Assessing the Quality of Democracy, Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, eds., A Journal of Democracy Book; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. xliii, 284.

Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino's edited volume, Assessing the Quality of Democracy, explores substantive and procedural variables that seek, as the title suggests, to measure the “quality” of consolidated democracies. The book is divided into two sections. The first section expands on eight “dimensions of democratic quality” outlined in Diamond and Morlino's introductory chapter. The second section applies the criteria, with varying degrees of exactitude, to six regionally linked pairs of cases.