What Is Democratic Resilience and Why Do We Need an Analytical Concept of It?

Two decades ago, we were still reflecting on the "democratization
of democracy". Times have changed. Now we are thinking about the
resilience of democracy. Times are changing. The long and global
trend of democratization, which accelerated once again after 1990,
reached its peak in 2008. Since then, liberal democracies are now
in the 15th year of a continuous and significant decline. This is
true even for the best constitutional liberal democracies of the
Northern hemisphere. An extraordinary simultaneous accumulation of
external crises has challenged democracy in the last 15 years:
financial and euro crises, migration and refugee crises, climate
crisis, pandemic and finally the Russian war against Ukraine and
its economic repercussions on Western democracies. How can
democracies arm themselves against this, how do they strengthen
their resilience? What actually is resilience of democracy? Do we
have sufficient theoretically inspired concepts that we can use in
empirical studies? The Talk aims to present such an analytical
concept of democratic resilience in order to finally answer the
action-theoretical question: How can democracies strengthen their
resilience in the current decade of crisis? Wolfgang Merkel is
Professor Emeritus at the WZB.