Some Reflections on the Stability of Liberal Democracy

Abstract

Liberal democracy is often considered to be unstable, consisting of two markedly different ideals (i.e., liberalism and democracy) that remain in tension. Yet the thesis regarding the alleged instability of liberal democracy is itself ambiguous, for it may refer to two senses of instability: empirical or conceptual. After introducing this, in our view, important distinction (though overlooked in the relevant literature where both senses of ‘stability’ are usually mixed up) we argue that while liberal democracy is indeed empirically unstable, it is, contrary to the implicitly assumed dominant opinion, conceptually stable. In the first part of the paper, we introduce several arguments supporting the thesis about the conceptual stability of liberal democracy; the arguments appeal to the ideas of the (constitutional) precommitment, intrinsic equality, and liberty. In the second part, we provide arguments for the claim about the empirical instability of liberal democracy, identifying its main causes, viz. several anthropological-psychological propensities, in particular the weakness of the propensity for freedom, hierarchical proclivities, and inclinations to adopt extreme normative convictions.