Defining Democracy

Foreword by Professor Arend Lijphart.- Part I: Decision-Making.- 1 The Myths of Majority Rule.- 2 Pluralist Decision-Maing.- Part II: Elections.- 3 "Party-ocracies".- 4 The Candid Candidate.- Part III: The Art of Governance.- 5 The Elected Dictator.- 6 Governance.- Appendices.- Chronology.- References.- Index.

Peter Emerson is the director of the de Borda Institute, an NGO which promotes the use of inclusive voting procedures, especially in conflict zones. The child of a Southern Irish Protestant father and a Northern English Catholic mother, he has been based in Belfast for the last thirty five years. As part of this work, he has travelled extensively, observing several elections for the osce, and his latest deployment was as a translator for the eu Monitoring Mission for South Ossetia.  In between such duties, he has lectured in countless universities and other institutes, throughout Europe, in East and Southern Africa, and across the United States. Since 1990 has published extensively on consesus politics in newspapers and books.

From the reviews of the second edition:

"It is a handbook on how to organise democracy in different ways. Emerson describes in different kinds of electoral and governmental systems, explains how each works in practice and weighs the pros and cons of each. The result is thought-provoking guide to what democracy actually means and how best it can be achieved." (Books Ireland, October, 2012)

"It is a thesis and its wide-ranging and informative overview of various forms of democratic mechanism is conducted in light of this thesis. ... author clearly delights in expounding his thesis and he retains the attention of the reader throughout with engaging insights and entertaining asides. ... Appendices are informative and thought-provoking and make an essential contribution to the book, further demonstrating that the author's thesis is based on an impressively wide historical and geographical scope of knowledge on the topic." (Katy Hayward, Representation, Vol. 51 (2), 2015)

"Peter Emerson's book covers a range of very important issues that stretch from the theory of democracy, across decision-making procedures, to electoral systems. Hence, the book is of extreme importance for students of these areas of political science. ... book is worth reading and studying. Emerson's work is both academic treatise and 'policy paper' advocating new voting procedures that are very different from those commonly used and that would be highly likely to have far reaching consequences for democratic polities." (Milos Brunclík, Central European Political Studies Review, cepsr.com, Vol. XV (4), 2013)

"It is a handbook on how to organise democracy in different ways. Emerson describes in different kinds of electoral and governmental systems, explains how each works in practice and weighs the pros and cons of each. The result is thought-provoking guide to what democracy actually means and how best it can be achieved." (Books Ireland, October, 2012)