SCIENCE@home

From latest buzzword to conceptual framework: Unraveling the complexities of democratic resilience

K. Walz,Lion Merten,M. Rosenthal,Jana Niedringhaus,Johannes Helgest

Published 2025 in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

ABSTRACT

Resilience makes its debut in an increasing number of research areas, most recently also in democracy research. Even though progress has been made in conceptualizing democratic resilience, the concept still appears to be rather diffuse and underdeveloped. We address these shortcomings by (re-)conceptualizing democratic resilience through the lens of Gerring and Christensons’s criteria of conceptual goodness with a special focus on resonance, internal coherence, external differentiation, and theoretical utility. We argue that democratic resilience is best understood as a capacity that stems from various resources at different system levels. Drawing on these resources, the resilience capacity provides the democratic system with certain abilities that enable democratic actors to apply concrete strategies to deal with stressors. In doing so, the resilience capacity ultimately operates as a moderator in the stressors-processing that make certain outcomes more or less likely. We contribute to the existing literature by systematically strengthening the concept of democratic resilience and distinguishing it from neighbouring concepts like consolidation. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed conceptualization of democratic resilience could contribute to systemizing and advancing empirical research on the decline and survival of democracies in the future.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-76 of 76 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-7 of 7 citing papers · Page 1 of 1