Note: I wrote these questions myself. I thought it would be a helpful for those coming to my book to have a little background and personal connection. Feel free to submit other questions and I will include them.
Q: How did you get interested in the subject of democratic quality?
Mainly it was the disconnect I saw between the way the new postcommunist democracies worked and the way they were portrayed. If you have lived in one of these countries as a Westerner recently, I think you get the sense that they are fairly vibrant democracies. Elections are competitive, there are lots of opinions on offer, rights are respected, and so on. But there is a widespread assumption that they are somehow second-class democracies - full of populism, corruption, broken promises - partially because democracy is so new, partially because communism left a lot of residue, and partially because that is what ordinary people there will tell you.
My inspiration for this book was to try to figure out which point of view better fits the facts. Is democracy working or not? And what do we mean by working? This seemed to me to be the key question in the study of postcommunist politics. Perhaps with the exception of economic reform (which makes it into the book as well), the move to democratic politics has been the fundamental change in these countries. And yet we still don't have a great sense of how democracy works in these countries at the level of politics and policymaking. Who governs as Robert Dahl asked many years ago. The book is trying to fill that gap.
Q: What are the main points that you want readers to take away from the book?
I think there are two main ones. The first is about the concept of democratic quality. Democracy has become a sort of universal good in our world and so democratic quality gets equated with all good things about a society - whether income equality, low poverty rates, honest politicians, good healthcare, and so on.
I'd argue for a more restrictive definition of democratic quality which focuses on what democracy is intended to do - give citizens a say in governing. Democratic quality in my view asks to what extent citizens are ruling or not. It doesn't ask whether elections are free (this is the question of democracy), whether the preconditions are in place for democracy to function (what does function mean?), or whether a democracy produces good outcomes (what are good outcomes?). Rather it focuses on the nature and extent of popular rule. Democratic quality is not the only value and it should be analytically distinguished from other values.
The second point is about the postcommunist democracies. My argument is that they work better than most assume at least from the point of view of citizen rule. They are not inferior in terms of representation to the established democracies and in some respects may be superior. This is not to say that all is goodness and light in these countries. Not even close. But in terms of citizen rule, they are quite democratic. Citizens have a good deal of influence on policy choices. Whether this is a good thing is another question (see below).
Q: Your conclusion is that democratic quality is reasonably high in these countries. How confident are you in this result?
As I mention in the book, I have only skimmed the surface of this issue. A lot of my evidence is based on high level generalizations or a limited number of case studies and so I am not quite as confident as I should be. There were a lot of additional directions I wish I could have gone, but this would have taken a lot longer and produced an 800-page book. I am following up a lot of those leads now - I am looking at actual campaign promises, responsiveness in welfare policy, and approval ratings of politicians. What I hope to have done is put the ball in the other court. To force others to come up with systematic defenses of the idea that democratic quality in these countries is deficient.
Q: Who are the heroes and villains in your book?
The heroes are pretty clearly the ordinary citizens of postcommunist Europe. They definitely got a raw deal under communism (yes, they were partially responsible for that, but only partially) and have done extremely well in constructing democratic systems under difficult circumstances. If you had thought beforehand how they would handle creating democratic regimes in the midst of wrenching economic reforms, GDP falling by 20%, the presence of lots of former communists, and little help from the West, I think your answer would have been "Not very well". Yet, if you had visited them even a couple of years after the transition, it would have seemed that democracy and capitalism had been there a long time. I'm not sure if the book has any villains. Maybe I'm just not a good enough writer.
Q: How much do you personally favor high quality democracy?
As a number of scholars have pointed out, democracy is far from an unequivocal blessing and democratic quality even less so. The problem is not the fecklessness of politicians - in a high quality democracy they are under the thumb of citizens - but the deficiencies of citizens. If citizens are not well-informed about policy or don't hold "good" opinions, then politicians will respond to those bad opinions. Bryan Caplan has recently been the foremost advocate for this view - he thinks citizens are totally befuddled by economic policy and so democracies will produce bad economic policy.
I'm also worried about this problem and so am not a whole-hearted believer in democratic quality. Personally, I have some technocratic leanings. The problem is that you can never get experts in the position to rule and the incentive to rule well. Usually the choice is between ordinary citizens and professional politicians/interest groups and in this battle I would often choose the public. In fact, I'm fairly sympathetic to elections by lot where Congress would be populated by randomly chosen citizens who I don't think would be any worse than the representatives we have and would be a lot more representative to boot. The problem with lottery elections is that they remove some of the good incentives of democracy (fear of losing elections should motivate at least somewhat better performance). On a number of issues government by opinion poll might be better than the government we have but worse than government by real experts.
Q: What do you wish you changed about the book in retrospect?
There are a lot of elements of my conception of democratic quality that I could have clarified and expanded. I have a tendency to state things a little too bluntly. Some issues I should have dealt with are how democratic quality takes into account minorities and the intensity of preferences. Or the relation between democratic quality and different sorts of campaigns (like negative campaigning). I also wish I could have included more empirical evidence of the sort I mentioned above. And that I had gotten more people to read drafts. I don't think anyone read the entire book except for the press's reviewers.