The Demos Index

Sammanfattning: Democracy is both a question of who the people are (demos) and how they rule (kratos); our understanding of democracy is imbalanced in favour of the latter. The aim of this thesis is to conduct a pilot project evaluating and comparing the level of democracy from a demos perspective through an index. The findings of a research review establishes the theoretical foundation of the index, which is the Nationalist Principle, the All-Affected Principle, and the Coercion Principle. The principles are selected due to having the most support amongst contemporary political theorists. The level of democracy is evaluated for 87 demoi (85 states, the European Union, and Catalonia), which were selected due to data availability. The evaluation is based on relative fulfilment of criteria derived from the principles and measured through twelve standardised indicators presented in a codebook and compiled in a dataset. Index scores are calculated through an aggregation formula giving equal impact to the three theoretical perspectives. The results of the analysis are presented in a diagram comparing the level of democracy from a demos perspective. Suggestions are made for how the index could be improved and used to further study the demos part of democracy.