Evaluation as the Conscience of Freedom and Democracy

Abstract

It wasn’t long ago that democratic political systems along with the free-market forces of globalization were generally expected to spread unchecked throughout the world. Only five years ago most would have found it unbelievable that the leading democratic free-market economies of the world would have significant trouble competing with non-democratic state-run economies and far flung terrorist organizations. Now this is obviously the case, and these competitors are aggressively spreading their influence around the world. This paper suggests the perhaps counter-intuitive notion that improvements to the theory and practice of evaluation can play a perhaps critical role in improving the relative performance of market-based democratic systems and explores what some of these potential improvements might entail.

Keywords

• evaluation
• accountability
• democracy