Democracy in Small States

Jack Corbett is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Being Political: Leadership and Democracy in the Pacific Islands (Hawaii, 2015); and Australia's Foreign Aid Dilemma: Humanitarian Aspirations Confront Democratic Legitimacy (Routledge, 2017) as well as numerous articles and book chapters.Wouter Veenendaal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. He is the author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (Routledge, 2014) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a NWO Veni-grant project titled 'When things get personal: Explaining political stability in small states'.

Populism and the personalization of politics appears to be threatening the existence of democracy as we know it all over the world. It is now more important than ever to understand the history of this form of regime: why it has thrives and fails. But, existing studies are limited by their focus on a few large and predominately rich states. This book takes the opposite approach: it investigates how politics is practiced in the smallest states wherehyper-personalization has always been a ubiquitous feature of political life. It optimistically finds that hyper-personalized democracy can actually persist against all odds, but also cautions that political practices in small states are often markedly different to larger states.Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, NuffieldCollege, University of Oxford.

This book brings small states into the comparative politics cannon for the first time. It examines how politics is practiced in the smallest states where hyper-personalization has always been a ubiquitous feature of political life, and finds that hyper-personalized democracy can actually persist against all odds.

1: The Small State Challenge