Measuring Liberal Democratic Performance: an Empirical and Conceptual Critique Joe Foweraker and Roman Krznaric Department of Government, University of Essex Liberal democratic performance is understood as the delivery of liberal democratic values, and not as regime longevity or government efficacy. Measuring it is a matter of how far liberal democratic governments achieve in practice the values they endorse in principle. It is recognized that the performance of liberal democratic governments varies widely. But extant attempts to measure this variation suffer problems of reliability and validity, and the object of measurement is often unclear. By defining the range of liberal democratic values we demonstrate that performance is multi- dimensional and that trade-offs across different values can create distinct performance profiles. The narrow gauge of the extant meaures – usually of just one or two values – is often disguised by single scales that masquerade as summary performance indicators. Comparative Liberal Democratic Performance Liberal democratic government may be defined in a minimal and procedural fashion as a political system where multiple political parties compete for control of the government through relatively free and fair elections. But, beyond this mini- mum benchmark, it is recognized that the liberal democratic performance of such political systems varies widely. This variation inspired Dahl’s description of ‘really existing’ liberal democratic governments as ‘polyarchies’, at a time when there were just thirty-five or so such political systems, most of them in rich and industrialized nations of the Western Hemisphere (Dahl, 1971). Today this number has grown to some one hundred and twenty. 1 But, although claims to liberal democracy – including an emphasis on individual rights and the rule of law – now serve as an almost universal principle of political legitimacy across the globe, 2 the real variation in liberal democratic performance remains, and may even have increased. Liberal democratic performance concerns the practices of liberal democratic gov- ernments. It does not have to do with competing claims to democratic governance, such as ‘people’s democracy’ or associational democracy, still less with democracy writ large. It is accepted that some minimum level of democratic performance must be achieved for a system of government to be defined as a liberal democracy (a familiar problem of degree and kind), but it is the variation in the practices of governments that matters. Liberal democratic performance is understood in different ways, and this tends to make comparisons more difficult. It is therefore helpful to distinguish the three POLITICAL STUDIES: 2000 VOL 48, 759–787 © Political Studies Association, 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA