How democracies can survive

Abstract

The crisis of democracy has raised a not-entirely understood insidious conundrum. Namely, democracies cannot avoid electoral results leading to the power leaders and movements who rise up against their institutions, and they must be able to cope with them. The trial that politics has placed before many liberal democracies is this: Will democracies be able to cope with populist leaders since democracies cannot avoid them? When we observe electoral outcomes that can be more or less harmful for democratic institutions, this risk affects each democracy in a different way. Questions arise about the strength of democracies: Why do democracies react differently, collapsing or surviving, to similar threats? Which democracies can better cope with them and why? Little is known about what causes these differences in democratic strength, on what their capacity to resist depends, and why it varies so much across countries. This thesis explores this important grey area in comparative politics. Reviewing the literature with a need to design a more reliable paradigm to understand the crisis of democracy, the answers to these questions lead us to the idea of creating an Index of Democratic Strength in order to measure the capacity of democracy to withstand threats to its political identity and institutional integrity. The Index represents the extent to which democratic institutions can resist as a kind of litmus paper of the crisis of democracy. Finally, this research moved from the methodology to the observation of case-studies, covering three particularly significant examples: United States of America (1993 - 2018), Hungary (1990 - 2014) and Poland (2007 - 2018).The crisis of democracy has raised a not-entirely understood insidious conundrum. Namely, democracies cannot avoid electoral results leading to the power leaders and movements who rise up against their institutions, and they must be able to cope with them. The trial that politics has placed before many liberal democracies is this: Will democracies be able to cope with populist leaders since democracies cannot avoid them? When we observe electoral outcomes that can be more or less harmful for democratic institutions, this risk affects each democracy in a different way. Questions arise about the strength of democracies: Why do democracies react differently, collapsing or surviving, to similar threats? Which democracies can better cope with them and why? Little is known about what causes these differences in democratic strength, on what their capacity to resist depends, and why it varies so much across countries. This thesis explores this important grey area in comparative politics. Reviewing the literature with a need to design a more reliable paradigm to understand the crisis of democracy, the answers to these questions lead us to the idea of creating an Index of Democratic Strength in order to measure the capacity of democracy to withstand threats to its political identity and institutional integrity. The Index represents the extent to which democratic institutions can resist as a kind of litmus paper of the crisis of democracy. Finally, this research moved from the methodology to the observation of case-studies, covering three particularly significant examples: United States of America (1993 - 2018), Hungary (1990 - 2014) and Poland (2007 - 2018).LUISS PhD Thesi