Democracy, Anger & Elite Responses

2026-07-22

This project is about the elite coalition strategies that will avoid democratic failure and deconsolidation – the loss of legitimacy among its elites and citizens. It will answer the question of which government coalitions help to avoid democratic deconsolidation, and ultimately democratic breakdown. It will do so by investigating the fate of democracies in interwar Europe, the best available comparison cases for contemporary democracies, and derive precise recommendations for policy-makers today. Presently, democracy is under threat around the world. Citizens disenchanted by economic inequality and migration are losing faith in democratic regimes. Populist parties and extremists at both ends of the political spectrum threaten democratic actors, institutions, and norms throughout the Western world. Yet few if any democracies today have failed outright, and this project adopts a historical-comparative approach and investigates the fate of 24 interwar democracies in Europe. The project makes five central contributions that move it beyond the current state of the art in political science. First, it innovates conceptually by investigating democratic deconsolidation, the loss of legitimacy among democracy’s elites and citizens, and democratic survival. Second, it innovates theoretically by developing a theory of strategic interdependencies between prodemocracy and antidemocracy political actors against the backdrop of citizen anger. Third, it innovates empirically by collecting new data on government coalitions and elite power grabs as well as citizen protests and political violence events. Fourth, it innovates methodologically by combining the strengths of quantitative, qualitative, and causal inference methods to investigate the effect of coalition governments with and without antidemocracy elites on democratic deconsolidation. Fifth, it innovates in terms of impact by matching historical to contemporary cases to derive lessons for today’s decision-makers.

Germany

2025-10-01