For much of the past decade I have been engaged in assessing the level or quality of democracy in a number of countries, both for the UK Democratic Audit and for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm. As a culmination of this work so far I and colleagues have published a handbook on democracy assessment (Beetham et al., 2002a), a comparative summary of eight assessments from developed and developing countries and our latest democratic audit of the UK, updated to include the Iraq war and its consequences.