Regional expertise shapes which features scholars add to a concept.

Evidence

In Karl’s list above, one can ask whether there are defining features that one does not find in other conceptualizations of democracy. In her case the unusual suspect is “civilian control over the military,” which is rarely explicitly present as a defining feature of democracy. One can understand why she included this attribute once one knows that she is a Latin Americanist. She is thinking of countries like Chile during its transition to democracy, when Pinochet and the military still had a lot of power. Her proposal to include that feature explicitly is not very controversial because most democratic theorists would require democratically elected leaders to have control over the military. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 494

Categorization

• CANDY: A democracy checklist that quietly smuggles in ‘civilian control of the military’ because the author spent her career studying Pinochet’s Chile — a good elevator line about how disciplines encode their fieldwork.
• XREF: Connects to area-studies versus comparative-methods debates about whether regional knowledge biases universal concepts.