DEMOCRATIC DECONSOLIDATION IN DEVELOPED DEMOCRACIES, 1995-2018. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019

Until recently, many political scientists had believed that the stability of democracy is assured once certain threshold conditions – prosperity, democratic legitimacy, the development of a robust civil society – were attained. Democracy would then be consolidated, and remain stable. In this article we show that levels of support for democratic governance are not stable over time, even among high-income democracies, and have declined in recent years. In contrast to theories of democratic consolidation, we suggest that just as democracy can come to be “the only game in town” through processes of democratic deepening and the broad-based acceptance of democratic institutions, so too a process of democratic deconsolidation can take place as citizens sour on democratic institutions, become more open to authoritarian alternatives, and vote for anti-system parties. Public opinion measures of democratic deconsolidation are strongly associated with subsequent declines in the actual extent of democratic governance and predict not only recent democratic backsliding in transitional democracies, such as Venezuela or Russia, but also anticipated the downgrades in Freedom House scores occurring across a range of western democracies since 2016

The Age of Responsibility: On the Role of Choice, Luck and Personal Responsibility in Contemporary Politics and Philosophy

The value of “personal responsibility” increasingly stands at the center of contemporary discussions about distributive justice and the welfare state. While deep disagreements about who is responsible for which acts and outcomes persist, a wide range of thinkers accepts the normative premise that an individual’s claim to assistance from the collectivity should depend, in part, on whether or not they have acted “responsibly” in the past. Drawing on the recent history of moral and political philosophy, the social sciences, and political rhetoric, I argue that the current consensus around what I call the “responsibility framework” is a new phenomenon. In the postwar era, a conception of responsibility-as-duty emphasized each individual’s obligation to contribute to the community. Today, by contrast, the newer conception of responsibility-as-accountability emphasizes each individual’s obligation, insofar as they are capable of doing so, to provide for their own material needs without outside assistance. This changing conception of responsibility has, in turn, led to a significant—and normatively troubling—transformation of key political institutions. In particular, the welfare state, once conceived as a responsibility-buffering institution that was to provide a social safety net even to those citizens who have made mistakes in their lives, has been transformed into a responsibility-tracking institution, which denies citizens benefits if they are themselves “responsible” for being in a state of need. Among left-wing politicians and egalitarian philosophers, the most common reaction to these normative shortcomings has been to accept the punitive interpretation of responsibility outlined in the responsibility framework, yet insist that the threshold for ascribing responsibility to most individuals is extremely high—thus making responsibility largely inapplicable to everyday moral and political life. However, this “no-responsibility view” ultimately overstates both the philosophical reasons to apply a high bar to ascriptions of responsibility and the political feasibility of convincing people to abstain from holding their fellow citizens responsible for their actions. Instead of dismissing the punitive, pre-institutional account of responsibility altogether, I therefore argue that we should construct a positive, institutional account of responsibility. Drawing on T. M. Scanlon’s work about the significance of choice, I give an account of the important self-regarding, other-regarding and societal reasons why we need to give responsibility a real role in our moral and political world. Building on these reasons, I sketch an institutional account of responsibility that helps to empower people to gain mastery over their own lives, and draw out this account’s implications for the design of political institutions, including the welfare state

Democratic Deconsolidation in Developed Democracies, 1995-2018

Until recently, many political scientists had believed that the stability of democracy is assured once certain threshold conditions – prosperity, democratic legitimacy, the development of a robust civil society – were attained. Democracy would then be consolidated, and remain stable. In this article we show that levels of support for democratic governance are not stable over time, even among high-income democracies, and have declined in recent years. In contrast to theories of democratic consolidation, we suggest that just as democracy can come to be “the only game in town” through processes of democratic deepening and the broad-based acceptance of democratic institutions, so too a process of democratic deconsolidation can take place as citizens sour on democratic institutions, become more open to authoritarian alternatives, and vote for anti-system parties. Public opinion measures of democratic deconsolidation are strongly associated with subsequent declines in the actual extent of democratic governance and predict not only recent democratic backsliding in transitional democracies, such as Venezuela or Russia, but also anticipated the downgrades in Freedom House scores occurring across a range of western democracies since 2016

The End of the Consolidation Paradigm: A Response to Our Critics

In the study of democracy and democratization, there is a clear and prevailing paradigm that has reigned since the early 1990s: the theory of democratic consolidation. According to this theory, democratic consolidation is a one-way street. Once a set of threshold conditions is attained, the stability of democracy is assured. Democracy has become consolidated. To be sure, scholars of democratic consolidation vary in their assessment of the precise nature of these threshold conditions. On various accounts, they consist in the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes among political actors; the procedural acceptance of democratic rules and the passing of a "two-turnover test;" the growth of the civic sector as a check upon political elites; or the spread of liberal values in society as a whole. But despite such differences of emphasis, they share a crucial premise: implicitly or explicitly, they believe that a successful transition to democracy will prove permanent. The purpose of our articles, published in the July 2016 and January 2017 editions of the Journal of Democracy, has been a modest one: We sought to give serious consideration to the mountain of anomalies that has accumulated in recent years; to assess whether confidence in the consolidation paradigm is still warranted; and to invite scholars to think anew about the conditions under which democratic governance may be considered durable and stable