Stresses and Strains: Will We Ever Agree on What’s Going Wrong with Democracy?

ABSTRACT It’s clear that the ‘crisis of democracy’ is a concept that is now well embedded in the self-understanding of political scientists writing about contemporary politics. What is less clear is what is meant by democratic crisis and why there appears to be little agreement on what the contours of the crisis are. By extension, we find it difficult to distinguish between the forms of crisis that appear to be a threat to the system of legitimation and stresses that might challenge particular aspects of functioning, without imperiling the whole. In this paper, I offer an overview of how the issue is framed in contemporary scholarship, and show how the various responses can be mapped in terms of two variables: duration and intensity. This in turn can help us think about how to differentiate between the accounts that imply system crisis and those that frame contemporary developments as forms of stress that may in fact show the resilience of democracy in the face of threat.