This paper will establish the case for the empirical assessment of democratic states from a deliberative systems perspective. The ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative theory has successfully advanced the idea of deliberative democracy as a polity-wide activity and systemic approaches have been adapted to the assessment of various institutions. However, we argue that there is a need to advance the idea further and extend such assessments to the level of the nation state, potentially as a ‘competitor’ to existing approaches such as Freedom House. Although such an approach involves many methodological challenges, we argue that these are not insurmountable so long as there is sufficient conceptual clarity and careful translation of concepts into measures. Moreover, we argue that such an assessment should distinguish between observation of deliberative capacity and the innovations and institutional settings that contribute to that capacity in recognition that there may be different paths to achieving such capacity. The paper outlines the advantages of broadening democracy assessments using a deliberative perspective and identifies some of these challenges as well as potential solutions to the approach of assessing deliberative capacity at the national level.
