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

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.