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The following
history was written by Phil Kelly as part of his article, “The
Fitzgibbon Survey of Latin American Democracy: An Update of the 2000
Tabulations,” which appears on the Historical Text Archive. It has been edited and updated by Joe
Klesner. For references, see the Published Analyses tab on the left.
The origins of the Fitzgibbon Survey
of Scholarly Images of Democracy in Latin America date back to 1945
when Professor Russell H. Fitzgibbon, a UCLA political scientist, asked
a panel of ten distinguished U.S. Latin Americanist
scholars to rank the twenty Latin American republics according to a set
of criteria that he felt would measure the extent of democracy in each
of the countries. His criteria for assessing the strength of democracy,
fifteen in all, encompassed the following describers:
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Educational Level
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Judiciary
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Standard of Living
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Government Funds
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Internal Unity
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Social Legislation
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Political Maturity
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Civilian Supremacy
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Freedom from
Foreign Domination
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Ecclesiastical
Domination
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Freedom of Press,
etc.
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Government
administration
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Free Elections
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Local government
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Party organization
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On a five-point evaluation,
panelists were to rate the republics separately according to each of
the criteria, and the poll results were tallied later.
Fitzgibbon replicated his canvass at regular five-year intervals
through 1970, adding more panelists than his original ten but
maintaining the original fifteen criteria. Kenneth Johnson became
associated with the project in 1960 and he assumed sole authorship of
the 1975 and 1980 polls after Fitzgibbon's retirement. As the present
director of the democracy project, Phil Kelly assisted Johnson in 1985
and administered the instrument alone for the three most recent
evaluations, 1991, 1995, and 2000.
In 2005, Kelly asked Joseph Klesner to take over the
administration of the survey, with Kelly continuing to serve as
co-director for 2005. In total,
thirteen democracy surveys, taken every five years and all adhering to
Fitzgibbon's original format, have been conducted since 1945. Eighty
panelists contributed to the 2000 survey.
All three earlier project directors, Fitzgibbon, Johnson, and Kelly,
experimented with the poll; most changes were tried only once and not
continued. For example, Fitzgibbon gave certain criteria more weight
than other criteria, and he also attempted a "self-assessment as
to the respondent's familiarity with both [Latin American] states and
[the fifteen] criteria" (Fitzgibbon 1967, 155). Both attempts were inconclusive and
dropped. Likewise, Fitzgibbon tested for statistical associations
between the democracy scales and an assortment of national attributes,
but he found none. Johnson composed a separate political scale drawn
from five "select criteria" among the total fifteen
(Fitzgibbon 1976, 131-132), and he and Miles Williams created a
"Power Index" that sought to measure various groups' impact
on politics (Johnson and Williams 1978, 37-47). But again, neither
innovation was kept. Nor did a later "Attitudinal Profile" of
panel respondents' backgrounds by Johnson and Kelly enjoy long life. In
sum, Fitzgibbon's original 1945 survey has continued for the past
fifty-five years without significant adjustment.
The most notable legacy of the Fitzgibbon democracy survey is its long
life, sixty years and thirteen different polls since 1945. No other
surveys can boast of such longevity and repetition over a time span
that has seen so many changes and perhaps improvements in democracy and
government in Latin America. Also,
this survey is the only panel-of-experts technique for gauging the
extent of democracy, as other assessments of democracy rely on census
and other secondary statistical data or a variety of subjective
measures. As stated by Fitzgibbon, "[Panel] Specialists are likely
to introduce desirable nuances and balances which are impossible in the
use of cold statistical information, even of the most accurate sort"
(Fitzgibbon 1967, 135). In addition, the canvass possesses both
conceptual and operational definitions of democracy, the former
rendered in the fifteen criteria and the latter in the survey method
itself, such that ordinal and interval data measurements become
available and hence statistical analysis can be performed between the
democracy ranking scales and an assortment of independent variables. Finally,
despite the absence of major overhauling of the project's approaches
since 1945, the panel procedure remains open to adjustment and to
replication by others (Kelly 1998, 3-11).
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