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How Democracy Works
This text analyses the functioning of modern democracies in terms of two basic principles: political representation and policy congruence between citizens and their representatives. A group of scholars examines if democracy still works today, and how it works, while its functioning is challenged by fundamental changes in society.
Elections and Democracy
Elections and Democracy addresses the contrast between two different views on representative democracy. According to the first view elections are a mechanism to hold government accountable. In the second view elections are primarily a means to ensure that citizens' views and interests are properly represented in the democratic process. The majoritarian and consensus models of democracy are the embodiment in institutional structures of these two different views of democracy. In the majoritarian view the single most important function of an election is the selection of a government. The concentration of power in the hands of an elected majority government makes it accountable to the people. In...
Political Representation and Legitimacy in the European Union
How severe a problem is what may be called the democratic deficit of the European Union? This volume elaborates a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of the alleged democratic deficit.
Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis
Theories about the decline of legitimacy or a legitimacy crisis are as old as democracy itself. Yet, representative democracy still exists, and the empirical evidence for a secular decline of political support in established democracies is limited, questionable, or absent. This lack of conclusive evidence calls into question existing explanatory theories of legitimacy decline. How valid are theories of modernization, globalization, media malaise, social capital, and party decline, if the predicted outcome (i.e. secular decline of political support) does not occur? And which (new) explanations can account for the empirical variation in political support in established democracies? This book systematically evaluates the empirical evidence for legitimacy decline in established democracies, the explanatory power of theories of legitimacy decline, and promises new routes in investigating and assessing political legitimacy. In doing so, the book provides a broad and thorough reflection on the state of the art of legitimacy research, and outlines a new research agenda on legitimacy.
Political Representation and European Union Governance
This book confronts and discusses different conceptions of political representation with respect to their application to the system of multi-level governance in the European Union. Political representation is an essentially contested concept. Its meaning has evolved with the development of representative democracy at the level of the nation state, and normative theories of political representation often evolved as a reflection on developing practices rather than the other way around. Since the EU is not a conventional nation state, and since the effectiveness and legitimacy of classic notions of political representation at the level of the national state has also become a matter of dispute, the EU has become a playground for the development of alternative or additional conceptions of democracy. The contributions to this volume evaluate these alternative conceptions with regard to both their effectiveness and their legitimacy, and combine both conceptual and empirical analyses. This book was based on a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.
The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies
The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritari...
Governance in Modern Society
This book is the immediate result of the co-operation of a great number of scholars in the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG). NIG is an interuniversity research school. As such it has a double task. In addition to offering a Ph.D program to students in Public Administration it also is a research institute in which a great number of scholars from seven Dutch universities participate and work on a common research program. The chapters in this book are all products of the research program that started in 1995. This program had the ambition to explore the frontiers of the discipline in two respects. First by studying a number of recent developments in society and their consequences for t...
The European Voter
This book provides a systematic comparative analysis of how and why voting behaviour has changed in Europe in recent decades. It has been widely argued that radical changes have occurred in the how and why of voting behaviour in Europe as a result of changes in the structure of society, most notably the rise in material affluence and educational attainment, and the decline in religious observance and the size of the working class. But most tests of this proposition have been undertaken on single countries. This book, however, systematically tests the validity of this proposition across various European countries. The argument that social change has altered voting behaviour has been increasin...
The European Voter
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The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies
"How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representat...
