Media Discourse and the Quality of Democracy in Serbia after Milošević

The article examines the quality of democracy in Serbia via the quantitative analysis of media discourse. It reveals robust competition, participation and accountability in the first decade after regime change, followed by major recent decline, thus showing that expert assessments from influential indices of democracy underrated democratic quality in the former period and overrated it later. Also revealed are the advantages of complementing expert assessments with those based on media discourse. The content analysis examined 1,921 coded items from print and electronic media coverage of major political conflicts at strategic points in the country?s democratisation.