Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy 21 (1) Provide a theoretical definition of political democracy (2) Identify its major dimensions (3) Measure each dimension with several indicators (4) Explain how the indicators were created and how to replicate them (5) Specify the relation between each dimension and the indicators, and (6) Report estimates of reliability and validity Munck and Verkuilen (2002: 8) provide a more detailed table suggesting the basic framework that might guide conscientious morticians in designing their measures and later analyzing and interpreting the qualitative and quantitative results of their application (See Table 1, below). It is quite surprising that with so many studies of democratization across so many years by so many academic workers, including those that have gained preeminence in their fields, careful reviews and constructive assessments nevertheless continue to reveal much work suffering from some of the most basic measurement errors, as in the case of ordinal data being subjected to interval or ratio data processing. Spurred at least in part by the largely critical reaction to their attempts at measuring democracy and its related concerns, academics have actually made improvements in the quality and rigor of their measures in the past decades. This has not escaped the attention of their professional colleagues, earlier noted as also some of their keenest and most constructive critics. Almost a decade ago, Munck even summarized the good features of work done by those who struggle to create democracy indices and his generous observations remain valid and resonate with current times: To be fair, constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about methodological issues. Thus they explicitly present their definitions of democracy, highlight the attributes they have identified, and clearly distinguish these attributes according to their level of abstraction. Moreover, a few indices are quite exemplary in terms of how they tackle specific tasks. In this sense, Hadenius (1992) is very insightful in identifying the attributes that are constitutive of the concept of democracy as are Alvarez et al. (1996) with regard to how various attributes should be logically organized. Nonetheless there remains a lot of room for improvement with regard to both concept specification and conceptual logic (2002: 14).