Democracy is rarely lost all at once. It thins — a competence transferred upward, a service withdrawn, an election that changes the government but not the policy — while the indicators still record a functioning regime. Assessments of democratic quality face a double movement: measurable progressions in transparency, participation rights and judicial independence in some settings, and regressions elsewhere that the same instruments capture poorly because they operate through structure rather than through rule-breaking. The panel takes both directions as its object.
Three lines organise the session. The first concerns plutocratic concentration: when concentrated capital sets the boundaries of feasible policy through ownership of media, infrastructure, debt and platforms, formal political equality survives while effective political equality decays — a quality-of-democracy problem that accountability and responsiveness indicators register only indirectly.
The second concerns the reduction of citizenship before states constrained by their own structure and by supranational organisation. Fiscal rules, central-bank mandates, regulatory harmonisation and European-level decision-making relocate authority to arenas where the vote arrives attenuated; the citizen keeps the franchise and loses the object. Papers examining how multilevel architecture redistributes responsiveness — and where it has been rebuilt — are central here.
The third concerns legitimacy by performance under material decline. Where housing, wages and living conditions deteriorate across an entire adult life course, the system's claim to legitimacy by results weakens before any attack on its procedures occurs, and support migrates toward forces that promise delivery without constraint.
Contributions are welcome from all methodological traditions: index-based and comparative measurement, single-country and subnational case studies, qualitative and mixed designs, and conceptual work on what democratic quality should register. Papers documenting progressions — deliberative innovations, transparency regimes, judicial and civic resistance, expanded rights of participation — are as welcome as those documenting regression, and the session is deliberately open to cases beyond Europe.
Whether the present is a period of democratic regression, uneven progression, or both at once is an empirical question, and the panel is organised to answer it comparatively rather than to illustrate a verdict already reached. The instruments that detect rule-breaking are mature; the instruments that detect structural attenuation are what this session is after.