Books

• Toby S. James (2026, in development) Real Democracy: Empowerment and Equality Around the World (Manchester University Press).

This book proposes a concept of democracy based on the critical realist school.  Realist (or real) democracy is a societal system in which citizens are empowered to fulfilling human capacities and there is group level equality.  The book sets out a methodology for measuring real democracy and traces patterns around the world and in select country case studies.  The book has important conceptual and policy implications for our understanding of democracy and how it can protected and strengthened around the world.

• (2025, in development) What is Electoral Integrity? Reconceptualising Election Quality in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge University Press), with Holly Ann Garnett.

Elections are indispensable for democracy.  They give citizens an opportunity to elect their representatives, hold governments to account and shape policy making.  Recent scholarship on electoral integrity has led to enormous advances in understanding the policy mechanisms for delivering better elections and consequences of good quality elections.  However, there is a longstanding debate about how to conceptualise electoral integrity.  Should they be judged based on international agreements?  Public perceptions of what constitutes a ‘fair’ elections?  Or should our conceptions of electoral integrity be connected to normative theory? 

This debate has become even more pressing in light of new forms of autocratic adaption, foreign interference from subversive actors, the challenges of delivering elections as the digital era progresses, and other threats such as global health emergencies and climate change. 

This book argues that we live in an age of uncertainty in which there are new risks to elections. To respond to this pressing concern, the book introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding electoral integrity by drawing from democratic theory.  This is proposed as an alternative normative framework for evaluating election quality and will be used by the authors to measure electoral integrity in the future through a revised version of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index.  This book will provide important lessons for prescribing best practices to defend and enrich democracy, as well as major scholarly implications for the study of democracy, democratisation, comparative politics and beyond.

• (2025, in development) Oxford Handbook of Electoral Integrity (New York: Oxford University Press), with Holly Ann Garnett.

Elections are indispensable for the democratic process, yet the quality of elections can vary enormously between and within countries. Elections can often be marred by problems such as disinformation spread on social media, gerrymandered electoral districts, claims of voter fraud, electoral violence and intimidation and low public confidence in voting technology. These concerns about election quality have therefore been central to debates about democratization and democratic backsliding – one of the pressing concerns of our time.

Scholarship over the last ten years has led to enormous advances in defining and measuring this important concept, using the terms “free and fair” elections (Elklit & Svensson, 1997), “electoral malpractice” (Birch, 2011) and most recently, “electoral integrity” (Norris, 2014, 2015, 2017a). This work has demonstrated the crucial consequences of electoral integrity for democratic outcomes – from citizen participation and trust in government, to local and global security and peace. Researchers have thus sought to use a variety of academic methods to evaluate how the policies, practices and programmes designed to impact electoral integrity have affected elections around the globe, and advanced or threatened democratic ideals.

The Oxford Handbook on Electoral Integrity is designed to consolidate existing research on electoral integrity for both scholars and practitioners, and launch new research agendas on emerging issues, including the role of emergency preparedness, cyber-security, and civic literacy.  As a field that has expanded and diversified greatly in the past ten years, both among academics and in public discourse, this volume will be a timely contribution to our knowledge of electoral integrity around the globe.  It will be an essential map and tool for academics and practitioners.  In this volume, an introductory section will first explore the concept of ‘electoral integrity’ (and associated concepts – like ‘election quality’, ‘electoral malpractice’ and ‘free and fair’ elections). It will also explore the varieties of methods and data sources that have been used to study this concept – both qualitative and quantitative. The second section, which will comprise the bulk of the volume, will cover the stages of the electoral cycle following key principles for electoral integrity: institutionalization, law and governance; contestation and deliberation; participation in the voting process; and dispute remediation.

(2025) The Effects of Wars: Lessons from the War in Ukraine (New York: Routledge), (eds) with Pierre Bouquillon, Suzanne Doyle, Ra Mason, Soul Park and Matilde Rosina

War has been an ever-present feature of human existence. The analysis of wars has tended to focus on either their causes or the military and strategic consequences of a conflict.  This book argues that war can have a much wider impact across layers of society that go beyond international boundaries.  It presents a framework for analysing the ripple and backwash effects across five connected analytical layers around the world: material; human capabilities; economic; values belief and attitudes; policy and governance; and power.   Through this framework, the book then introduces a set of empirically rich and theoretically informed studies which examine the first consequences of the war in Ukraine following the invasion of Russia in February 2022.  This multi-disciplinary approach shows that the effects of the war were much deeper and sustained.

(2023) Elections in Emergencies and Crises: Lessons for Electoral Integrity from the Covid-19 Pandemic (International IDEA: Stockholm), with Alistair Clark and Erik Asplund.

Elections often have to be held in emergency situations. The Covid-19 pandemic was one of the most serious emergency situations that the world has seen. The rapid spread of the virus presented a huge humanitarian threat—but also an unparalleled challenge to electoral stakeholders globally seeking to protect electoral integrity during times of uncertainty. This volume identifies how the pandemic affected electoral integrity, what measures were put in place to protect elections and what worked in defending them. It brings together a comprehensive set of 26 country case studies to explore how elections were affected on the ground, what measures were put in place and what worked. These case studies are of elections which took place in the eye of the storm when practitioners and policymakers were operating under uncertainty and without the benefit of hindsight.  

To learn lessons in a more systematic way, this volume also provides a thematic analysis of electoral integrity during the pandemic using crossnational studies. This provides the big picture for policymakers, practitioners and academics looking back at the crisis. The volume therefore seeks to contribute towards the future development of policy and practice. However, it does so by using academic research methods and concepts which enable greater confidence in the policy lessons, as well as contributing directly to the scholarship on democracy, democratization and elections. The volume includes 11 areas of recommendation based on the evidence collected in this volume to protect electoral integrity in any future emergency situation. 

(2023) Governance and Public Administration in China (Routledge: New York and London), with Wei Liu and Caixia Man.

China has traditionally been held up around the world as the archetype of centralised governance and a top-down system of public administration. But to what extent does this remain true of modern China? This book provides an updated perspective on modern China through a series of cutting edge, original studies focusing on public administration in China.

The book opens with an overview of the key political institutions and the evolution of public administration research in China, followed by two distinct sections. Part I contains studies focusing on power, governance, and administration. Part II focuses on ‘what works’ in solving wicked problems in Chinese society. The volume shows that China has seen some localisation and decentralisation, alongside experiments with collaboration and networked-based policy making. However, the system of governance and public administration remains innately top-down and centralised with the centre holding strong policy levers and control over society. As the pandemic revealed, this statist approach provided both governing opportunities and disadvantages.

(2022) The Trump Administration: The President’s Legacy Within and Beyond America (Routledge: London and New York).

The Trump presidency has been one of the most eventful and controversial in American history, with consequences for the governance and policy of the US and beyond. While Trump left office claiming a long list of ‘Trump Administration Accomplishments’, his time in office was also marked by a hailstorm of criticism. But beyond the sensationalist tweets and news stories, what policy effects did he bring?

This volume provides an extensive and authoritative set of studies evaluating Donald Trump’s impact on American society and beyond. It provides a new layered framework for assessing the policy impact of leaders, which can be used for understanding presidential and prime ministerial leadership more widely. Chapters explore his impact on American democracy, Congress, the Supreme Court, the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic, the environment, American soft power, the international system and more.

• (2020) Comparative Electoral Management (Routledge: London and New York).

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections.

The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials.

• (2020) Building Inclusive Elections (Routledge: London and New York), with Holly Ann Garnett.

lections around the world are plagued with the problem of unequal levels of participation. This can have profound consequences for election results, representation and policies. This book focuses on the interventions that can be used to redress the turnout gap and other inequalities within the electoral process.

The book defines the concept of inclusive voting practices to refer to policy instruments which can reduce turnout inequality between groups and mitigate other inequalities within the electoral process. Studies from around the world then examine how policies can affect inclusivity on election day. This includes research on enfranchising felons and migrant communities; compulsory voting; voter ID requirements; voter registration practices; investment in electoral management; gendered electoral violence; accessible voting practices; and overseas voting. As a result, this book will be of interest to scholars of democracy, democratic theory and elections, as well as having major policy implications worldwide.

• (2015) British Labour Leaders (Biteback: London, with Charles Clarke).

As the party that championed trade union rights, the creation of the NHS and the establishment of a national minimum wage, Labour has played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Keir Hardie to Ed Miliband, via Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success.

With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Labour leadership since the party’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century inception have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition – and not all its leaders have managed to keep up.

This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the country’s foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves.

An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Labour Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.

• (2015) British Conservative Leaders (Biteback: London), with Charles Clarke, Tim Bale and Patrick Diamond.

As the party that has won wars, reversed recessions and held prime ministerial power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm – from Sir Robert Peel to David Cameron, via Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success.

With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Conservative leadership since the party’s nineteenth-century factional breakaway have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition – and not all its leaders have managed to keep up.

This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the country’s foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves.

An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Conservative Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.

• (2012) Elite Statecraft and Election Administration (Palgrave: Basingstoke)

The way in which elections are run is changing, as radical reforms or experiments have been introduced across the world. This book establishes why election administration might be used by political elites to win and maintain power. It identifies the role of elite interests in shaping election administration in USA, UK and Ireland.