In October, the Board of the NCCR Doctoral Program granted the first Living Reviews in Democracy Award to NCCR PhD students Nils-Christian Bormann, Rinaldo Kühne, Antoinette Scherz, and Thomas Winzen. The prize recognizes the best articles published in the open access online-journal Living Reviews in Democracy (LRD), which publishes review articles that survey progress in democracy research and guide readers to the most important literature in the field. LRD articles are regularly updated by their authors to incorporate the latest developments on the theme.

The jury selected the award-winning articles particularly due to their completeness and originality:

Nils-Christian Bormann’s review summarizes the discussion of Lijphart’s typology of consensus and majoritarian democracies and challenges the typology’s usefulness for understanding democracies beyond the OECD world.

Rinaldo Kühne’s article focuses on the question of how the appeal to citizens’ emotions made by media coverage of political issues influences political opinions. It offers a review of the literature on the effects of mood, arousal, and emotions in judgment processes and analyzes if all affects, whether relevant to a judgment or not, have the same impact.

Questions on the legitimacy of the demos are the topic of Antoinette Scherz’s review. Democracy needs a clearly delimitated demos to be able to make decisions. But who are the people that constitute the demos? The article aims to clarify the legitimacy of the demos’s boundaries, a question that has gained considerable importance due to migration and globalization.

Thomas Winzen deals with the question of whether political integration challenges democracy by undermining the impact of national parliaments and parliamentary elections on policy making. The paper reviews the literature on the role of national parliaments in the European Union and observes that the question of how national parliaments relate to citizens in EU affairs is a rarely studied field.

[from NCCR Newsletter Dec. 2012]

The Living Reviews in Democracy (LRD) is now online. It is a new member of the family of Living Reviews journals. One of the most important features of the LRD is that its articles are updated regularly by the authors; this is the significance of the word ‘living’ in the title. Web-based and peer-reviewed, the LRD publishes reviews of research on core themes relating to democracy. Articles are solicited by an international editorial board from scientists who are experts in their fields. They provide critical outlines of the state of the art in the subjects covered and offer annotated insights (and where possible, active links) into the key literature. The goal of the journal is to develop its articles into a carefully screened and edited, well-integrated, topical set of hypertext documents that, taken together, form a valuable research tool for scholars of democracy.

LRD is part of the global Open Access movement for free, immediate, and permanent online access to knowledge and research results. The journal is published by the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich in the framework of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century”. The Editor-in-Chief is Prof. Dr. Frank Schimmelfennig.

The concept of Living Reviews journals was developed by institutes of the Max Planck Society, which pioneered the Living Reviews in Relativity (LRR) and the Living Reviews in Solar Physics (LRSP). Living Reviews in Relativity has already been online for ten years and became one of the primary resources in gravitational physics. Since 2007, the Living Reviews in Landscape Research (LRLR) is published by the ZALF, an institute of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft. The journal family is now affiliated with the Max Planck Digital Library, which provides technical infrastructure and software support.

LRD is the second Living Reviews journal in the social sciences, besides the recently launched Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG), which is published by the European Community Studies Association Austria.

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