Budowa skali pomiarowej w politologii

The article aims to reconstruct and analyze process of developing a measurement scale in political science, and its methodological foundations. In the first part of the article a general theory of measurement is presented, focused on criteria for assessing its quality. A set of such criteria is given, and some procedures providing its fulfillment are presented. The second part of the article contains an analysis of typical process of developing a scale in political science. Basing upon a concept of Geraldo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, the author analyses process of building a scale of political democracy, as a set of three challenges for the researcher: a challenge of conceptualization, a challenge of measurement and a challenge of aggregation. As the analysis is made, some examples of most widespread and recognized indices of democracy are given, showing how their authors cope with those challenges.