Auditing the UK's changing democracy

Patrick Dunleavy establishes the wider context for liberal democracy globally, where prospects have generally been deteriorating in recent times. The factors that are currently going wrong for democratic advance across the world mostly have their counterparts in modernisation changes within Britain itself. This introduction then sets out how the Audit implements a detailed and disaggregated (section-by-section) analysis of the current performance of UK institutions. The final section considers the ‘British political tradition’, or the so-called ‘Westminster system’, which continues to define the almost unique political and institutional development of the UK.