In this article, we present measures of democratic governance to give a sense of how Latin american countries have fared since the early 1990s. the rest of the book discusses reasons for success and failure in democratic governance, but first it is necessary to provide a descriptive map of which countries have been more or less successful on which dimensions of democratic governance. óur evaluation is concerned with the extent to which democracies enhance citizen well-being and protect citizen rights. We provide an empirical mapping of how Latin american countries have fared since the early 1990s on a wide array of governance issues that are infrequently brought together to provide a medium time perspective. In addition to providing this descriptive map, we hope to stimulate thinking about how to conceptualize and measure democratic governance. the closest existing measures are of effective governance in general (e.g., Kaufmann, Kraay, and mastruzzi 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) rather than specifically democratic governance, and of the quality of democracy based on its procedural ideals (diamond and morlino 2005; Levine and molina 2006). óur enterprise is different, and we believe it merits an effort to create a systematic approach to measurement.