Book review: reconstructing democracy: how citizens are building from the ground up by Charles Taylor, Patricia Nanz and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor

In Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens are Building from the Ground Up, Charles Taylor, Patricia Nanz and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor respond to the lack of public faith in the institutions of representative democracy by calling for a ‘bottom-up’ reconstruction of democracy at the local level, drawing on examples of local participatory democracy in action. While the book explores some inspiring initiatives that can have real and lasting benefits for communities and the capacity to solve local problems, Luke Bostian is unconvinced that such programmes alone can address the wider structural forces that jeopardise efforts to reconstruct democracy.