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

To note that democracy is in crisis has in recent years moved from being a mildly contentious proposition, to a truism (Tormey, Citation2015). Whether one is interested in day-to-day politics, in elections and the goings-on of parliaments and assemblies, or the longer range structural and systemic evolution of advanced democratic states, the conclusion would appear to be the same: democracies have never been under as much stress as they are currently. The election of figures like Trump and Duterte, the result of the Brexit referendum, the steady rise of far right and nativist movements and parties across the European continent and elsewhere, all add to the sense that something is fundamentally shifting in the coordinates of democratic life – and not in a good way. What is also apparent however is that behind this consensus lie a range of different analyses and by extension a range of different panaceas for addressing the crisis. It is not after all because we agree that there is a crisis, that we will agree on what the nature of the crisis is, or what has to be done to address it.

So, an important preliminary task for those of us interested in the discursive politics of democratic crisis is to map the various ways in which the idea of ‘crisis’ is framed so that we can see for ourselves what is at stake in a vocabulary and mode of exposition that might otherwise hide more than it reveals. In this paper, I offer a heuristic overview of some of the dominant ways in which theorists have talked about the crisis of democracy. This isn’t a literature review, so much as a conceptual essay that will help us think about the key coordinates underpinning the ever-proliferating literature on democratic crisis. What will become apparent is that two variables are particularly important in terms of situating these different accounts: temporality and intensity.

As regards temporality, there are accounts that in effect see democracy as more or less permanently in crisis. Democracy here is seen as expressive of capitalism, itself a crisis-prone social formation. Equally, there are however those who see crisis in more conjunctural terms: as wedded to certain specific occurrences or features of the contemporary political landscape, in turn implying limited duration. As regards intensity, there are those who see the chronic nature of democracy’s crisis as being rooted in some aspect or other of political modernity. Equally, there are others who see the talk of crisis as so much rhetorical hot air, a useful embonpoint for framing suggestions around how democracy could be improved or reformed. A preliminary typology might therefore be framed in quadrant formed through the intersection of a temporality axis and an intensity axis (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Temporality vs Intensity.

Display full size

What follows is not a means exhaustive in terms of mapping contemporary concerns about the direction democracy is headed. It is intended rather to be illustrative of the point that the idea of a crisis of democracy is by no means a settled proposition. While there are points of agreement around what constitutes crisis, there are important distinctions within and beyond the literature that give witness to a highly contested terrain of analysis. Understanding the coordinates of that terrain will be important in terms of assessing normative recommendations, and by extension what it is we should be doing, if anything, to address the issue. The quadrant will provide a simple heuristic for mapping how ‘crisis’ plays out in the literature, and also then how the concept of stress used in this issue maps on to some of the key interpretations. Following the introduction (Giovannini and Wood), democratic stress refers to tensions between traditional democratic institutions and democratic pressures, manifested as ‘informal’ institutional dynamics (populism, protest, democratic ‘innovations’ and so forth) placing pressure on them. As the figure suggests, stress implies something of relatively short duration and limited intensity. This is by contrast with other interpretations that variously describe a crisis that is so deep and entrenched that it imperils the system, or equally so minor as to be essentially functional to how we should be thinking about democracy.

1. The (Permanent) Crisis of Democracy – Crisis as Endemic Condition

The idea of the crisis of democracy is not new. Indeed, the first harbingers of doom as far as liberal democracy can be found in the late nineteenth century. What is new is the collective sense of ‘crisis’. The spate of articles and books on the theme of the crisis, indeed on the death of democracy, is telling. It was only 20 years ago or so after all that Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’ by which he meant the end of fundamental contestation around which kind of political arrangements we should have. Democracy had, it seemed, won, banishing other conceptions of politics to the margins. This idea was debated widely not least by those whom it was intended to provoke: radical critics of capitalism and ‘bourgeois’ democracy who take their lead from Marx’s account of the relationship between capitalism and democracy. There are many different variants of the critique with some following the contours of Marx’s account closely, while others such as Ernesto Laclau, Jodi Dean and Slavoj Zizek work within various kinds of post or neo-Marxist account (Laclau, Citation2001; Dean, Citation2009; Žižek, Citation2011). Still others such as Wendy Brown and Colin Hay stress the transformation of the public realm under neoliberalism, implying that it is less capitalism that has produced a crisis of democracy as much as the neoliberal variant of it (Hay, Citation2007; Brown, Citation2015).

To recall, for Marx politics is essentially an epiphenomenal activity the contours of which are dictated by the requirements of social reproduction. Under capitalist conditions, this means ensuring that the bourgeois class is able to generate profit through exploiting labour to generate the goods and services it can sell in national and international markets. Given the vagaries of the trade cycle, international competition and the falling rate of profit, capitalism is it seems always on the brink of crisis if it is not already in one. Politics under capitalist conditions is thus not only about managing the crisis that is endemic to capitalism, it is also about managing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism between those who own the means of production and exchange and those who are subject to it. Class war lurks beneath the surface of even the most ‘functional’ liberal capitalist societies.

This understanding of the relationship between capitalism and bourgeois democracy was greatly expanded upon by Antonio Gramsci in turn the key influence of important chroniclers of democratic crisis such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. Gramsci expanded upon Marx’s own account of how bourgeois hegemony works through understanding the dynamic whereby those in power are able to convince those subject to that power that their position is legitimate and worthy of their support. According to Gramsci, the ruling class secures its power under advanced democratic conditions by convincing the broad mass of citizens that democracy works for the general good. But this is put at risk by virtue of the nature of capitalism itself, which continually seeks expansion through exploitation of the vast majority. Democracy is always caught in the bind of having to serve two masters: those for whom it works, and those who are the subject of democracy, ‘the people’. The sense of democracy as being in ‘crisis’ is not therefore contingent or temporary, as much as something endemic to democracy under capitalist conditions. Capitalism is by definition crisis prone, and that crisis is held to play out or express itself in political terms through a contest between representatives of various class interests. Now thatpolitical parties are much less the bearers of these interests than they once where, this contest often involves other actors such as trade unions and social movements, and the various organisations composing civil society. There is no, and can be no, respite for democracy on this reading. Either capitalism is replaced by a system that resolves the fundamental contradictions at the heart of social reproduction, or it continues in a state of permanent crisis. Democratic stress on this reading manifests the structural incapacity of the liberal-democratic system to fulfil its vocation as the bearer of the will of the people. It is beholden first and foremost to capital – not the demos.

It follows that any resolution of this crisis involves a fundamental renegotiation of the relationship between capital and labour so that the deep disparity of power and wealth that currently characterises democratic states is addressed in some far-reaching way. This could be, as for example, Piketty argues, through massive redistribution from rich to poor (Piketty, Citation2014). Or it could be through some more extensive reorganisation of the system of social reproduction itself to diminish or eliminate the antagonism between workers and owners as Marxists have traditionally argued.

What is clear, however, is that there can be no resolution of the crisis of democracy by tinkering with the system of representation itself, through lowering barriers of entry for participants and actors, through creating more opportunities for deliberation or any of the other kinds of reform often introduced into the discussion by democratic theorists. At the very least democracy has to be, as Laclau and Mouffe famously argued, ‘radicalised’, which is to say extended to all areas of economic and social life, not just those the elites chose to identify as ‘public’ in contradistinction to those areas remaining ‘private’, notably the domain of economic activity (Laclau & Mouffe, Citation1985). It also follows that what we are calling here ‘democratic stress’ needs to be characterised as a symptom of a more deep-lying antagonism lying at the heart of the system of social reproduction. Attending to these stresses is unlikely in and of itself to resolve tensions that have their cause in a system of class exploitation and dispossession.

2. Trends and Trajectories – Crisis as Expressive of Late Modernity

By contrast with Marxist analysis, the starting point for many political science approaches to understanding the nature of the crisis of democracy is the evidence of decline as far as the key indicators of the relative health of democracy is concerned (Dalton, Citation2004; Mair, Citation2013). If we compare many of today’s key indicators with the 1960s it is easy to form the view that citizens have become disillusioned with the system of representation, and thus that the system is in crisis encouraging democratic back-sliding and the move to authoritarianism, particularly in the developing world. In mature democracies, the most prominent indicator, the willingness of citizens to vote, shows this reasonably clearly. We have moved from a world where 70 or 80% of citizens voted to one where it is often much less than this. This is particularly the case at the subnational and indeed supra-national level where often turnout can be seen to have declined very significantly in the past half-century. However, the evidence is not all one way. It’s also clear that when citizens perceive a significant difference between candidates or parties, or where the stakes seem in other regards to be high, then turn out often improves, sometimes remarkably so. After several decades of decline in terms of turnout, the Brexit referendum showed that even the most disinterested citizens in the UK could stir themselves to express a view in impressive numbers. Recent presidential elections in the US and France show a similar trend: citizens will vote in greater numbers when it seems there is a clear distinction to be drawn between candidates. This seems to back up the thesis that when commenting on citizen engagement we need to distinguish between causes identifying the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ – or between what it is that politicians offer by way of analysis and prescription and what it is that citizens need and want. Citizens can appear to be apathetic when they perceive that the stakes are low in terms of the choices available to them. But where they perceive real differences between offerings, interest in voting and engaging with electoral processes can rise significantly.

What seems more expressive of the ‘decline’ story is the situation with regard to party membership. Whereas in the 1960s a large proportion – as much as a third in countries such as the UK – of the electorate in many democracies were members of one of the major political parties, that figure has declined in a dramatic fashion (Mair & Van Biezen, Citation2001; Van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke, Citation2012). The concern here is that the political party has traditionally been one of the main, if not the main, mechanism in advanced democracies for ordinary citizens to become engaged in politics. But even here the evidence is far from clear cut. The revival of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn suggests that where political parties tap into the views and sentiments of newer constituencies, and in particular the young, they can address or even reverse the tendencies. Other qualifiers include the fact that we are seeing under certain circumstances the proliferation of new political parties of a different kind to the traditional mass party. For example, after the citizen protests of 2011 in Spain (popularly termed ‘#15M’) over 500 new political parties were formed (Tormey & Feenstra, Citation2015). Many of them had an open membership model, were run on a voluntary basis, and involved assemblies and informal gatherings. On the other hand, many of them disappeared almost as fast as they were set up. So it may be that the ecology of political parties is changing rather than the attractiveness or otherwise of the party form itself.

Other indicators that could be mentioned here include measures of trust in politicians, and more broadly still interest in politics (Rosanvallon, Citation2008). When we try to capture what is happening as regards these important variables the evidence tends to suggest that we are seeing a significant erosion in terms of what are generally held to be important elements composing the overall picture in terms of the health of our democracies. We trust politicians much less now than we used to (Goot, Citation2002). We are much more sceptical about the motivations of our representatives, and when we take an interest in politicians it is usually with regard to stories of scandal, corruption or cronyism. More generally, the days when a significant portion of the electorate demonstrated an interest in the routine politics of parliaments, assemblies and their committees has significantly diminished. Whether the decline in media coverage of ‘serious politics’ is a cause or an effect of this erosion of interest is a moot point. What is less in question is the sense of citizens becoming ever more distant from the traditional sites of political power, from their representatives, and from the routine business as that is understood in liberal democracies (Keane, Citation2009; Dalton, Citation2004; Mair, Citation2013).

The above account of the decline of representative politics provokes a sociological view of these developments in terms of the progressive erosion of the understandings that sustained a model of representative democracy that first emerged in the nineteenth century. Among the more important of these understandings include the idea of the integrity of the nation state, and thus the centrality of territorial politics to democracy. They also include what we might term ‘bounded pluralism’. This is the idea that citizens vote according to relatively predictable lines of affinity in terms of interests, ideologies or identities. This in turn provided the impetus for the creation of political parties expressive of those affinities or cleavages providing something like a transmission belt between government and voter preferences.

Over the past half-century or so, many of the elements that propped up this view of how democratic politics should work have come into question. We have moved from a world of relatively simple political geographies to one marked by complex territoriality and in turn complex or shared models of sovereignty. We have moved from easily mapped categories of identity to a discourse and practice marked by what Bauman, Beck and others characterise as ‘individualisation’ (Beck, Citation1997; Bauman, Citation2001). As we become less inclined to see ourselves in terms of the kind of categories and identities that political parties were set up to represent, so our political practices become less predictable, more evanescent and contingent. All this seems to be accelerated by the revolution in communication technology allowing individuals to bypass traditional political structures to create apparently leaderless and more spontaneous kinds of organisation based on various affinities and connections (Castells, Citation2012). These developments do not necessarily threaten more traditional forms of politics. Indeed, political parties have been among the early adopters in seeking to use ICT for their own purposes. But other developments have made us wonder whether what Bennett and Segerberg term ‘connective’ technologies might pose a longer term threat to the representative nature of politics (Bennett & Segerberg, Citation2012). They note how Twitter, Facebook and other platforms provided the basis for mobilising millions of citizens in Egypt, in Spain and most notably as part of the Occupy movement, each of which was notable for rejecting a discourse and practice of representation in favour of one based on participation, assemblies, and collective deliberation.

Implied in this evolutionary and sociological approach is the idea that the crisis of democracy heralds the progressive problematisation of party-based representative politics of the kind that has been paradigmatic in most advanced democracies since the start of the twentieth century. Democratic stress equates on this reading to waning engagement with and participation in the institutions and processes that characterise mature liberal democracies. There are a number of different ways in which this can play out, some of which may be helpful to stabilising the system of representation while others may threaten it in some way. An increase for example in forms of political participation around discrete campaigns or issues does not at one level pose a challenge to traditional party politics. On the contrary, it might provide a useful outlet for the kinds of energies that might otherwise become more disruptive. Equally, the ease and facility of creating new political organisations using ICT might be a stimulus to the party system, rather than a threat to it. This was certainly the case in Spain where the facility of citizens to create new political parties was an important factor in stabilising the existing system, which at one point seemed to be on the brink of breakdown. Once citizens made the leap from street protest to mobilising to create new parties, crisis dissipated and energies were channelled into the electoral system, rather than bringing the system of representation into question. The sense of the system being in crisis was averted and replaced by one in which various ‘stresses’ were able to be mediated and managed (Feenstra, Tormey, Casero-Ripollés, & Keane, Citation2017).

So, in this account, the crisis of democracy appears less as an existential crisis whose outcome is likely to be the displacement of representative democracy, than one concerning a particular model of how representative democracy should work. The sense of the end of a particular paradigm for how we should organise ourselves explains the upsurge of interest in developing alternative models to party-based representative democracy among political theorists, notably deliberative democracy and online direct democracy (Dryzek, Citation2002; Smith, Citation2017). The idea is that by stimulating greater engagement and participation in governing processes either directly through citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting and the like, or indirectly through encouraging a plurality of actors such as social movements and neighbourhood assemblies to get involved, this will reduce democratic stress and improve governance for the betterment of the citizens for whom it is supposed to operate.

3. Democratic Crisis as Exception

The trickle of work devoted to the crisis of democracy quickly became a flood in the wake of the global financial crisis, recession and the ensuing regime of austerity imposed on many advanced democratic countries. While for some this is merely the latest episode demonstrating the endemic crisis qualities of liberal democracy, others are of the view that this accelerated certain negative traits, as well as bringing forward new issues and problems. Chief among the latter was the emergence of populism as a mainstream political tendency, as opposed to a minor nuisance confined to the developing world. Mark Blyth sees the rise of ‘global Trumpism’, which is to say a right-wing nativist anti-internationalist style of politics, as directly caused by the GFC. His approach is echoed in the views of many who take a political economy approach to explaining political changes. Commentators such as Wolfgang Streeck, Yanis Varoufakis and David Harvey argue that democracy has been too obliging to neoliberal capitalism permitting the latter to colonise the democratic life world in turn severing the link between citizens and elites (Streeck, Citation2017; Varoufakis, Citation2017; Harvey, Citation2005). Populism is the predictable reaction to a perceived lack of accountability and the widening gulf between rich and poor.

There is a great deal of debate about what exactly populism is, but most commentators agree that as a very minimum it is a style of ‘outsider’ politics that sets ‘the people’ against the elites (Moffitt & Tormey, Citation2014). In Europe, we have seen the emergence and strengthening on the right of powerful nativist parties in France with the Front National, in Germany with Alternative für Deutschland, in the UK with UKIP and figures such as Nigel Farage, and across central and eastern Europe with the arrival of nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee parties. Even countries such as Greece where until recently the left was dominant have seen the emergence of nationalist political parties. Further afield, we can note the extraordinary election of Donald Trump, the continued consolidation of figures such as Putin in nominally democratic countries, and the emergence of outsider figures such as Duterte in the Philippines.

Notwithstanding the fact that many of these figures and parties were elected under democratic conditions, the rise of populism is usually seen as a threat to democracy as well as symptomatic of the broader crisis of democracy (Mudde, Citation2014, Müller, Citation2016). They are the product of disillusionment and despair at elites who are held to be responsible for financial crisis as well as for inflicting austerity measures on the victims of it. A common theme here is a general backlash against ‘liberal’ values, cosmopolitanism, a belief in the inexorable globalisation of the world, and the idea of open borders and open markets. So, this is as much a crisis of liberal democracy as it is one concerning the institutions and processes that we associate with contemporary democratic society. It is liberalism as much as the actions of any particular elites that is reaping the backlash.

Intrinsic to this position is the hope if not the expectation that with a return to economic growth much of what appears here in the form of a ‘crisis’ will, if not blow over, then become rather less threatening than it currently appears. In short, this is less a case of deep lying structural factors or systemic issues that make us query the integrity or efficacy of the system of representation than a reading of the daily motivations of those affected by economic crisis. As unemployment comes down, incomes go up, and the balance sheet of national and local governments turn positive, so something approaching a more normal form of democratic politics will kick in. And there is good evidence to support the assumption. The citizen insurgency that so disrupted Spain in 2011, petered out due to the return of economic growth, particularly in the major cities. The incorporation of some of the more radical movements and parties such as Podemos into the system of representation itself has also helped. Elsewhere, the green shoots of recovery enabled Emmanuel Macron to overcome Le Pen in the French presidential election of 2017. More generally far left and far-right parties have largely been on the back foot in Western European elections since the populist ‘explosion’ of 2016.

A political economy reading of the threat posed by populism seems therefore to offer a useful perspective on the current crisis. It focuses on the nexus between economic and political stresses, emphasising the degree to which perceptions of the adequacy of the democratic system correlate to economic considerations and in particular factors that impact an individual’s sense of well-being: employment, wage growth, health of public services and so on. On this reading, the rise of populism and the sense of crisis correlates directly with one of the worse recessions since the 1930s, one that has left ‘somewheres’ (i.e. the traditional white working class) feeling isolated and betrayed by the political class (Goodhart, Citation2017). Once, so it is argued, the economy picks up, so these feelings should ebb and be replaced by ones more favourable to maintaining the political mainstream. But does the containment of populism amount to resolving the crisis of democracy? Will economic growth in and of itself revitalise institutions and practices and help dampen down the sense of democratic stress? It has to be doubted given as we have already noted that many of the trends and tendencies associated with the decline of the party-based liberal-democratic model pre-date the GFC and the recent upsurge of populist parties and movements. More likely we will see the continued erosion of the sense of participation mass political parties gave citizens. They will be displaced by an increasingly diverse repertoire of mechanisms for the most active citizens to get involved. But overall, the sense of the growing irrelevance of mainstream politics may well persist, especially for marginal groups (or more’s the same, groups that perceive they have become marginal, such as elements of the white working class) in turn feeding the sense that democracy remains under stress.

4. Stuff Happens – Crisis as Exigency

Finally, we come to what we might term crisis as exigency. This is the view that it is in the very nature of democratic life that it is punctuated by regular and unpredictable occurrences that have the appearance of a crisis that might destabilise the government or even the system itself. David Runciman goes as far as arguing that it is characteristic of democracy to appear to be crisis prone and under stress (Runciman, Citation2017). Democratic governance does not aspire to be a system in which everything is under control, or where the variables that might disrupt or create problems for government are extinguished. Built on top of pluralistic open market systems, democracies are prone to the destabilising effects of recessions, unemployment, low growth and fluctuations in public finance giving a sense of contingency or ‘stress’ to politics. Where others regard crisis as a measure of weakness, he by contrast sees the resilience of democracies in the face of all manner of external and indeed internal exigency as by contrast its chief strength. Democracies have survived world wars, severe downturns, huge inward flows of migrants and refugees, various attempts to destabilise the system from within and without. Yet few democracies have gone to the wall or become so unstable as to provoke the thought that some other system might be better able to provide a firm basis for governance. So, the paradox of democracy is that while it is crisis prone, it is better able to manage crisis than rival political systems, many of which depend on a narrower supporter base as well as the whims of a dominant leader or ruling caste.

Intrinsic to this account then is the idea that the ‘crisis of democracy’ is for the most part hyperbole. Democracies endure crises. Events that look as if they have the capacity to disrupt or destabilise democracy come and go, often with great frequency. But this is not the same as saying that there is a crisis of democracy, in the sense that democracy itself is under threat. Supporters of this view often take comfort in the evidence provided by polling such as Eurobarometer and the World Values Survey. They tend to show that support for democratic values and institutions rarely varies significantly. Most citizens in most democracies support the free press, an independent judiciary and the right to protest (Wessels, Citation2011). Our concerns are about the people who run the system, the politicians or representatives, as opposed to the system itself. The implication is that if somehow it was possible to improve the calibre of our elected representatives that this would be sufficient to appease most citizens.

It is in light of findings such as these that commentators such as Matthew Flinders query the manner in which the idea of the crisis of democracy is framed (Flinders, Citation2012). In his view we have come as citizens to regard democracy in the same way as we look at products or services in the market, that is as consumers, not citizens. Our stance is that we have paid for a particular set of outcomes, and if we don’t get them then we need to express our disappointment and regret at those who are supposed to deliver them. This is an unrealistic way of thinking about how democracy works, and one that places impossible demands on the political class. All too often the talk of crisis reveals a certain naivety about the gap between what it is the politicians promise and what it is that they can deliver. We need to be much more realistic – and much more forgiving – about what it is that any government can deliver. We need to realise that most politicians are not in politics to enrich themselves or cover themselves in glory. Most of them are in his view public-spirited individuals trying to live up to impossible expectations.

Bandying around terms like ‘crisis’ or ‘failure’ is in this sense of form of self-harm. It promotes the idea that there is some much more perfect way in which we can govern ourselves. Given the complexity of contemporary societies, given issues of scale and the reality of open markets, it is unrealistic to expect something far better. We should instead console ourselves that democracies are the ‘least worst’ form of polity, guaranteeing for the most part relative peace and security under unpromising conditions. By doing so we would as it were de-stress our thinking about democracy while promoting a more mature and thoughtful approach to the issues that are broached in otherwise hysterical talk of ‘crisis’.

5. The Contested Terrain of ‘Crisis’

What becomes evident in surveying these various accounts is that one's view on whether and to what extent democracy can be said to be in crisis depends in large measure on the framework one is working from, as well as the normative commitments one brings to the issue. The idea of a crisis of democracy is embedded in our ideas about what kind of politics is implied in democracy – how it should run, for whom. Empirical observations concerning how democracy operates now as opposed to how it operated in the near past or far-flung past, the findings of opinion polls and such like, support all manner of different hypotheses, which can, in turn, be mapped across two key variables: temporality and intensity.

Temporality refers to the duration of crisis. At one end of the temporality axis lie those for whom the crisis of democracy is permanent and endemic. At the other end lie those who believe that crises are episodic and short-lived. They are events that come and go, usually without disturbing the ability of the system to carry on or indeed our view of the merits or otherwise of how well it is working. The ‘long view’ tends to be taken by those with a strong evolutionary to teleological approach that stresses the dependency of democracy on the macroeconomic system it supports and which in turn supports it. The short-term view relies on the directly empirical evidence of democracy’s evolution over decades indeed centuries, and its ability to withstand crises of existential proportions in the form of world wars and economic depressions to name two such events.

As far as intensity is concerned, what becomes evident is that while for some the crisis democracy is said to be traversing is profound, for others crises are shallow and fleeting, barely affecting the overall functioning of the system. We have accounts in which it is suggested that no matter what kinds of remedial action is taken, democracy is doomed if it is not already in some important sense ‘dead’ (Keane, Citation2009). We then traverse accounts that suggest that representative democracy is located in a specific and contingent historical time and space, and that that time and space have come to an end, posing the question of ‘paradigm shift’. We then move through accounts where the overall legitimacy of the system is not in question, but we wonder how specific deficiencies around engagement, participation and governance might be remedied with particular kinds of action. Finally, we arrive at positions that are sceptical about the notion that democracy can itself be described as in crisis. Rather events arise that give us the impression of a crisis, until they wane or are managed until the next event comes along. It is the very fact that crises have come and gone persistently over the decades, that, paradoxically, should remind us that democracy is an adept system for crisis management.

Using these two variables, we can create a quadrant to illustrate where any given account and any given theorist on the topic sits. We can have a horizontal axis for temporality, and a vertical one for intensity. This would show that in the top left of the quadrant where the suggestion is that the crisis is both of long duration and deep in its effects, we have the kinds of positions described in the first section, occupied mainly by those influenced by Marx and Gramsci. This would contain various kinds of materialist analyses, but also more cultural or postmodern variants of Marxism as well. In the bottom right of the quadrant we arrive at the kinds of position described in the fourth section. This would equate to the view that whatever we take to be the ‘crisis of democracy’ is essentially fleeting and not very deep in terms of its ramifications for the viability or legitimacy of the system. These are the kinds of positions associated with other longue durée approaches taking their cue from the fact that democracy in many advanced societies has been in existence for a century or more, withstanding shocks that would have brought down other kinds of regime.

6. Conclusion

As we noted at the outset, the view that there is a crisis of democracy has moved from being an idiosyncratic position, to one shared across the broad spectrum of analysis in political science. Democracy is now held to be showing signs of weakness or decline, leading to speculation that it may not have the wherewithal to recover. This has led to a far-reaching discussion about the nature of the crisis confronting democracy, what causes it and what can be done to address it.

What our discussion shows however is that the conceptualisation of crisis is embedded in a wide variety of theoretical and normative approaches. One theorist’s idea about what counts as a democratic crisis might be very different to another’s. What I have tried to show in this brief discussion is how this plays out by reference to four kinds of position, each well represented within the literature of democratic crisis. Given the breadth of different ways in which we can think about politics and democracy, it should come as no surprise that we can also discern a range of different articulations of the concept of crisis itself.

So, if the term ‘crisis’ is too strong to properly capture our current situation might we view our current situation as one of democratic ‘stress’ instead? Because ‘crisis’ is a strongly loaded term with a somewhat portentous aspect to it, when we come to consider the dynamics of our current situation in western liberal democracies ‘stress’ may help us see what is at stake more clearly. Talk of ‘crisis’ can become self-defeating if not self-fulfilling. ‘Stress’, by contrast, points us towards an empirical context where democracy itself is not in danger or ‘dying’ – but rather where different notions of democracy are rubbing up against each other. Participatory, deliberative, agonistic, direct and other theories of democracy have a less comfortable relationship with liberalism than our currently formally instituted parliamentary and governmental structures, and so it is little surprise that political movements from both left and right claiming these theories as their own will clash with the norms and values of specifically liberal representative democracy. Focusing on ‘stress’ might help us understand the crisis in a more fine-grained manner.

Secondly, and notwithstanding the above, I think there are certain contours to this idea of crisis that are worth capturing from the point of view of trying to get an overall sense of how this contestation plays out. I suggested that two variables stand out which in turn help us construct a quadrant in which we can place the dominant interpretations of crisis. One variable is temporality, which is a sense of the duration of the crisis of democracy. The other is intensity, or the degree to which an articulation of crisis implies a systemic or structural set of issues, as opposed to minor contingent items that may not disrupt democracy in too profound a fashion. The utility of a quadrant is that it allows us to capture a sense of what is important in thinking about crisis as far as the commentary is concerned. It also allows us to see the affinities between approaches that otherwise may share little connection. To prefer the concept of ‘stress’ is, in terms of this facet of the discussion, to prefer the centre to left-hand area of the quadrant over the extremities or peripheries. It is to see the idea of ‘crisis’ as of limited duration and intensity, in turn implying that whatever our perception of system threatening developments, democracy can not only survive, it can return stronger. It can as Nicholas Taleb puts it, demonstrate its ‘anti-fragility’ (Taleb, Citation2013). The idea of democratic stress is thus of value to those who wish to promote the idea that the current concerns are both manageable and remedial, and that actions can be taken to make democracy work better without having to recast everything anew or equally adopt a posture of despair or resignation. It is a comportment that is at once realistic, but also hopeful.