Dignified Development: The Concept and a Strategy for Measurement

• In Event: Dignity, Inequality, and Political Regimes: New Approaches

Abstract

Leaders of major international organizations, philosophers, human-rights activists, and various analysts and observers frequently invoke the term dignity to elicit a benchmark notion of wellbeing. The claim that an individual or a group of people have been “deprived of their dignity,” is widely recognized as a serious charge – the basis for holding government leaders accountable. Local and national governments, international treaties and various courts of justice frequently use the language of dignity to legitimize decisions and policies. Nonetheless, while dignity is an emotive term, it has not been frequently employed by political scientists or other empirically-oriented social scientists, almost surely because of a lack of clear definitions or approaches to measurement. This paper seeks to fill these lacunae, and argues that “dignified development,” may be a more useful construct for analyses of the political causes and consequences wellbeing than extant approaches. We seek to contribute to longstanding debates raised by scholars of the political-economy of development (e.g. Sen 1990, Przeworski et al 2000). The economists’ short-hand (also frequently used by political scientists) – of defining development in terms of economic development and measuring it in terms of per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – continues to be widely employed despite extensive criticism by scholars. Other conceptual and measurement approaches, including human development, capabilities, subjective well-being, and happiness, have provided some useful correctives, but also contain characteristic shortcomings. We ultimately conclude that dignified development offers substantial value-added relative to these approaches because it is normatively compelling, and because the links to workhorse political variables are plausibly stronger. The paper will offer an approach to measurement at the micro-level, and highlight why, at the macro-level (for example at the level of countries), one should simply calculate the share of the population living with dignity, rather than to average across various metrics of well-being. We will detail how our approach relates to other measurement approaches and identify where the differences are most profound. Finally, consistent with much of the extant literature that examines the relationship between democracy and development, we estimate the predictive relationship between democracy and dignity.

Authors

• Evan S. Lieberman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Blair Read

• Paige Bollen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology