Democracy, Quality

Leonardo Morlino

In recent decades, discontent, dissatisfaction, and alienation have been growing political phenomena in old, established democracies. At the same time, more and more countries have been defined as democratic. Democratization has also brought about a large number of so-called hybrid regimes. From these three different perspectives, the same question emerges: What is the quality of democracy in any specific country, and what does this tell us in terms of (a) how actual and deep the satisfaction or dissatisfaction is, (b) what is behind democratic appearances, and (c) how ambiguous cases can be turned into democracies by improving their quality? This entry focuses on the notion of quality, its key dimensions or qualities, and the mechanism of quality subversion as a key aspect to explore when dealing with this topic. There are at least three main streams of literature dealing with this topic. A first group of scholars have been working ...

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