Democratic Audit in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the work and development of Democratic Audit, a loosely-knit consortium of scholars, lawyers, journalists and others, organised around the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, and the Centre for Démocratisation Studies, Leeds University. Democratic Audit was initially established at Essex in 1992 by the Democracy Panel of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust as the Democratic Audit of the United Kingdom. The idea, which originated with Professor Lord Smith of Clifton, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ulster, was to provide an annual check upon the state of democracy and political freedom in the UK to meet concerns which were being increasingly expressed during the late 1980s about the erosion of both under Conservative governments. However, the group¹ which developed the idea decided that the Audit should become an instrument for providing more rigorous evidence and systematic evaluation of the “the British way of doing things“² — that is, of its long-standing informal arrangements for democratic government and the protection of political and civil rights. How democratic was “the British way“, actually? Providing an authoritative answer to this question, through a systematic audit of democracy, could serve to demonstrate if, and how far, the concerns of the time were justified, and help identify where reform might most be needed. Such an audit could also provide a benchmark against which any future reforms could be evaluated.