Measuring Democracy in Tanzania

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 1,00, Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, language: English, abstract: While it is commonly agreed on, that being able to measure democracy precisely has become increasingly important in political science, different approaches can be taken to measure democracy. This paper compares and evaluates Freedom House (FH) and Vanhanen's approaches and applies those to the United Public of Tanzania from 1974 to the present. While both approaches agree that Tanzania cannot be classified as a democracy, Vanhanen determines the degree of democracy on the basis of elections and their outcomes and FH by looking at the implementation of preconditions of democracy.