Emancipation theory considers democracy as the institutional manifestation of people power. Thereby, it links democracy to two preinstitutional manifestations of people power: action resources and emancipative values. The theory interprets these preinstitutional manifestations as the social fundament in which democracy is grounded. Thus, measures of democracy with a stronger link to action resources and emancipative values tap the social grounding of democracy better than measures with a weaker link. These measures are better representatives of democracy’s origin in preinstitutional manifestations of people power; from the viewpoint of human empowerment they are more valid indicators of democracy.

How appropriate is it to evaluate measures of democracy first and foremost through the lens of human empowerment? Section 1 of this chapter answers this question, proposing five different points of view from which an evaluation of democracy under the criterion of human empowerment appears appropriate. Then I portray the new index of “citizen rights” used earlier in this book as a measure of institutionalized people power. Here I detail how this index is built and why. The purpose is to create an index that captures the empowering nature of democracy better than other measures do. In Section 2, I test whether the index meets this purpose, and the result is that it does. Section 3 discusses the causal connection between democracy and the preinstitutional manifestations of people power. We will see that these are indeed antecedents rather than consequences of democracy. Section 4 demonstrates why democracy’s embedding in preinstitutional empowerments is easily overlooked – a pitfall that the human empowerment framework avoids. Specifically, I show that scholars’ preoccupation with mass preferences for democracy has obscured the fact that these preferences affect systemic democracy if – and only if – they are grounded in emancipative values. Ungrounded preferences, by contrast, are irrelevant for systemic democracy. I conclude with a summary of key points.