ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Democracy Scores published by Freedom House in which Serbia has consistently been graded as less democratic than Bulgaria over the past decade. These grading are an artefact of the methodological approach used to deliver the verdicts, which is to say that they privilege institutional frameworks and practices over all else. The chapter discusses the theoretical debate concerning the study of democracy by arguing that the progress of liberal democracy ought to be understood in a way that is at least appreciative of the analytical dimension of everyday practice. In Serbia, the relatively prominent role of liberal discourse in political talk provides a strong counterpoint to the illiberal discourses that occupy the mainstream of political discourse. In Bulgaria by contrast, the content of discussion tends to be less philosophically diverse, leading to the persistence of an illiberal and exclusionary consensus around generally uncontested conservative orthodoxies.
