Democracy - Michael Saward

This new textbook invites readers to explore their own responses todebates about democracy's meaning. It provides tools for thinkingactively about democracy as a practice, an ideal, and a site ofcontestation.

Open-minded and written with genuine clarity for anundergraduate audience, Saward's book avoids providing easy answersto democracy's dilemmas. Instead, it offers to students the diverseapproaches to democracy, showing how the key narratives ofcontemporary political life have been created and adapted.

Working through a series of compelling real and hypotheticalcases, twentieth-century narratives of democracy and their roots,and major new challenges such as globalization andenvironmentalism, the book makes the ideal starting point both forstudents already curious and those needing to be enticed andprovoked. It concludes with an extraordinary snapshot and appraisalof the new theories of democracy that are making waves in thetwenty-first century, and invites informed speculation on the shapeof the democracy of the future. Democracy includes anextensive glossary of types of democracy, as well as a guide tofurther reading.