Application of Freedom House and NELDA measures to Albania

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 1.33, Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, course: Comparing Political Systems, language: English, abstract: This essay will compare and contrast two widely-used measures in democracy research; Freedom House(FH) and National Elections across Democracy and Autarky (NELDA). Firstly, the theoretical frameworks behind both of the measures will be introduced. In order to add a practical base to this comparison and identify the differences in pictures and/or the definitions both measures give, discussion will be centralized with the case of Albania. Following the critical evaluation of merits and demerits of measures, a conclusion will be formulated containing the opinion for a more effective measure.
The democracy research incorporates a niche of distinct measures. Although this can be characterized as distinct future of the field, it also triggers differences between the definitions, operationalization and empirical study of democracy in scholar works. These indicators of democracy vary in terms of their natures, methodologies and applications. Some of them follow a taxonomy-oriented path, classifying countries into categories while others derive certain scores from various indices according to the country's performance in certain democracy components such as electoral competition, freedom of media, and maintenance of human rights.