What you think of as the problem is affected by your sense of what the solution might be. That might sound strange but it is often true. So if you are asked how Britain’s democracy is faring your response will be determined by the evidence but also by a hunch about how well you would expect a democracy to perform.
There are two perspectives that have run through democratic thought for centuries: the protective perspective of democracy and the developmental perspective of democracy (Box 1). The first presents a more limited perspective than the second. These two perspectives of democracy lead to a different response to the same evidence which does, indeed, suggest that many citizens have doubts about the quality of democracy in the UK.
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