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 …

Empirical political scientists and normative political theorists both seek to assess the quality
of democracy. But they apply to this task very different criteria and assumptions. Empiricists …

This article focuses on the nature and strength of the relationship between political parties
and the state. Expanding on the analytical framework we developed earlier (van Biezen and …

Using data from two expert surveys conducted in 2007–2008 and 2013 in 24 European
democracies, we examine the response of political parties—especially mainstream ones …

Electoral manifestos play a crucial role in visions of party democracy and political science
analyses of party competition. While research has focused on the contents of manifestos, we …

As more countries grant political rights to their emigrants and more politicians look beyond
national boundaries for support, scholars are beginning to explore the drivers and …

The congruence between public preferences and public policy is of special importance in
representative democracies. We want to know whether the public is getting the policies it …

This article seeks to demonstrate that the concept of populism can help us to understand the
dynamics of intra-party politics. This argument is made via a case study of the British Labour …

Indonesia's 2019 elections confirmed both the country's status as a competitive electoral
democracy and the trend of decreasing democratic quality. In this article, we investigate this …

This article considers the potential to use knowledge of expected electoral system effects to
engage in electoral engineering. The review focuses on contributions made in the past …