Critical Review on 'A Social Democratic Narrative of British Democracy' Bansi Mehta: 180068636 Beech, M. (2011). A Social Democratic narrative of British Democracy. Policy Studies. [online] Taylor & Francis. Available at: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer? vid=2&sid=86d0d4b6-5d00-4402-9559- a737e6e7ea88%40sessionmgr104&thePreGuestLoginUrl=/eds/detail/detail The article I have chosen to analyse is called 'A social democratic narrative of British democracy' and argues that in a British democracy, social democracy is a political ideology contributes to it. There are three main focuses of the article, where the author addresses these statements and provides an argument. The first argument is whether the article evaluates the ideological role of democracy in social democracy and that it attempts to give a history of democracy and democratisation of British social democratic thought. The author does address these statements clearly by going through the history of British democracy, for example in the fourth line of the paragraph, it quotes 'This is because the histories of Conservatism and Liberalism ... ' and then goes into further detail of the history of British democracy, such as enfranchisement in Britain. The author does also evaluate the ideological role of democracy in social democracy by giving a two-sided argument by comparing the Marxist socialism theory by its intellectual challenge from Eduard Bernstein. The use of the two-side argument shows that there is a structure in the argument and that it does follow its focus in the article, followed by a convincing conclusion, drawing up his evaluation from the rest of argument under this subtitle. Secondly, Beech evaluates the main policies and reforms since 1997 made by New Labour to apply an agenda of democratisation. This argument structured well, as it provides two sided arguments - evaluating the policies and reforms made. For example, he discusses that the Labour Party has lowered the amount of campaigns for democratic renewal to favour other policies but then on another hand the Labour government did devolve power, however his arguments on how the Labour party put across democratic renewal was weak and not as persuasive, perhaps due to the lack of points he put across. The last focus of the article was to offer suggestions for future social democratic reforms of the British institutions. An important quote I picked up, 'the civic realm of life must contain the opportunity for individual citizens to exercise power', made it seem that this argument had an underlying theme of political participation. It was structured clearly by going through each of the reforms and discussing what was / or is the problem and why it should be solved by the certain reform, also explaining why that particular reform is a good idea. The strongest argument was about reforming the use of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) by giving three long and persuasive reasons for the need of changing the electoral system that connected to the quote that I noticed, showing that his points were being linked to his underlying theories. However, what weakens his suggestions on democratic reform is that is very one sided and doesn't outline whether the reforms are