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As democracy has spread to a majority of the world’s states over the past three decades, many scholars, politicians, activists, and aid administrators have gone from asking why transitions happen to asking what the new regimes are like. This new approach focuses on what makes a democracy “good” or “better,” and on how improvements can not only be measured, but encouraged. While there is no absolutely objective way of laying out a single framework for gauging democratic quality, there are eight dimensions on which democracies vary in quality: freedom, the rule of law, vertical accountability, responsiveness, equality, participation, competition, and horizontal accountability. These dimensions are closely linked and tend to move together, either toward democratic improvement and deepening or toward decay.

This article introduces three different notions of quality grounded in procedure, content and result. Those three notions are at the core of three different notions of democratic quality. Each of them has different implications for empirical research. Starting from these premises, the article proposes some theoretical arguments fundamental to the analysis of democratic quality and good democracy. In the first section definitions of democracy and quality are suggested. The subsequent three sections analyse the main emphasized dimensions, such as the rule of law, accountability, responsiveness, freedom and equality. Such an analysis calls for indicators, certain measures that reveal how and to what degree each dimension is present in various models of good democracy, the numerous and related problems associated with empirical study, and the essential conditions for its existence. The penultimate section indicates models of good democracy and highlights the related and much more common models of low quality democracies. The concluding remarks briefly mention the main directions of future research on the topic.

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Since early 1990s in Italy there has been a major change in the party system. Some of the explanations that are often mentioned, such as corruption, the April 1993 referendum, the new electoral laws, or the secularization of the society and the economic crisis, are important aspects of a complex funnel of causality. Together, however, they do not satisfactorily explain the change. Thus, we identify an idiosyncratic factor, the chronic, widespread dissatisfaction, that existed since the end of the 1940s, and explore the reasons why this dissatisfaction caused change only in the 1990s. The main explanations we suggest provide the basis for some speculations on changes in an Italian democracy that is still in a phase of transformation in the mid‐1990s.