Morlino, L. (2021). Democracy. In: Harris, P., Bitonti, A., Fleisher, C.S., Skorkjær Binderkrantz, A. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13895-0_65-1

Despite the embedded difficulties of an “essentially contested concept” (a concept that is used with a variety of meanings with no possibility of settling the consequent disputes) (Gallie), the definition of a mass liberal democracy can start from the procedural approach by Schumpeter and the five criteria suggested by Dahl: effective participation; voting equality; enlightened understanding, i.e., citizens have adequate and equal opportunities to learn about policy alternatives; control of the agenda; and the inclusion of adult residents who enjoy citizenship rights, and complement it with the definitions by Sartori (“large-scale democracy is a procedure and/or a mechanism that (a) generates an open polyarchy whose competition in the electoral market (b) attributes power to the people and (c) specifically enforces the responsiveness of the leaders to the led.”) and by Schmitter and Karl (as “a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives”). To these definitions, we should add a largely shared minimal empirical definition, which is necessary for the empirical analysis of democracies, and a review of existing typologies, where the one proposed by Lijphart around the majoritarian/consensual poles is the dominant one. When considering the main actors and processes a real democracy can go through, party leaders, interest groups, and movement are to the fore and transitions, installations, consolidations, crises, deepening or deterioration of democracy are cursorily analyzed. The change of research questions characterized the search for the explanations during the past decades. From the social-economic conditions of democracy, scholars switched to the analysis of the reasons for the way the processes have been unfolding and of the related results. The conclusions recall the limits of representative democracy and the pursuing the subversion of it.