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the law, and free and fair elections. Alongside this, the findings show that European citizens are both democratic and demanding, and that the real issue is not the attitudes of the citizens, but the poor performance of democratic systems in Europe. While these findings show that European countries are by and large legitimate, the real issue lies in the non-procedural elements of democracy; it is in the arena of social democracy, such as protection against poverty, that European countries are failing. Despite this, there remains heterogeneity in attitudes, with citizens in countries with poorer performing systems more demanding than those in countries that perform well. Perhaps most interestingly, the book seeks to explain this variation, finding that both context and normative expectations of different elements of democracy affect citizens’ evaluations (chapter 10). These findings culminate in a methodological chapter on the commonly used ‘Satisfaction with Democracy’ measure, finding that satisfaction with democracy is reliable if one controls for an individual’s prior conceptions of democracy: importantly, not all citizens think of the same feature of democracy. How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy is a theoretically and empirically excellent book, which draws on and contributes to democratic theory, methodology and the substantive literature at hand, and makes its case convincingly. It would have been interesting for the book to reflect on two features of contemporary politics. First, is it possible that the context of European democracy – namely, in the European Union – alters these findings? Second, how does the rise of anti-democratic political movements sit alongside these largely positive findings? This does not detract from the relevance of the book, however. The extremely rich theoretical and empirical content should be of interest to scholars in a range of fields, and anyone interested in the rapidly changing political context of Europe.