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ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to contribute in two respects to the evolving research agenda focused on the problem of democratic resilience. First, we attempt to provide several clarifications regarding the general concept of ‘democratic resilience’, in the course of which we both assess a number of accounts offered thus far and discuss some difficulties raised by elements of its most attractive articulation. Second, we outline a specific conception of democratic resilience framed on minimalist grounds and designed so as to be compatible with a wide range of descriptive and normative models of democracy. Aside from the conceptual and analytical value of these contributions, we also point to their practical relevance for both empirical assessments and for the normative and applied-level evaluation of democratic institutions and their performance.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The label backsliding raises a number of important conceptual and normative issues (Wolkenstein, Citation2022). Others have been proposed to refer to the same phenomenon and throughout the paper we will use backsliding and democratic erosion (Laebens & Luhrmann, Citation2021) interchangeably.
2 See Dowding (Citation2016, p. 189) for a discussion on the importance of this idea in conceptual analysis.
3 Barring a few exceptions such as Rosenthal (Citation2016) or Albert and Pal (Citation2017).
4 See Bourbeau (Citation2018) for a more in-depth look at how the concept emerges and is used across various fields of research.
5 A case study which has also been discussed by Laebens and Luhrmann (Citation2021) as an ultimately successful example of democratic resilience.
6 For an extensive discussion on accountability mechanisms and the distinction between vertical accountability mechanisms (e.g. free and fair elections), horizontal ones (e.g. an independent judiciary), and diagonal ones (e.g. a free media) see Laebens and Luhrmann (Citation2021, pp. 912–914).
7 For a more in-depth look at the case of Ecuador, including some more recent developments, see de la Torre and Ortiz Lemos (Citation2016), Balderacchi (Citation2017), de Lara and de la Torre (Citation2020) and Polga-Hecimovich (Citation2020)
8 For the relation between polarisation and backsliding see Lieberman et al. (Citation2022).
9 We group all of these under the label of maintenance, in line with the general concept of resilience rather than distinguish between maintenance, marginality, and transformation as Holloway and Manwaring do (2023, p. 80).
10 We draw here on Rawls’s (Citation1971 [1999]) familiar distinction between a concept of justice, which aims to describe what justice is about (i.e. the assignment of basic rights and duties as well as the burdens and benefits of social cooperation), and a conception of justice, such as justice as fairness, which aims to specify how basic rights, duties, and the burdens and benefits of social cooperation should be distributed. Even though some political philosophers are skeptical of the general usefulness of this distinction (e.g. Dowding, Citation2016, p. 201), we believe it is relevant in the current context as, on the one hand, there are separate difficulties affecting each level of conceptualisation and, on the other one, the prospects for reaching a shared understanding on the concept of democratic resilience are somewhat better than those for a conception of democratic resilience, as the latter is bound to be more intricately specified and, thus, more controversial.
11 And this practice continued well into 2023, when a new constitutional referendum was organised by the Lasso administration (although all proposed measures were defeated in this case).
12 Addressing these actions also give rise to an interesting question, albeit one which we cannot discuss here further, of what are the democratically permissible methods of restoring democratic institutions after they have been undermined as part of a disturbance.
13 For the latter two, which were not as extensively discussed up to this point, see Palos Pons and Hallin (Citation2021) and de la Torre (Citation2014).
14 In contrast to some authors, who outline conceptions of democratic resilience by narrowly pinpointing the agents responsible for the disturbance, such as ‘the ability of the institutional guardrails and civil society to withstand the attempts of technocratic populists to erode accountability’ (Guasti, Citation2020, p. 476).
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Notes on contributors
Alexandru Volacu
Alexandru Volacu is Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest and Ameropa Fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest. He is also a Senior Researcher in the project Resilience and Stability in Polycentric Governance Systems. Theoretical, Empirical and Applied-Level Perspectives (POLYGOV), financed by CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant no. PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-1076. His research interests include democratic theory, the ethics of voting, and theories of justice.
Paul Dragos Aligica
Paul Dragoș Aligică is KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest and Senior Research Fellow in the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in PPE at Mercatus Center, George Mason University. He is also the Director of the project Resilience and Stability in Polycentric Governance Systems. Theoretical, Empirical and Applied-Level Perspectives (POLYGOV), financed by CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant no. PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-1076. His research interests include institutional theory, political economy and social philosophy, and futures studies.