Zwei neue Beiträge zur Demokratieforschung von Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Lauth und Oliver Schlenkrich

" Demokratie in komplexen Gesellschaften. Demokratieprofile – Responsivität – Populismus" in "Die Demokratie und ihre Defekte. Analysen und Reformvorschläge": 

Dieses Buch versucht die Leerstelle bei der wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit den Defekten der Demokratie zu füllen. Zwar blüht die Demokratieforschung, doch die systemimmanenten Defekte der Demokratie genießen eine vergleichsweise geringe (wenngleich wachsende) wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit. Zu diesen Problemen zählen etwa ihr „short-termism“ und die „Unbeständigkeit der Zahl“, die Neigung zur „Tyrannei der Mehrheit“ und Kompetenzmängel beim Demos wie beim Führungspersonal. Die Autoren dieses Bandes – renommierte Experten auf dem Gebiet der Demokratieforschung – greifen je einen Defekt heraus, beleuchten ihn eingehend und diskutieren institutionenreformerische Lösungsvorschläge.

• Verlag: Springer VS; Auflage: 2018
• ISBN-13: 978-3-658-20847-9

"Making Trade-Offs Visible: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations about the Relationship between Dimensions and Institutions of Democracy and Empirical Findings" in "Politics and Governance":

Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.

• Verlag: COGITATIO; Volume 6, Issue 1 (2018)
• ISSN: 2183-2463
• Open Access Journal