Democracy: Concepts, Measures and Relationships

This briefing paper reviews the existing research and debates on the causes and consequences of democracy to provide guidance on the key conceptual and methodological issues surrounding democracy promotion and aid conditionality. It provides three working definitions of democracy; a review of the different strategies and efforts to measure democracy; an examination of the empirical findings on the causes and consequences of democracy; and concludes with a discussion of the dimensions of aid conditionality by examining the efforts by the USAID, the World Bank, and UK Department for International Development (DfID) in linking measures and assessments of governance to the allocation of aid.