Qualitative Assessment (QA) is one component of the larger project, which involves scholars from the five South Asian countries, Bangla Desh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The project, State of Democracy in South Asia, engages in a thorough ‘assessment’ of democracy in the five South Asian countries. Cross-section survey, elite survey, case studies, dialogues and qualitative assessment are the five aspects of this assessment. They employ different methodologies but operate in the same intellectual framework.

The project visualizes five different levels at which the democratic experience can be evaluated. These levels are labeled as Promise, Design, Working, Outcomes and Futures. As the global debate about the meaning of democracy continues, we confront two initial difficulties: In the first place, we need to strike a balance between the minimalist and the maximalist conceptions of democracy. The former leads us to a standard liberal democratic notion tying democracy to a set of rules and regulations. The latter allows the concept of democracy to become a hold-all for all good wishes and lofty expectations. Our conception has to be sensitive to institutional requirements emanating from democracy as a principle of governance. At the same time, conception of democracy must take into account the tension between the formally democratic state and the potentially anti-democratic trends existing in the arena of civil society. Secondly, democracy has to be posited in such a manner that we can transcend concerns about political equality and extend them to social and economic field.

The other initial difficulty is the tension between received notions of democracy and indigenous ideological advances. This is the problematique of universal vs. the particular. The former has a homogenizing tendency while the latter has the risk of being reduced to exceptionalism. Our answer to this problematique would be that although the principles may be universal, their routes of reaching the public imagination would be country specific. It therefore, becomes a necessary exercise to probe what meaning is constituted by the notion of democracy, what images are derived from the invocations of democratic ideology. In this context, democracy does not remain a mere institutional arrangement, but a ‘promise’ by and to the people of a country. This exercise, however, needs to be cautious of the attempts to hijack the spirit of democracy in the name of indigenous ideas of democracy.

Therefore, the primary task is to locate ‘democracy’ as an ideology that has both universal and country specific salience. This implies that democracy reaches the public and the elite as containing a certain promise. Having thus located democracy in the realm of ‘promise’, we further need to assess the institutional imagination employed by the society in order to translate the promise into operational organizations and rules and procedures. This architecture of democracy may be described as the ‘design’, which is a purposive set of regulations and a concretization of goals and objectives in the form of ‘structures’. However, this architecture has to shape on the available terrain in terms of the social and economic design, which is a pre-given. Therefore, ‘design’ includes the characteristics of the society in which democracy operates and the economic structures within which democracy is sought to be realized.

Design and Promise presuppose certain modus operandi. But the set of rules and regulations and the situational contexts produce different configurations. These need to be measured in terms of their distance from the promise and the design. Herein lies the tension between the proclaimed principles and their articulation through social and political processes. This invites our attention to ‘working’ of democracy. This dimension would have three reference points: the commitment of the ‘working’ of democracy to the formal statements of promise and design, the creativity of ‘working’ in evolving and expanding the scope of the promise and design, and the ability of ‘working’ to relate to supra-national norms. Working would, of course, include the distortions of the goal of democracy, both in its universal and country-specific context, and the deviations that enter into the working of democracy either due to socio-economic situations or as a result of political competition for power.

Next, we need to ask the question: where does democracy lead our society? Do we simply adopt the formal standard and stop there or does democracy keep expanding its meaning? In other words, assessment of democracy would take into consideration the process of democratization. Here, we are looking at the ‘outcome’ of democracy. One can posit a complex set of issues in the term democratization. Expansion of popular participation, more intensive role of public in decision-making, more accountability and transparency, are some of the issues involved in democratization. Democratization would also involve the diversification of the social bases of power. Further, it would refer to democratization of public policy in terms of the agenda and the manner of addressing that agenda. And lastly, democratization would refer to a more democratic (plural, equal and dialogical) civil society. Assessing the outcomes in terms of these different senses of democratization would involve the fourth dimension of outcome. There is one more sense in which discussion of outcomes becomes relevant: What are the internal processes of examining the democratic practice and institutional framework? Has there been a search for alternatives, improvements, reforms and ideological innovations, in the course of the country’s political journey? Does that posit any special features as far the future of democracy in that country is concerned? In the near future, say in the next decade or so, what are the likely trajectories of democracy that may emerge from the experience so far? We call this, the fifth level of assessment, as ‘Futures’. The assessment of futures would not just be futuristic, it would make an assessment of the possibilities hidden and the expectations generated by the working and outcomes. Instead of merely discussing the gap between promise and working, ‘futures’ would also take into account the institutional and ideological response by the country to its democratic experience and likely implications of this for the future of democracy.

Thus, we can treat promise, design, working, outcome and futures as the five levels at which our study would focus. Qualitative assessment would be strengthened by inputs from survey, case studies, dialogues, etc. Besides, we have developed a set of specific questions which will taken into consideration by the assessment team. (These questions are modeled on the IDEA questions and for good measure borrow many of the IDEA questions).