Preston Manning and Andre Turcotte write in The Globe and Mail that Canada's political parties are failing to engage with voters on a range of pressing policy issues.
A report by Congressional Management Foundation finds that email torrents from citizens are jamming the gears of the US Congress – and the advent of social media will only add to the problem.
A study by Peter Mair for the University of California's Centre for the Study of Democracy shows that in Western European democracies key indicators of the system's health have dropped markedly since the 1990s.
The power of micro-parties in the Australian Senate is a symptom of an archaic system that needs to be updated, say Mark Triffitt and Travers McLeod from the University of Melbourne.
Attila Ágh from Corvinus University of Budapest examines the status of the democracies that emerged in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1989.
