Nicolás Palomo Hernández
The public and the media increasingly use Democratic Global Performance Indicators (GPIs). But how good are these indicators at measuring democratic health? Nicolás Palomo Hernández looks at the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index as an example. He argues that the index has methodological and ideological biases, yet significant impact nonetheless Read more
Simone Belko
Simone Belko invites us to imagine research into democracy as an 'artful science'. Without mediation by experts or representatives, but only through open civic intelligence, we can together determine the total texture of democracy from the bottom up. This self-referential poetics has the potential to define democracy in still untold ways Read more
Thareeat Laohabut
The fashion for seeing all authoritarian regimes through the lens of ‘democratic backsliding’ or ‘autocratisation’ has overshadowed our understanding of the strategies of classic authoritarians. Thareerat Laohabut uses the case of Thailand to illustrate this problem, showing how civil-millitary relations supporting the regime have been inadequately understood Read more
Alex Prior
The ‘total texture’ of democracy exists, and we can observe it, argues Alex Prior. This is possible through a conceptualisation of this ‘texture’ as fractal: being complex and self-referential at every scale. Through this perspective, we can problematise long-standing – but nevertheless incomplete – analogies of democracy and democratisation Read more
Julian G. Waller
The lure of typology is irresistible for social scientists, yet commonly used schemas classifying authoritarian politics still miss key variation. Our frameworks often rely on organisational assumptions set one level of abstraction too high. Julian G. Waller demonstrates how a closer look at constitutional structure can confront this problem Read more
