Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail (The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy)

Constituted to fail : democracy and its self-negation -- Exogenous breakdown : the institutional, socioeconomic and political causes of democratic termination -- Endogenous breakdown : the conditions and characteristics of democracies which self-destruct -- Towards a theory of democide. Beginning with the premise that democracies are often deeply implicated in their own downfall, The Theory of Democide challenges the conventional view of how and why democracies collapse by demonstrating that democratic collapse is often a direct result of the inherent logic of democracy itself. The common assumption is that the path to democratisation is, once begun, near impossible to reverse. Particularly where democratic transition has been properly consolidated conventional wisdom and empirical evidence both suggest that no democracy should follow the example of Classical Athens or Germany's Weimar Republic and return to despotism. Starting from the premise that democracies are often deeply implicated in their own downfall, Theorising Democide challenges this conventional view by showing how democratic collapse is symptomatic of the inherent logic of democracy. Democide, in some cases, can thus be understood as a kind of ideological suicide with the tenets and devices of democracy being somehow intrinsic to its own collapse. In other words democide denotes the capacity that democracy has to come undone, to risk its own safety, to take its own life while doing what it was intended to do What role does the concept of political knowledge have in democratic theory? What according to democratic theorists should the ordinary citizen know about politics? What do empirical studies about political knowledge teach us? And why should we care what people know about politics in the first place? By asking these important questions, this book offers the reader a quick yet comprehensive overview of the steps that have been taken toward understanding the concept of citizen knowledge in democratic theory over the past several decades. The book summarizes and explains the essentials of a vast body of literature while the empirical studies offer data on a number of Western democracies. Furthermore, the reader is taken through the theoretical foundations of political knowledge from Ancient Greece to modern representative democracy. Clear and concise, the book offers a cutting edge insight into our current understanding of citizen knowledge in democratic theory. Publisher website What according to democratic theorists should the ordinary citizen know about politics? What does several decades of empirical research about citizens' political knowledge tell us? And why should we care? This book offers a comprehensive outline of the vast literature on political knowledge and by providing an analytical framework for its studying