Paper short abstract:

Democracy rankings designed by hegemonic way of life can be seen as a self-examination. When democratization is taken in the sense of contextualized process (more than transcendental procedures), it´s evident that barriers to interculturality are a main problem to a wide concept of politic cultures.

Paper long abstract:

There are several models of "democracy rankings" structured and publicized by academic studies and private institutions related on different criteria. Based on two classifications - the Effective Democracy Index (EDI), elaborated by Welzel and Inglehart; and the Democracy Index shaped by Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), linked to the british publication The Economist -, this paper intends to analyze the attempts to "measure" politic culture. Both initiatives assume that politic culture has a relevant "weight" on behalf of the "quality" of democracy in each country, but conceive it as a result of the institutional achievements of "developed" nations of the North. Through a postcolonial approach, it´s possible to put assortments like these, designed according to the western hegemonic epistemology, in the framework of "coloniality/modernity" enterprise. A set of contributions also presented by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in the molds of "sociology of absences" and "sociology of emergences" emphasizes the relevance of an "abyssal line" that divides the valid/visible and invalid/invisible knowledges, practices and existence itself of the Others (non-western societies). The adoption of idealized parameters of a universal, deterritorialized and timeless liberal representative model of democracy functions like a mirror: the two referred rankings in fact do not "measure" the level of democracy in another countries, yet see themselves´ image. Otherwise, EDI and EIU use widely public opinion surveys to underpin their respective rankings with quantitative data, supposedly shielded by scientific rationality. However, surveys did not privilege, for instance, barriers to interculturality, which can be a serious problem to democratization processes.