Concept membership should depend on a case’s own features, not the sample.

Evidence

A given case can slip in and out of the category of full democracy depending on how the other cases are coded. From a semantic perspective, this is problematic. Whether a case is a full democracy or not depends on the definition of that concept and the features of the case, not on the distribution of levels of democracy within the population as a whole. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 865

Categorization

• DEFINE: States a hard criterion — semantic vs. distributional definition — that can be applied to any index (democracy, poverty, fragility).
• SEED: Angle: ‘Your country’s democracy score went down because other countries changed’ — how statistical standardization quietly makes ratings comparative rather than absolute.