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I'm about to start work on a research project on the development of democracy (national and international) in the 20th century, and was wondering if any Dakkanaughts could recommend some books to get me started. Any suggestions of titles or authors would be appreciated, and if anyone has seen any documentaries on the subject that would be handy too.

Thanks in advance.

The Open Society and It's Enemies (part I and II) by Karl Popper.

Cheers, I'll take a look.

Anyone else got anything?

You're talking about quite a bit and broad subject. It can really go in all directions. What will you exactly be researching, what's your focus? Also, what kind of democracy are we talking about here? Your electoral one, or more participatory forms?

Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy by Hilary Wrainwright is pretty interesting if you're searching for more on participatory/direct democracy, especially the Brazilian case study is interesting.

Then there are of course the books that put question marks on our whole concept of democracy, wondering how democratic they actually are. Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, but also The Shock Doctrine and No Logo by Naomi Klein kinda delve into that.

Yeah, it is a big subject, the actual (working) title of the project is 'to what extent was the development of democracy in the 20th century a success?' This in itself isn't much narrower, but as I have no real word/time limit and it's not being assessed I can't see that being too much an issue.

I intend to define what a successful democracy is in some detail, so books like the later suggestions on whether democracy is actually democratic would be handy. At the same time, though, I've not studied a huge amount of politics outside of history, so I'm also looking for some theory/overview stuff as well. Basically, at this stage, any suggestion is a good one!

Thanks again.