The Measurement of Democracy and the Means of History

The issue of measurement has seized the public eye more than ever before. The computer, communication, and information revolutions have produced a veritable flood of facts and observations on every imaginable topic and subject from every nook and cranny on earth, and beyond. Information overload challenges both our sensibilities and our abilities to process and organize knowledge; everything must be measured, compared, rated, and ranked. The demand for informational order has grown far faster than the ability to deliver. The public obsession with order and ordering to the minutest detail can be both consuming and obscuring. On the surface, inaccurate and inappropriate measures command the same allusion to mathematical precision as the more accurate and reliable measures. The focus of measurement in the social sciences is on identifying common metrics that accurately capture the essential quality of key factors and attributes that define complex, social phenomena. Objective and subjective assessments must be separated to the degree possible. Similarly, in social processes, means and ends must be distinguished in order to gauge performance. Governance and social order are, to a greater degree than any other social phenomena, based in commonalities of collective action and response. These constitute the means of history and should be distinguished from the ends so we can better understand how the past got us to the present and what we might make of the future. From a secular perspective, the purpose of democracy is to define and refine democratic purpose, the success of which can be measured as a conflict management function. Factionalism and the polarization of dissent present major impediments to the consolidation of democracy.