100 Books on Democracy

Robert Dahl (1956) – A Preface to Democratic Theory 

Robert Dahl (1998) – On Democracy  

Robert Dahl (1961) – Who Governs? Democracy and Power in the American City  

Patrick Deneen (2018) Why Liberalism Failed.  

Matthew Desmond (2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

John Dewey (1927) – The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry

Larry Diamond (2008) – The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies throughout the World 

Frederick Douglass (1845) – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.  

John Dryzek (2000) – Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations  

James Fishkin (2009) – When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy & Public Consultation  

Francis Fukuyama (1992) – The End of History and the Last Man 

Francis Fukuyama (2011) – Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution  

Francis Fukuyama (2014) – Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy 

William Galston (2018) – Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy 

Masha Gessen (2017) The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia  

Tom Ginsburg (2003) – Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases 

Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq (2018) – How to Save a Constitutional Democracy 

Jürgen Habermas (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 

Jürgen Habermas (1992) – Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Jürgen Habermas (1996) – The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory  

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class  

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1788) The Federalist Papers  

Friedrich Hayek (1944) The Road to Serfdom  

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land Anger and Mourning on the American Right  

Samuel Huntington (1991) – The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century 

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel (2005) Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

Yang Jisheng (2012) Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

Michiko Kakutani (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump  

Ernesto Laclau (2005). On Populist Reason  

Ryszard Legutko (2016) – The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) – How Democracies Die 

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2010) Competitive Authoritarianism Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War  

Arend Lijphart (1999, 2012) (2nd Edition) – Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries 

Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (eds.) (4 vols.)  (1978) – The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes 

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) – Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. 

Walter Lippman (1922) Public Opinion

Niccolò Machiavelli (1531) Discourses on Livy

C. B. Macpherson (1973) – Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval  

Scott Mainwaring (ed.) (2018) Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse 

Seymour Martin Lipset (1960) – Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics

Seymour Martin Lipset (1989) – Continental Divide The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada 

Michael McFaul (2018) From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia

Robert Michels (1911) – Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracies  

Branko Milanovic (2016) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization 

John Stuart Mill (1861) – Considerations on Representative Government  

John Stuart Mill (1859) On Liberty. 

Barrington Moore (1966) – Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World 

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (1985) – Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics 

Chantal Mouffe (2000) – The Democratic Paradox 

Yascha Mounk (2018) – The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save it 

Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction

Moisés Naím (2013) The End of Power From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be  

Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) – Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics  

Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillippe Schmitter (1986) – Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. 

Thomas Paine (1776) Common Sense. 

Thomas Piketty (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century  

David Pion-Berlin (2016) – Military Missions in Democratic Latin America  

Karl Popper (1945) The Open Society and its Enemies. 

Robert Putnam (1995). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community  

Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro (2018) – Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself 

John Rawls (1971) A Theory of Justice  

David Runciman (2018) – How Democracy Ends  

Michael Sandel (1996, 2022) Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy

Giovanni Sartori (1962) – Democratic Theory 

E. E. Schattschneider (1960) – The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America 

Carl Schmitt (1922) – The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 

Joseph A. Schumpeter (1943) – Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 

Amartya Sen (1999) Development as Freedom. 

Timothy D. Snyder (2017) On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century  

Timothy D. Snyder (2018) The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

Charles Tilly (2007) Democracy

Alexis De Tocqueville(1835, 1840) – Democracy in America 

Alexis De Tocqueville(1856) The Old Regime and the French Revolution

David Van Reybrouck (2013) – Against Elections: The Case for Democracy  

Michael Walzer (1983) – Spheres of Justice: A Defense Of Pluralism And Equality

E. B. White (2019) – On Democracy 

Mary Wollstencraft (1792) Vindication of the Rights Women  

Daniel Ziblatt (2017) Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy