Media Discourse and the Quality of Democracy in Serbia after Milošević NEBOJŠA VLADISAVLJEVIĆ Abstract 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. THE MASSIVE POPULAR MOBILISATION AGAINST AUTHORITARIAN RULE in October 2000 raised hopes that Serbia’s democratic development would advance rapidly in the following years. Slobodan Milošević, the country’s leader from the late 1980s, ended up in jail and later in The Hague Tribunal, while old-regime parties remained in disarray. The democratic opposition coalition (Demokratska opozicija Srbije—DOS) took over the main levers of power, working hard to end Serbia’s international isolation after the Balkan wars of the 1990s and to introduce major political and economic reforms. There have been several changes of power since, between parties previously in the DOS and later also involving reinvented old-regime parties. Looking back, it seems that popular hopes and demands for democratisation have only partially been met. Scholarly accounts of Serbia’s political development after 2000 based on detailed empirical research suggest that Serbia is a weak and unstable democracy at best (Pavlović & Antonić 2007; Dolenec 2013). Most accounts focus on transitional justice, Serbia’s prospective membership of the European Union (EU), the secession of Kosovo or the issue of corruption, which are important but only indirectly relevant to the aspects of democracy discussed in this article (Listhaug et al. 2011; Gordy 2013; Zurnić 2019). Reputable and widely used quantitative indices of democracy reveal a slow improvement in the level and quality of democracy © 2019 University of Glasgow https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1669534 This work was supported by the Seventh Framework Programme: [Grant Number 613370] and by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia: [Grant Number 179076]. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2020 Vol. 72, No. 1, January 2020, 8–32