How Democracies Endure: The Challenges of Polarization and Sources of Resilience

• In Event: Democratic Resilience: Can the US Withstand Rising Polarization?

Abstract

At a time of rising concern about “democratic backsliding” and the strengthening of authoritarian currents around the world, we explore whether the United States is also prone to such tendencies and we analyze what features of American society and U.S. democratic institutions make them more or less resilient in the face of such pressures.
We define “democratic resilience” broadly as a system’s capacity to withstand a major shock such as the onset of extreme polarization and to continue to perform the basic functions of democratic governance—electoral accountability, representation, effective restraints on excessive or concentrated power, and collective decision-making. Democratic resilience has both institutional and behavioral components. In this paper we explore the historical roots of these phenomena and lay out a novel conceptual framework for considering democratic resilience in the face of challenges to democracy.

Authors

• Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University

• Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University

• Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University