Online Appendix for "Conceptual Vacuum in Measuring Democracy: The Political Process beyond Aggregation"

Measuring democracy is an essential prerequisite for analyzing the relationship between democracy and social, economic, and political outcomes, and defining democracy is a vital requirement for such measurement. Therefore, this article aims primarily to suggest a new conceptual attribute of democracy by reviewing both democratic theory within political theory and a conception of democracy as an element of empirical studies. Until recently, existing efforts to measure democracy have not considered the tension between two models of democracy in political theory: the aggregative model, which focuses on elections as processes of aggregating fixed preferences, and the deliberative model, which places emphasis on the transformation of preferences through communication. By referring primarily to the deliberative model, this article reveals that the conceptual vacuum, existing in current attempts to measure democracy, indicates that research has failed to capture or measure what is essential in some critical concepts. In discussing this conceptual vacuum, this study introduces several attempts to fill it, contending that future studies should explicitly measure the political process after elections to capture the democratic communication process in political institutions.