Reforming Democracy: Institutional Engineering in Western Europe (Comparative Politics) – PDF

Revamping Democracy: Enhancing Political Institutions in Western Europe (Comparative Politics) is a book series that caters to teachers, students, and researchers of political science with a special focus on contemporary government and politics. Published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research, this global series emphasizes comparative analysis and rigorous methodology. In the midst of crises of representative democracy, when, why and how are democratic institutions reinforced? This is the overarching question that guides the research published in this eBook.

Core democratic principles can be understood as the formal political rules that regulate the relationship between political elites within the political system, political parties, and citizens. As such, they are the foundation of any political system. This PDF eBook examines why institutional engineering is employed as a response to political challenges by political elites in consolidated democracies in Europe between 1990 and 2015. It focuses on the motives and mechanisms behind the choice of political elites to use – or not use – institutional engineering.

The eBook, Revamping Democracy: Enhancing Political Institutions in Western Europe, provides a better empirical understanding of the world of democratic reforms in consolidated democracies owing to a new set of data that covers six dimensions of reform in 18 European countries. Secondly, the book offers evidence of the correlation between the absence of political support and democratic reforms and the role of electoral shifts in instigating reforms. Lastly, the publication demonstrates that the final outcome of a particular reform is contingent on the nature of the reform and the process employed during the reform discussion phase by analyzing case studies in Italy, France, and Ireland.

The eBook establishes that contrary to popular belief, reforms of the core democratic rules are frequent. Such reforms are mostly a response by political elites to the erosion of political support and electoral change. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Muller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. NOTE: This purchase only includes the PDF document.