Adaptive Capacity of Democracies: Through the Party System and Beyond It

• In Event: Party Competition and Democracy

Abstract

The condition of many democracies at present has provoked a range of reactions, which coalesce in two (partly) opposing ‘grand narratives.’ The main theme in one perspective is dysfunction, resulting in stagnation or even deterioration in the quality of democracy (e.g. Haggard and Kaufman 2021; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Przeworski 2019). Often, and particularly in studies of the American experience, the party system has been identified as a major source of the malaise, aggravating societal divisions and undermining effective governance (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Rosenbluth and Shapiro, 2018). Another line of scholarship, however, stresses the superior performance of democracies over time (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2019; Besley and Persson 2011; Stasavage 2020). Encouraging a step back from the vicissitudes of the present, this work points to the strong record of consolidated democracies in weathering all kinds of societal and policy challenges. Democratic performance is presented strikingly differently in these two narratives, but they together prompt the question of why some countries and political systems seem able to adapt – that is, navigate changing social and governance challenges – better than others. This paper engages this question by fleshing out a framework to understand and compare the adaptive capacity of democracies.

To do so, it builds on the notion of ‘adaptive efficiency’— coined by Douglass North (2005) to analyze economic performance over the long run — but recasts it to study democratic performance over time in a dynamic setting. Party systems are at the heart of this account since they have often been regarded as the key to dynamic responsiveness in democracies. Crucially, though, the elements needed for party systems to perform this function may (often) be lacking. Thus, we need to consider how party systems can be strengthened for this purpose, and what institutional mechanisms of adaptation exist beyond party systems. This paper maps the range of such adaptive mechanisms. Furthermore, it shows that this perspective opens up a novel way to analyze and evaluate political systems, namely, in terms of their adaptive capacities. As a proof-of-concept exercise, the framework is applied to examine governing institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Nigeria.

References
1. Acemoglu, Daron, Suresh Naidu, Pascal Restrepo and James A. Robinson (2019) “Democracy Does Cause Growth,” Journal of Political Economy 127(1), 47-100.
2. Besley, Timothy and Torsten Persson (2011) Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters (Princeton University Press).
3. Haggard, Stephan and Robert Kaufman (2021) Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge University Press).
4. Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) How Democracies Die (Harvard University Press).
5. North, Douglass (2005) Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton University Press).
6. Przeworski, Adam (2019) Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press).
7. Rosebluth, Frances McCall and Ian Shapiro (2018) Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (Yale University Press).
8. Stasavage, David (2020) The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press).

Author

• Zim Nwokora, Deakin University