The first edition of this book, published in 2019 under the same title, addressed some of the most pressing questions of the time. It pondered the threat globalisation posed for democracy and its legitimacy, and it considered the challenges democracy faced by high-level migrations, the rise of populism, and the encroachment of authoritarianism. Building on a cross-cultural study of democracy conducted by the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa for nearly twenty years Sweden, Germany, Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, Turkey and Poland received thorough attention. Further insights were gained by examining the influence on democracy of the global screen culture of Television and the Internet, and by posing the question of what democracy could learn from diplomacy to fare better in the future.

This second edition brings up-to-date all these themes and offers a new chapter addressing the impact of social media and disinformation. The original authors have updated their earlier offerings but now as members of the Centre for Research on Democracy, CREDO, the successor to TRU. 

Given the broad range of topics and cases supported by current data, the book is bound to appeal not only to students and practitioners of democracy but also to the general reader.    

Ursula van Beek is the founding Director of the Centre for Research on Democracy, CREDO, at the Department of Political Science at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She is the editor and co-author of seven books on democracy in cross-cultural perspective. Her interests include historical memory and identity, comparative historical analyses, and cultural values and democracy.