Faithfulness to a concept requires measures that existing indicators systematically violate.

Evidence

This book thus tries to violate Goertz’s Second Law. I analyze in detail the major ways one can build concepts, but I do not stop there. I continue the analysis by examining how different concept structures have important methodological implications for the construction of quantitative measures. For example, as chapter 4 on democracy shows, to be faithful to one’s concepts implies measures quite different from those that one finds in the quantitative literature on democracy indicators, scales, etc. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 69

Categorization

• DEFINE: Goertz’s Second Law: the tradeoff whereby concept-builders ignore measurement and measure-builders ignore concepts.