Marcus Spittler

Are democracies at risk? Is the quality of well-established OECD democracies today worse than 20 years, 40 years or 50 years ago? Are democracies again facing a crisis of legitimacy as Jürgen Habermas or the Trilateral Commission in 1975 have already diagnosed in the 1970s? Which are the symptoms, which the causes of such a supposed risk for democracy? Can we talk about the democracy in singular even if we restrict our sample to the well-established democracy of the OECD countries? Or is there a difference between Denmark and Greece or Germany and Spain? These are questions Wolfgang Merkel and I have been addressing in an article recently published. We examine the current state of democracy from an empirical point of view by taking a very close look at the Democracy Barometer.

The article is part of the edited volume [“Desafección política y gobernabilidad - el reto político”](Desafección política y gobernabilidad) by Ludolfo Paramio. For all Spanish speaking readers of this blog, Ludolo Paramio has produced some short YouTube Videos introducing the book.