Practices of Democracy: An Introduction - Paperback

by Sergiu Gherghina (Editor), Jean-Benoit Pilet (Editor), Jane Suiter (Editor)

An applied introduction to the four models of democracy: representative, direct, deliberative and technocratic government. This text shows the complex and contested nature of democratic politics, and charts contemporary democratic challenges such as a decline in faith of elected leaders or contestation of established institutions. Throughout, proposed solutions are offered in the form of enhanced citizen participation, new forms of democratic representation, and improving the relationship between citizens and democratic governance to halt the decline in the health of democracies.

Author Biography

Sergiu Gherghina is Professor of Comparative Politics at Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests lie in party politics, political participation, democratization and democratic innovations. He advises on several participatory budgeting practices in new democracies. He is the book series editor on democratic innovations for Routledge (since 2021). He published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals including American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Electoral Studies, European Political Science Review, International Political Science Review, Party Politics, Political Studies or West European Politics.

Jean-Benoit Pilet is Professor of political science at the Université libre de Bruxelles and member of the CEVIPOL. He has been working on three main topics. The first is elections and electoral systems, with a specific focus on the personalization of electoral systems and on electoral reforms. The second is the transformation of representative democracy, especially looking at the growing impact of direct democracy, deliberative democracy, and technocracy. The third is the role in elected politicians in democracies, and the way they try to connect with citizens. His work has been recently published in some of the top journals in political science, like the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior or the British Journal of Political Science.

Jane Suiter is Professor of Political Communication in the School of Communications at Dublin City University and director of DCU′s Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society. Her research focus is on the information environment in the public sphere and in particular on scaling up deliberation and tackling disinformation. She has been involved in various research and oversight capacities on the Irish Citizens′ Assembly (2012-2022). She was the joint winner of the Brown Democracy Medal in 2019. She published in international peer-reviewed journals including Electoral Studies, International Political Science Review, Political Communication, Political Studies Review, Representation or Science.