Camille Bedock on 'Reforming Democracy'

New in the Oxford University Press Comparative Politics series is Camille Bedock's comparative study of democratic reforms in Western Europe. 

Reforming Democracy: Institutional Engineering in Western Europe provides a better understanding of the world of democratic reforms in consolidated democracies, of their determinants, and of their mechanisms.

Analysing six dimensions of reform across 18 West European democracies and providing in-depth case studies about three processes of reform in Ireland, France, and Italy, Camille looks at when, why, and how democratic institutions are reformed.

Her book deals with the context, the motives, and the mechanisms explaining the incidence of institutional engineering in consolidated European democracies between 1990 and 2015. It is centred on the choice of political elites to use – or not to use – institutional engineering as a response to the challenges they face.

Camille shows that, contrary to what has been commonly assumed, reforms of core democratic rules are frequent and constitute in most cases an answer of challenged political elites to the erosion of political support and electoral change. She also shows that the final outcome of a given reform depends on the type of reform at stake and on the process used during the phase of discussion of the reform.

Speaking to ECPR about her book, Camille told us:

'Reforming Democracy is a book that originated in my interest for electoral reforms in Italy, because they challenged the idea that institutions are inherently stable. Scholars have tended to present institutions as stable patterns structuring the behaviour of political actors. I wanted to show that there was in fact much change going on underneath the appearance of stability, and I tried to understand how these frequent reforms could be related to the notion of erosion of political support and electoral change.

I also wanted from the very beginning to combine quantitative and qualitative methods because I was interested in two very different questions: in time, what can explain why reforms are more frequent in certain circumstances, and when they are put on the agenda, why do some reforms manage to get adopted while others are abandoned by reformers?

My research has always been very empirical: I study democratic reforms through a range of different methods, including statistical analysis of ‘hand-made’ databases, semi-structured interviews, press and parliamentary debates’ analysis, etc. I also use comparison as a way to better understand the differences across countries in the use of democratic reforms.'

About Camille

'Since September 2016 I have been a FNRS postdoctoral researcher in the Centre d’étude de la vie politique (CEVIPOL) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). My work focuses on democratic reforms, but also on electoral change in a context of crisis, and on how citizens perceive their institutions and their political system in consolidated democracies.

I want to disentangle the notion of political support, to understand what democracy means for ordinary citizens, in a context where democratic reforms are more and more frequent and used as a tool by political elites to try to regain legitimacy. This is what my current research project looks at; combining different methods and using comparison.'