The quality of democracy and a 'kinder, gentler' democracy : consensus democracy makes a difference.Effective government and policy-making : does concensus democracy make a difference?.The two-dimensional conceptual map of democracy.Central banks : independence versus dependence.Constitutions : amendment procedures and judicial review.Parliaments and congresses : concentration versus division of legislative power.Division of power : the federal-unitary and centralized-decentralized contrasts.Interest groups : pluralism versus corporatism.Electoral systems : majority and plurality methods versus proportional representation.Executive-legislative relations : patterns of dominance and balance of power.Cabinets : concentration versus sharing of executive power.Party systems : two-party and multiparty patterns.It elaborates original research design that analyses the cross-time, cross-section interplay between sub-national, national or even supranational systems of governance, to examine causes and effects in interregional variation.Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. The chapter discusses the regional dimension of assessment of democratic performance of contemporary political regimes. It overcomes nation-centric bias in mainstream research on quality of democracy by integrating existing scholarship on democratic governance with tailored research designs aimed at measuring democratic quality in multilevel systems. The chapter develops research design for assessing to what extent regional institutions and processes vary within countries and across countries and, to what extent regional institutions correspond to the 'majoritarian versus consensus' model elaborated by Lijphart almost two decades ago. It applies Arend Lijphart's analytical approach to regional political systems of federal and decentralized countries in Western Europe.

This chapter develops specific methodological and analytical instruments for evaluating how democratic regions have developed different institutional structures and how these variations can impact on their public policy capabilities.

Patterns of Democracy by Arend Lijphart