Democracy and the Erosion of Its Own Liberal Constraints

Many people ask, is democracy in crisis?

Many people ask, is democracy in crisis?

The question is self-diagnosing. It assumes democracy is an ideal form of government that has somehow begun to fail, and asks only to what extent and how to repair it. But this framing depends on three claims that must first be questioned: that democracy previously produced ideal results, that crisis means deviation from the ideal, and that present instability is an accident rather than a systemic feature. This essay contends that all three are, at best, conditional.

What we are observing is not so much a crisis of democracy, but as a working-out of tendencies internal to it. By democracy, I mean existing Western constitutional liberal democracies, rather than an idealized conception of rule by the people. This essay is interested in the ways that the institutionalized operation of a democracy can, or cannot, accommodate the tendencies it generates. These institutions of the liberal state are designed not to enable the operation of the will of the people, but rather to limit it. What distinguishes constitutional liberal democracy from other governmental systems is precisely its restraint upon its own mechanisms of popular rule; it is the presence of constraints upon majorities: a constitution and a bill of rights, separation of powers, independent judges, and federalism. My argument is that democratic politics now tends to create outcomes that erode the liberal framework which previously stabilized its effects. Democracy is not in crisis, but fulfillment.

The pattern is not entirely new. When the Athenian Assembly voted to invade Sicily, against Nicias’ warning that if it passed all was lost, Nicias demanded an impossible troop deployment; the Assembly granted it, and he was voted commander. The expedition was a disaster; it crippled Athens’ military might and led to a massive loss of life. Athens in many ways does not resemble modern liberal democracy, but its appetite for flattering delusion rather than stark reality clearly has not disappeared. Plato did not merely fear democracy’s potential for error, but also the way its own excesses might produce its self-destruction.

Acemoglu and Robinson rightly acknowledge the achievements of democratic states -- famine avoidance, economic growth, and inclusive institutions. However, though Acemoglu and Robinson stress democratic accountability as itself essential, these triumphs depended critically on the liberal part of the regime. Rule of law, property rights, and fair courts, which democracy once, rather fortuitously, seemed to bolster. Liberal institutions matter because they prevent momentary majorities from exhausting the future for the sake of the present. They slow politics down, fragment power, and make some things hard to do even when they are popular. In that sense, they are not democratic outputs so much as democratic restraints. The relevant issue now is whether the democratic mechanics begin to consume the liberal infrastructure they once appeared to reinforce.

None of this should be taken to mean that democracy will not or cannot persevere. When the liberal scaffolding has been already degraded; by a level of economic inequality which causes people to possess insufficient shared stakes, by fragmentation of media which causes people to lack a common epistemic basis required of liberal norms, and by spatial and cultural segregation causing the electorate to lack competing perspectives; democracy has a tendency toward outcomes which are not self-correcting, but work in a circular mutually beneficial way, exploiting epistemic and emotional deficits of the electorate and electoral strategies of politicians. If so, then the current period is not so much a crisis, in the traditional sense, as a system’s predicted outcome given the state of its institutional underpinnings.

The epistemic problems are already apparent in the act of voting itself. Bryan Caplan, in The Myth of the Rational Voter, argues that an individual voter’s decision to become informed about politics is rarely rational: a single vote is unlikely to sway any outcome, and the cost of political education outweighs the benefit for an isolated voter. This means that voters often make decisions not because of facts, but on things that feel good or carry partisan benefits. While a bad market decision directly harms the chooser, a voter’s bad choice imposes only a very small cost on that voter and can be borne only across millions, making a bad decision politically cheap to endorse. What democracy uniquely adds here is not ignorance by itself, but collective choice under conditions of radically diluted responsibility. Democratic voting processes are thus inherently suited to disseminating poor choices rather than rational ones.

By a different path, Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists arrive at a similar conclusion, contending that actual voter decisions are driven by partisan identity and group affiliation, not reasoned calculation over policy. The cause -- economic in Caplan’s view, sociological in Achen and Bartels’ -- may differ, but the conclusion is the same: democratic choices are structurally alienated from facts and outcomes. What voters lack is not necessarily the means to attain information, but the incentive to employ accurate information rather than the heuristic benefits offered by loyalty and affiliation.

A more complex view, developed through Dan Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition, suggests that people are not simply ignorant, but rather “in a state of conscious opposition to anyone who would provide them with information that contradicts their deeply held loyalties or prejudices; their very intelligence can be put to work devising ever more elaborate ways to protect their desired, emotionally comfortable illusions.” In such cases, democracy might not only fail to compensate for our biases but actually reward them.

One counterargument to this criticism is that democracy inherently possesses the capacity to correct its own mistakes through the power of the ballot box. The idealized version, as articulated by Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, predicts that aggregation will be superior to any individual judgment, though this assumes an unbiased, independent electorate, precisely what we lack. Deliberative democrats such as Hélène Landemore and James Fishkin argue that deliberation is the solution to our aggregation problem. Yet real politics mostly occurs through mass election campaigns, not deliberative assemblies. Friedrich Hayek, meanwhile, relies on the idea that decentralized knowledge is superior because individuals pay a cost for ignoring information contrary to their beliefs. But with the internet and algorithms designed to filter information and push people toward content that supports their existing biases, individuals are rarely forced to confront inconvenient truths. Instead, we live in informational bubbles, where voters are not simply unaware of the truth but are rewarded for continuing to support the political system they prefer.

Secondly, there is the idea that the government in a democracy exploits both our knowledge and our lack of concern for it. The traditional Schumpeterian model of politics sees elections as contests among entrepreneurs-politicians who use ideas as advertising, while Mancur Olson posits that diffuse majorities lack the necessary incentives to address costs as effectively as motivated minorities, who bear relatively low costs to gain concentrated benefits. Combining these two visions of politics reveals an incentive structure not designed for efficiency of choice, but for distributing losses and collecting concentrated benefits. Once accuracy is no longer rewarded among the electorate, leaders are not punished for selling soothing lies; they are often rewarded for it.

Thus, the overall nature of democracy is that while voters are offered diffuse benefits, losses tend to be concentrated in certain groups that bear the high cost of policy failures, or are simply postponed until a later date. An obvious example is the Greek sovereign debt crisis, where political pledges led to the accumulation of sovereign debt that the public was later forced to cover through future taxes. Canada in the 1990s and Germany in the 2000s both had to correct their economies at a painful rate, only to find their reforms punished by the electorate.

As Bastiat famously described, the state has become “the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.” La Boétie had warned earlier that dependence on power is an addictive process; in a democracy, once people accept and receive its gifts of protection, benefits, and services, they acquire a vested interest in its continuation. Many people’s moral claims may therefore be little more than an astute perception of how to satisfy their material interests under democracy. Even when this is dressed up in the language of justice, it may still amount to a demand that present voters be permitted to consume resources whose true costs will be borne by somebody else.

Finally, structural decay complements all of these factors. Tocqueville argued that democracy’s capacity for excess could be tempered by civil society: intermediary associations and local participation can limit centralized state power. Now, these moderating forces have largely dissipated. Putnam and Skocpol document how interest groups and professional lobbyists have crowded out intermediary civic institutions, and federal power continues to rise at the expense of local government. Rather than being active, self-directed citizens, people now view politics as a consumer service. The state becomes more intimate, but citizenship becomes thinner.

Levitsky and Ziblatt point out in How Democracies Die that while voters’ ignorance helps make this possible, there is also a distinct mechanism by which elected politicians use their victories to take over the umpire class: the judiciary, election commissions, and the mass media. Hungary, under Orbán, is the prime example: without ever abandoning democratic procedure outright, the prime minister has dismantled checks and balances from within. This case is certainly an extreme and exceptional one, but it demonstrates that democratic mechanics themselves may offer no protection when elected officials are adept at using them to erode existing liberal constraints.

However, one must also acknowledge important counterexamples: the 2023 elections in Poland and Brazil’s struggle with the Bolsonaro presidency attest that even where institutions are weakened, a capacity for correction may persist, often at high social cost. This essay’s claim must therefore be modified from inevitable self-destruction to a conditional argument. Where liberal infrastructure is strong enough, and where individuals still bear significant enough personal cost from bad political outcomes to motivate information acquisition, democracy can still operate as a self-correcting mechanism. Poland suggests that correction remains possible where civic mobilization, backed by residual judicial independence, survives long institutional erosion. Brazil suggests that institutions can hold, though precariously, when courts and electoral bodies retain enough autonomy to resist populist pressure. The point is not that democracy never recovers, but that recovery becomes harder and costlier once liberal restraints have already been weakened.

Historians generally agree that democracy’s rivals have often been more catastrophic in their effects, but that is not itself an argument that the democracy that replaces them will be sustainable. Brennan may well be correct to call for more reasoned decision-making; he is wrong to assume that those removed from the popular will and installed in a technocracy would not themselves be prone to epistemic error, or that the threat of electoral removal is not itself a key check on political power. The problem may not be who governs, but what governing, under modern conditions, incentivizes.

Is democracy in crisis, then? Not in the way the question implies. What we are witnessing may be closer to normal functioning without the liberal constraints that once disguised its tendencies. Democracy is not failing to do what democracy does; it is doing what democracy does, in the absence of the institutional order that previously made its outcomes tolerable. When Plato saw Athens broken after the Sicilian disaster and the rule of the Thirty, he saw in the city’s defeat a consequence of its own appetite for delusion over restraint. If that parallel holds at all, then the answer to the question is no, democracy is not in crisis. It’s producing predictable results.

Works Cited:

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012. pp. 73–87, 372–376.

Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. pp. 1–20, 213–231, 267–296.

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