Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century. Concepts, Methods, Causality and the Quality of Democracy Edited by Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018, 190 pp., ISBN 9780815381839

Abstract

Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century. Concepts, Methods, Causality and the Quality of Democracy is a timely effort to systematize the current challenges to democracy and to provide key conceptual and methodological guidelines for tackling them. The contributors adopt the Quality of Democracy perspective, with the aim to advance its analysis, while reflecting on the democratic transformations that have taken place in the last decade. The editors, Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri, together with the selected contributing authors, among which are such prominent names as Leonardo Morlino and Philippe Schmitter, draw the lines of a renewed academic agenda, which is meant to provide a relevant and adequate response to the current challenges. This debate has important consequences for the future democratic developments and for the definition of meaningful policy-making paths for tackling the democratic crises, which define the political landscape in both consolidated democracies and hybrid regimes. The main goal of the book consists of the conscious effort to advance a case-oriented methodological approach, which sheds light on the causal mechanisms that bridge the different phases of democratizationtransition, installation, consolidation and crisis. For this purpose, a dynamic perspective towards political change is promoted, as the second important contribution of the book. The first two chapters of the book provide an insightful conceptual discussion of the research on the Quality of Democracy in the last decade. Philippe Schmitter critically reflects on the possibility to assess the Quality of Democracy and suggests potential research strategies that can provide relevant insight based on aggregation of similar groups of countries. He also argues that democracy is not in decline, but in deep transformation towards a post-liberal model. Dirk Berg Schosser supports and illustrates the use of fuzzy-sets for better aggregation and calibration of a more context-oriented research. The dynamic case-oriented methodological and conceptual choices are supported by several chapters that present in-depth analysis of specific countries or regions. For instance, Luca Tomini analyses the process of learning of the Polish and Hungarian elites and explains the different behaviour of social actors in the same institutional context. A detailed study of the constitution and policy-making in these two countries reveals that the trade-off between effective and legitimate institutions is the key dilemma that guides the political transformations in the last few decades in the two Central European States. While the analysis focuses mainly on the accountability mechanisms, it is worth exploring in what way the study of the substantial dimensions of democracyfreedom and equality, as well as the perceived responsiveness of the institutionscould provide relevant explanations for the outcomes of the institutional framework and the challenges that the democratic institutions face in these countries.