Measuring a concept by its own logic yields different rankings than standard indices.

Evidence

I take the popular polity data on democracy (Jaggers and Gurr 1995) and show that if one constructs a quantitative measure that reflects the polity scholars’ own concept of democracy then one arrives at a quantitative measure that is quite different from the one developed by Gurr and his colleagues. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to quantitative measurement and index-construction critiques, e.g. the social capital and diamond-trade literature where proxies miss the operative mechanism.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Your index doesn’t measure your own concept’ — how common quantitative scales silently substitute additive logic for the Boolean structure of the underlying theory.