Secondary concept dimensions can visibly shift democracy scores and required explanations.

Evidence

In a different way, the content of the secondary-level dimensions can matter a great deal. If one includes women’s suffrage in the concept of democracy (it is often not included in democracy measures that extend back to the pre–World War II period, such as Polity or “minimal” conceptions of democracy), the values on the democracy variable can significantly change (e.g., most famously for Switzerland, which gave the vote to women only in the 1970s; see Paxton 2000). As such, one might need to include factors that influence the decision to give the vote to women when explaining how democratic a country is. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 528

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: suffrage and dress rules both reveal who is counted as a full political person and when that boundary moved.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Switzerland Was Not a Democracy Until 1971’ — how a single measurement choice rewrites twentieth-century political history.
• SHARE: The Switzerland 1970s-women’s-suffrage fact is the kind of tidbit to send to someone working on democracy indices.