Democratic Resilience in the Twenty-First Century - Search for an analytical framework

The capacity of a system to be resilient and the level of actual resilience are linked by the concept of resilience mechanisms – those causal processes through which capacities impact the actual 6 resilience performance of the system. [...] The choice of a specific concept of democracy in turn has important consequences both in terms of how one measures the democratic qualities of political regimes in general and with regard to the resilience of a democracy in particular. [...] This approach could also be used to operationalize the performance of a system in terms of its ability to recover from the negative impact of a shock and return to a level of democracy that equals or exceeds that of the year(s) before the onset of a political crisis or autocratization process. [...] The institutional relationship between the executive on the one hand and the legislative and judiciary branches of government on the other determines the quality of the “horizontal accountability mechanism” (Laebens and Lührmann 2021). [...] Exploring Democratic Resilience in the Twenty-First Century In the following, we demonstrate the usefulness of our conceptualization of democratic resilience for empirical research through an explorative study of resilience performance and resilience capacities in up to 117 countries across the world.