| dc.description.abstract | Over recent decades, demands for improving the quality of democracy and for monitoring democratic processes have stimulated the sophistication of data collection, management and evaluation. Yet, and presumably exactly because this production and use of indicators is characterised by a strong air of technicality and technocracy, the act of measuring itself is rarely understood as a democratic innovation that brought forward innate means for political and democratic change. Taking up this underexplored link, this paper claims that indicators could aspire to improve democratic governance, if they embraced a non-hierarchical, integrative vision of governance (both in their production process and in their own conceptual matrices). To explore this argument, the paper elaborates on the relationship between numbers and civil society participation in framing and measuring governance. The paper proceeds as follows: In the first part we argue that contemporary measures of governance, as relatively new post-regulatory policy tools, still encompass a series of methodological and conceptual constraints that potentially limit their capacity to impact on the quality of democracy. In response to these constraints, and departing from the dichotomy between output and input indicators, the paper analyses, under what conditions governance indicators might become instruments to stimulate further democratic change. Then we analyse the relationship between indicators and citizens, across the two generations of governance indicators. The second part of the paper explores the conceptual and instrumental function played by the Corruption Perception Index as a key example of governance indicators in encouraging knowledge creation; the emergence of epistemic communities; and the dissemination of the anti-corruption normative quests, model, and practices. The third part of the paper analyses the evolution of the relationship between indicator practices and civil society across the second generation of governance indicators in order to scrutinise the democratic innovation potential of indicator-based processes themselves. | en_US |
