This new textbook invites readers to explore their own responses to debates about democracya s meaning. It provides tools for thinking actively about democracy as a practice, an ideal, and a site of contestation. Open--minded and written with genuine clarity for an undergraduate audience, Sawarda s book avoids providing easy answers to democracya s dilemmas. Instead, it offers to students the diverse approaches to democracy, showing how the key narratives of contemporary political life have been created and adapted. Working through a series of compelling real and hypothetical cases, twentieth--century narratives of democracy and their roots, and major new challenges such as globalization and environmentalism, the book makes the ideal starting point both for students already curious and those needing to be enticed and provoked. It concludes with an extraordinary snapshot and appraisal of the new theories of democracy that are making waves in the twenty--first century, and invites informed speculation on the shape of the democracy of the future. Democracy includes an extensive glossary of types of democracy, as well as a guide to further reading.