Measuring and Comparing Civil Societies

Beyond strong and weak: rethinking postdictatorship civil societies.

What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a...

A "Grand Challenge": Measuring Information Societies

Even though there has been a proliferation of e-society measures in recent years, analyses of the metrics of the “information society” are still far from responsive to the needs of many stakeholders and continue to suffer from a number of serious limitations. Issues in eight critical areas are briefly presented. They include: definition of the universe to be measured; definition of the objects ...

Newsletter on Measuring the Progress of Societies

Measuring and Comparing Energy Flexibilities

Flexibility in energy supply and demand becomes more and more important with increasing Renewable Energy Sources (RES) production and the emergence of the Smart Grid. Socalled prosumers, i.e., entities that produce and/or consume energy, can offer their inherent flexibilities through so-called demand response and thus help stabilize the energy markets. Thus, prosumer flexibility becomes valuabl...

Measuring Time and Comparing Clocks