Abstract
This chapter investigates whether democracy is in crisis from the perspective of experts and citizens. We do so by comparing indices of the quality of democracy and individuals’ judgments on the functioning of democracy over time. First, by making use of indices provided by the Democracy Barometer project along with survey and election data, we empirically assess the overall development of established democracies throughout past decades. Second, we pay special attention to democracy’s subcomponents. Hence, we ask how the different dimensions, partial regimes, institutions, and organizations of democracy are seen by experts and citizens. Based on this, we show that none of the employed indicators suggest any crisis tendencies at the highest level of aggregation. Neither “objective” nor “subjective” assessments, thus, suggest an overall decline of the quality and functioning of democracy. A more fine-grained look at lower levels, however, reveals subtrends that indicate a decrease of some of democracies’ core features. Declining turnout rates, rising social selectivity in political participation, and fading confidence in democracies’ core (majoritarian) institutions point to specific phenomena that need further evaluation. This will be provided in the subsequent chapters of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
On measurement scaling, see the codebook of the DB: democracybarometer.com. Theoretically a country reaches an overall score of 100 only if for all 100 indicators it exhibits the highest quality of all 30 countries. In reality, Denmark showed the highest democratic quality in 2010, reaching a total score of almost 74.
- 2.
Chapter 6 shows clearly that substantial representation of the interests of the “lower third” of society is significantly worse than that of the upper third.
- 3.
For the function participation, the following subcomponents are measured: non-selectivity of electoral participation, non-selectivity of alternative participation, participation rights, effective institutionalized participation, effective noninstitutionalized participation, and rules facilitating participation. On the indicators that measure these subcomponents, see democracybarometer.org, Codebook.
- 4.
It should, however, be pointed out that these ratings turn out quite differently if respondents are asked instead about their subjective appreciation of representation. Asked whether they felt themselves to be well represented by at least one national party, more than half the respondent citizens of EU countries gave an affirmative answer (The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems 2013).
- 5.
Voter turnout ranking for the period 1975–2010 is Malta 95.6%, Belgium 92.5%, Luxembourg 89.0%, Iceland 87.0%, Sweden 86.5%, and Denmark 86.0%.
- 6.
As the individual studies in this volume show, post-democracy is not to be dismissed in toto; what cannot pass, however, is the empirically untenable claim that democracy per se has its best times behind it.
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Krause, W., Merkel, W. (2018). Crisis of Democracy? Views of Experts and Citizens. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_2
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