What is a ‘good’ democracy?

Abstract

This article introduces three different notions of quality grounded in procedure, content and result. Those three notions are at the core of three different notions of democratic quality. Each of them has different implications for empirical research. Starting from these premises, the article proposes some theoretical arguments fundamental to the analysis of democratic quality and good democracy. In the first section definitions of democracy and quality are suggested. The subsequent three sections analyse the main emphasized dimensions, such as the rule of law, accountability, responsiveness, freedom and equality. Such an analysis calls for indicators, certain measures that reveal how and to what degree each dimension is present in various models of good democracy, the numerous and related problems associated with empirical study, and the essential conditions for its existence. The penultimate section indicates models of good democracy and highlights the related and much more common models of low quality democracies. The concluding remarks briefly mention the main directions of future research on the topic.