How to Strengthen Democratic Resilience: Five Lessons for Democratic Renewal
The ongoing trend of democratic erosion around the world has led academics and policymakers to increasingly ask how to insulate political systems from authoritarian subversion and strengthen their democratic resilience. By most counts, democracy suffered a 20-year recession that left no region of the world untouched. While many authoritarian states have become more repressive, a wide range of democracies – including those in the global north – have had their images tarnished. In addition to undermining the rights and liberties of millions of citizens, this process has significantly complicated the challenge facing pro-democracy citizens, policymakers, civil society groups, and international donors in several ways.
Domestically, fewer citizens are convinced than in the past that democracy is the best system of government to deliver development and security, in part because a new wave of populist leaders has told them that it does not. Internationally, the growing number of authoritarian states has emboldened would-be autocratisers and made it even harder to build international and regional consensus around the value of democracy. At the same time, intensifying international competition between Western states and countries such as China and Russia means that the temptation to trade democracy off against other foreign policy goals is strong. New technology is also complicating the battle for democracy, which must now incorporate efforts to counter disinformation and build societal consensus around agreed facts. As a result, it is even harder to foster and sustain democratic values and institutions than in the early 1990s.
New focus
There is also a somewhat different focus on the work of many civil society groups, policymakers, and donors today. In the 1990s, the democracy community focused mainly on helping transitions to democracy in what had previously been authoritarian regimes or ensuring that such transitions did not stall. The core assumption underpinning this approach was that democracy was in the ascendant and that, according to researchers, “once consolidated, democracy is a stable or resilient political system”. The last two decades have demonstrated that this assumption is deeply misleading, and there are growing concerns about democratic erosion in what were once called established democracies. There has therefore been a rapidly escalating focus on democratic resilience in both academic research and the projects and priorities of pro-democracy organisations and funders.
At its most basic, democratic resilience refers to the ability of a political system to withstand and adapt to challenges, threats, and crises without compromising its core principles, institutions, or processes. This concept involves maintaining the integrity of democratic governance, including the protection of civil liberties, the rule of law, free and fair elections, and political pluralism, even in the face of internal or external pressures. There is also a growing recognition that resilience includes the ability of political systems to modify their structures and processes to make them more robust – and more truly democratic.
The new stress on protecting democratic systems from attack has led to a greater emphasis on the concrete measures that can be used to insulate constitutions and democratic institutions from subversion from both outside and inside the political system. This has involved discussions of the merits of increasing the threshold required to change fundamental aspects of the system and a strong emphasis on enhancing the independence of the judiciary so that it can reject unconstitutional actions and legislation. There is also a growing focus on resistance as a potentially critical and distinctive element of democratic resilience and, hence, on ways to support individuals and groups that may come to play key roles in resisting autocratisation, including students, faith-based organisations, and urban residents.
How to Strengthen Democratic Resilience
Yet, despite growing research on the efficacy of these measures and other important questions, such as the relationship between citizens’ attitudes and democratic stability and how to insulate states against coups, much remains unknown about how resilience works and can be strengthened. There has also been relatively little thinking about the relationship between specific acts of resistance and systemic resilience as well as insufficient crossover between the emerging findings of academic studies and the policy community. A report from the European Democracy Hub seeks to bridge this gap, aiming to enable activists, civil society groups, policymakers, international donors, and researchers to better understand democratic resilience by:
- explaining what democratic resilience is and why it matters;
- providing guidance on the most effective ways to strengthen resilience;
- communicating recent academic research findings to a broader audience; and
- highlighting important areas for future research.
Taking an in-depth look at autocratisation and its remedies, the report offers five main lessons about how to reconceptualise and defend democratic resilience. These lessons are particularly relevant for civil society groups and the global democracy community.
The European Democracy Hub is a joint initiative of Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.
Photo credit: © REUTERS/Jorge Silva, 2020
This report was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
