by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton

Welcome to our first themed collection of 2025, featuring our most popular, recent research published in Policy & Politics! Our first collection centres around themes of Democracy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on democracy or doing research in that area, or are just interested in keeping up to date with the latest concepts in democratic innovations, we hope you will find these highlighted articles interesting!

Our first article in this collection, is a conceptual article which presents a new theory of robust democracy. In this powerhouse of an article, authors Sørensen and Warren argue that such a theory is needed to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to change. While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, the authors argue that  what enables such reform is rarely considered. The authors posit that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate in ways that enable them to serve their core democratic functions, even in the face of disruptive political demands and events. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. This theorising becomes all the more urgent in response to three current challenges that the authors highlight which urgently demand the adaptation and innovation of liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. The new theory suggests that when a political system serves these three core democratic functions, this not only deepens democracy, which is justifiable on its own terms, but it also increases political robustness.

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