III (1991), Ray
(1995), Raymond (1994), Miller (1995), and Siverson and Starr (1994).
9
For a review of different measures of democracy, see Munck and Verkuilen (2002).

9
over the exact conceptualization of contestation and particpation based on the measures
available to evaluate them.
Conceptual ambiguity and overlap between the underlying concepts of participation
and contestation contributed to differences in how measures represented them. Arat
(1991), for example, measured “participation” based on executive and legislative
selection, legislative effectiveness, and the competitiveness of the nomination process, and
“competitiveness” based on party legitimacy and party competitiveness. Many datasets
that spanned the post-WWII era also overlooked the participation dimension, since
universal suffrage could be taken for granted (Munck and Verkuilen 2002).
Elsewhere, scholars empirically represented aspects of democracy without reference
to contestation and participation as core components.10 For Alvarez et al. (1996),
democraticness in the minimalist sense was represented by the extent to which the
executive and legislature are elected, while others distinguished between political liberties
and the selection process (Bollen 1980). Still others, such as Freedom House, qualified
countries based on political rights and civil liberties. Subsequent discussion emerged in
the literature about the differences between the various democracy measures and issues
related to concept and measurement validity (Adcock and Collier 2001; Bollen 1993;
Casper and Tufis 2003; Elkins 2000; Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Schmitter and Karl
1991).11
The variety of datasets that present democracy as comprising different components
make it difficult to say whether the concepts of contestation and participation are
observable as distinct dimensions across them and whether they have empirical value
for explaining democratic development. Scholars may have been influenced by the way
in which Dahl (1971) conceived of democratic dimensions but did not share a consensus
on how to represent them. The set of theoretically relevant attributes encompassed by

10
It bears mentioning that Dahl does not seem to be a leading inspiration behind the Polity data, as Dahl
was never mentioned in the codebook or the presentation of data, though they were cited in Jaggers
and Gurr (1995).
11
To date, there still does not seem to be a consensus over how to adequately measure democracy; see,
for example, Skaaning (2018).

10
different datasets is quite broad, and the ability to use them to validate arguments about
specific dimensions of democracy is unclear.

Issue 2: Concept-Measurement Mismatch — Various operationalizations of

democratic features were not focused on the same criteria, and measures increasingly
diverged from one another due to the lack of an established consensus.

The multiplicity of measures that did not perfectly align with theorized concepts
inspired efforts to identify latent estimates of democracy and associated dimensions from
multiple sources (Bollen 1993; Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado 2008; Miller 2015;
Pemstein, Meserve and Melton 2010; Teorell et al. 2019). Some therefore began to
combine related attributes to approximate conceptual dimensions. This approached the
dimensions question by using latent representations of inclusiveness and competitiveness
to bear out arguments about trends in democratic development.12 Coppedge, Alvarez and
Maldonado (2008), for example, used principal component analysis on multiple measures
of democracy attributes between 1950 and 2000 and identified two dimensions that they
interpreted as representing contestation and inclusiveness, concluding that the placement
of regimes and patterns over time validated Dahl (1971). Similarly, Miller (2015) used
principal component analysis on a variety of indicators of democracy—closely resembling
the approach of Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado (2008)—, to produce composite
measures of contestation and participation from 1815 onward, noting that higher levels
of contestation over participation occurred in electoral regimes prior to 1940, after which
participation overshadowed contestation.
Nevertheless, the composite measures differed considerably from theoretical
depictions of them. For example, the latent estimates of participation that Coppedge,
Alvarez and Maldonado (2008) and Miller (2015) created came from disparate sources that
included adult suffrage, legislative selection, women’s political rights, effective executive

12
The latent-variable approach to measurement acknowledges that particular constructs are difficult to
observe and leverages multiple measures of related (correlated) phenomena to represent an underlying
concept (Pemstein, Meserve and Melton 2010).

11
selection, and an index of participation, while their estimates of contestation incorporated
Political Rights from Freedom House, Competitiveness of Participation and Executive
Constraints from Polity, and measures of party legitimacy and legislative effectiveness
(Banks 1976).
Though it can help to reduce idiosyncratic errors and uncertainty between
measures, the effectiveness of the latent-variable approach as a form of validation
depends on whether they are focused on the same concepts. Insofar as various
datasets operationalized the concepts of contestation and participation differently
(if at all), combining them together using a latent-variable approach incorporates
different definitions and measurements that could make the latent indicators less valid
representations of specific dimensions. That is to say, it may exacerbate the discrepancy
between the definition and measurement of specific concepts, making it less clear what
the dimensions are and how they support or undermine specific theoretical expectations.
The latent-variable approach improved on validating and testing the concepts in some
ways but entailed combining several different attributes from varied sources that diverged
from how they were initially conceptualized by scholars such as Dahl (1971).
There is a variety of measures that capture some element of democracy and that
were guided, to different extents, by the intuition that contestation and participation
constitute recognizable aspects of democratic development. They also vary in the extent
to which they correspond to each other and to those concepts, in part because of vagueness
about how to characterize them (the problem of conceptual ambiguity noted above). As
a result of this concept-measurement mismatch, few have come close to providing an
empirical basis for evaluating whether those concepts appropriately describe historical
democratic development. For many theoretical applications such measures may be valid,
but when it comes to specific dimensions there is a problem of concept mismatch—of
measures that do not perfectly align with what they purport to measure. According to
Treier and Jackman (2008), “a good measure of democracy should identify the appropriate
attributes that constitute democracy, each represented by multiple observed indicators;
have a well-conceived view of the appropriate level of measurement for the indicators
and the resulting scale; and should properly aggregate the indicators into a scale without

12
loss of information” (p.202).13 Without much loss of generality, these evaluation criteria
can be extended to other social science concepts, including the ideas of contestation and
participation. Numerous measures that seemed focused on those attributes are available,
but due to discrepancies, do not meet the standards for empirically demonstrating their
existence as distinct dimensions of democracy.

4 Inference
The idea that democracy has different dimensions that can develop separately may be
appealing, but as outlined above there is not much consensus on what they connote and
how to measure them, which has important implications for inference.14 One risk is
invoking an idea because it is intuitive but not empirically validating it. This implies
that the theorized mechanism is not actually tested or demonstrated. One might assume
that the measures and results match up with the concepts and mechanisms and wrongly
infer that the results support their intuitions about them. This can occur when people
assert a particular concept, aggregate items to represent it, and describe what comes out
of the analysis. It is not yet clear which, if any, measures appropriately align with the
notions of contestation and participation, for which that risk remains likely. Yet, those
notions continue to influence empirical work on democracy and democratic development,
with Wong (2021) being a recent example.

Issue 3: Concept Reification —Scholars continue to perpetuate belief in distinct

dimensions because it is appealing, though they remain ill-defined and not empirically
substantiated.

13
Similar arguments have been made elsewhere; see, for example, Munck and Verkuilen (2002); Boese
(2019); Goertz (2020).
14
Similar issues have been noted with respect to the concept of democracy. Inasmuch as scholars use
different representations of democracy to test questions about its causes and consequences, it affects
inference because they may not be talking about the same thing (Casper and Tufis 2003).

13
 Scholars may endeavor to operationalize and describe an idea not because it
results in the greatest reduction in error among observations but because it is commonly
treated as useful or valid. Collier and Adcock (1999) note that “if a particular
name resonates primarily due to this tacit belief, rather than because it provides an
analytically appropriate slicing of reality, then this name can become a slogan that is
employed in a sloppy and uncritical manner” (p.544). Adherence to concepts such as
contestation and participation may represent the reification of “bounded wholes” and
not the most appropriate way to depict democratic development (Collier and Adcock
1999; Sartori 1987). That is to say, using different measures to represent a particular
concept emphasizes their correspondence and shared contribution to that notion at the
expense of alternative groupings. Though this is a regular part of research design and
measurement, inconsistently using data and measures to create combined values places
undue importance on the concept, potentially obscuring both its meaning and what we
know about its effects.
The potential threats to inference created by conceptual ambiguity and
concept-measurement mismatch are especially clear when considering whether how the
Polity dataset might affect conclusions about contestation and participation. This is
because the link between these specific conceptual dimensions and the way in which
the Polity data were measured and aggregated is tenuous at best. For example,
Wright (2008b) found that among newer democracies those with a higher initial level of
competition were more durable. The author also showed that new democracies with lower
levels of initial political competition were more likely to incur civil conflict. Though the
authors relied on a measure of political competition from Polity that captures “the extent
to which alternative preferences for policy and leadership can be pursued in the political
arena” (PARCOMP), the measure refers to the Competitiveness of Participation and
“implies a significant degree of civil interaction”(Marshall, Gurr and Jaggers 2014, p.26).15
The author’s exclusive focus on the concept of contestation and the measure’s allusion
to participation obscure a clear understanding of how either contributes to democratic
stablity.

15
Emphasis added.

14
 This issue is not unique to studies that use the Polity dataset to test arguments
about contestation and participation—as noted earlier, it could also occur when
aggregating data from multiple sources to represent the conceptual dimensions. In either
case, the threat to inference stems from asserting a particular concept in one’s theoretical
explanation and using a measure that may not adequately represent it to characterize it
and test relationships. Extant conclusions about dimensions of democracy rest critically
upon decisions about how to empirically represent them. The imperfect overlap between
concepts and measures thus begs the question of what exactly it is about democracy that
drives outcomes such as growth and regime change (Armijo and Gervasoni 2010; Boix
and Stokes 2003; Miller 2015; Przeworski et al. 2000; Wright 2008b).

5 Revisiting Democracy’s Dimensions

There are plenty of reasons to revisit the dimensionality question. As Skaaning, Gerring
and Bartusevičius (2015) note, “the goal of reducing the plenitude of characteristics
associated with ‘democracy’ to a single unidimensional index is elusive...because the
concept itself is multidimensional and because extant indicators are limited in their
purview” (p.1494). Contestation and participation have long been tacitly agreed upon
dimensions. However, conceptual ambiguities, concept-measurement mismatch, and
concept reification have limited our ability to delineate and uncover theoretically and
empirically relevant dimensions. Consequently, the role of these dimensions in providing
democratic stability or supporting democratic transitions is not yet clear.
Recognition of the aforementioned issues is an important first step towards
establishing more well-defined theoretical constructs and shared standards of evaluation.
Outlining them supports several suggestions for advancing research on the cross-national
and historical development of democracy. This is valuable for revising the question of
how democracy develops, since scholars have portrayed democracy as developing along
one (Bollen and Grandjean 1981a), two (Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado 2008; Miller
2015), three (Gates et al. 2006; Boese et al. Forthcoming), or more dimensions. Below,
we discuss three avenues for improvement.
The first suggestion is to closely link theoretically and empirically relevant and
consistent attributes of democratic dimensions. Fortunately, advancements in data

15
collection have made it possible to revisit the question of whether different attributes
of democratic systems fall into empirically observable dimensions and, if so, whether they
correspond to theoretical depictions such as contestation and participation. The start of
the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project (Coppedge et al. 2020b), for example, was
informed by the preceding theoretical and empirical discussions on the construction of
democracy indicators. Scholars who surveyed existing measures to evaluate the validity
of Dahl’s arguments were central to the construction of the V-Dem data. Arguing that
previous measures did not capture Dahl’s components comprehensively, Teorell et al.
(2019) developed the project to estimate qualities associated with the “institutional
guarantees.” One of the primary indices measures electoral democracy based on the notion
of polyarchy that Dahl (1971) originally promoted (Teorell et al. 2019). According to the
codebook,“[the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index] consists of five sub-components (each
of these sub-components being indices themselves built from a number of indicators)
that together capture Dahl’s seven institutions of polyarchy” (Coppedge et al. 2020a,
p.27). The disaggregated nature of the V-Dem data and myriad aspects that it measures
make it possible to examine relationships between them and the ways in which they
have covaried over time. This, in turn, supports a reexamination of whether contestation
and participation make up empirically meaningful dimensions using measures that more
closely match up with the institutional guarantees that are thought to compose them.
The second suggestion is to adapt the meaning of the traditional concepts so that
they travel further, which may mean moving up the ladder of abstraction (Sartori 1970).
The conceptual contents of contestation and participation have likely changed over time.
For example, while suffrage was a defining component of participation during the 20th
century, it has decreased in importance after the fall of the Soviet Union, as almost every
country has had full suffrage since (Przeworski 2008; 2009). Still, many countries are far
from offering fully inclusive governance systems: today, barriers to party participation and
restrictions on civil liberties remain popular methods for illiberal and autocratic leaders to
impede large shares of voters from being fully engaged in the political process (Boese et al.
Forthcoming). Freedom of expression and participation of civil society organizations are
among the most threatened democratic attributes in the “third wave of autocratization”
(Hellmeier et al. 2021; Lührmann and Lindberg 2019) and thus constitute other ways in
which citizens are hindered from being fully included in the political process.

16
 1.0
0.8
Standardized value

0.6
0.4
0.2

Elected Officials index

Suffrage
Free and fair elections index
Freedoms of expression index
Freedoms of association index
0.0

1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Year

Figure 1: Average values for subindices over time.

Faint lines indicate variables that make up each subindex, denoted by color.

Thus, a crucial element of any successful conceptualization of contestation and

participation is a relatively high level of abstraction that allows the attributes to evolve
over time, as opposed to a list of lower-level attributes whose relevance change. To
illustrate this evolving nature of different aspects of democracy over time, Figure 1
plots the five sub-components of the Electoral Democracy Index. At least three major
trends are apparent in the average values of those sub-indices over time. The first is the
rapid increase in suffrage after World War II, which after 1980 saw little variation. This
evidences the point made above that suffrage has limited explanatory power relative to
other features in the 21st century. The second observation is that between 1960 and 1990
the elected officials index was higher than measures of civil liberties and election fairness.
This suggests that more countries were holding elections to fill positions of power but
limiting the terms on which they occurred. The third trend is the increase in liberties
such as freedoms of expression and association, and election quality after 1990.

17
 The differences in these trends underscore the question of how we might
conceptualize “contestation” and “participation”: whether participation pertains
exclusively to suffrage or whether it should be expanded to include other ways that
citizens’ engage the political process. Improvements in citizen activity in the form of
information and associational life has bearings on conclusions about the ways they might
participate and how the concept of participation has changed over time, which has not
been readily decided.
This points to a third suggestion, which is to abandon the traditional concepts
altogether and to rely on empirically derived dimensions that make theoretical sense. If
we cannot measure it correctly and if it is not stable in meaning over time—that is, if
we cannot overcome the issues of conceptual ambiguities, concept mismatch and concept
reification—, then we need to question the empirical value of those concepts. Instead,
scholars might focus on allowing trends in the data to shape the process of abstraction
and guide how we describe and think about democratic development. Examples include
Bollen and Grandjean (1981b), who used confirmatory factor analysis to investigate
the dimensionality of data on democracy and Pemstein, Meserve and Melton (2010),
who combined a number of democracy scales into a latent variable that incorporates
uncertainty. This offers a corrective for some of the issues that we raised here, in
that it encourages scholars to develop ideas about dimensions based on patterns in the
data before empirically assessing their effects, rather than using potentially incongruent
measures to test ideas about dimensions.

6 Conclusion
There is widespread agreement that contestation and participation are fundamental
building blocks of a minimalist standard of democracy, as defined by publicly
contested elections (Boix, Miller and Rosato 2013; Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland
2010; Przeworski et al. 2000; Schumpeter 1950). Here, we develop the argument
that early conceptualizations about these dimensions—and dimensions of democracy
more generally—have been insufficiently tested and verified. Dahl (1971) argued that
democracy developed along two lines, but subsequent empirical work became clouded by
different focuses and data from alternative sources. There are several issues associated

18
with our understanding of dimensions of democracy and how they have changed over time,
which has important implications for research on democratization and development.
Our survey of the state of the art on the conceptualization and measurement of
democracy underscores a divergence between early ideas about how democracy develops
(e.g., Dahl 1971) and the measures that were used to evaluate them. Few datasets were
explicitly concerned with creating measures that lined up with the institutional guarantees
that Dahl (1971) outlined, making it difficult to validate claims about contestation
and participation existing as separate dimensions on the basis of those guarantees.16
Elaborating on the shape of democracy by constructing dimensions from multiple datasets
is further complicated by the challenge of identifying the contributions of various features
to each dimension. This, we argue, has had downstream effects on conclusions about
the concept of democracy and patterns of democratization. Though the concepts of
contestation and participation are theoretically appealing to many scholars, whether they
exist as separate aspects of democracy has been obscured by challenges related to concept
and measurement validity.
Here, we noted three interrelated issues that affect conclusions about democratic
dimensions and about contestation and participation in particular. The first issue
is conceptual ambiguity, or ambiguities regarding what contestation and participation
actually entail. The second issue is one of conceptual mismatch resulting from variety
in the extent to which different measures of democracy attempted to measure aspects
associated with the two dimensions. Finally, the third issue is one of concept reification,
or the persistence of aggregating different components to represent or interpreting results
as confirming those concepts despite the ambiguity and mismatch. These issues, we
argue, have made it difficult to revisit and test some of the original propositions about
historical developments in contestation and participation. Scholars who are interested in
empirically demonstrating the relationships of contestation and participation to important
outcomes should think critically about how they have been measured and represented
in the literature, keeping the aforementioned issues in mind. There are nevertheless

16
One exception to this is Coppedge and Reinicke (1990), although they faced some limitations associated
with the temporal domain of their coverage that we note elsewhere.

19
promising avenues to explore concerning the dimensionality of democracy—including
whether other attributes such as constraints matter—for which several potential solutions
and new data may help.

20
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