Democracy requires a long-time horizon.  The winners of today must internalize that they might be voted out tomorrow, and the losers must believe the future might be rosier.  The presidential election of 1800 was the first time that a head of state had been removed through the popular franchise.  That engendered a norm of reciprocity that should prevail across the democratic world. Samuel Huntington famously declared that democracy is demonstrated by the two-turnover test: two successful rotations in office between rival political parties.

But how does this come to pass?  All new democracies face the initial moment of existential doubt when the first losers are compelled to submit to a new political order not of their choosing.  Over time, those fears subside and the lesson is learned that democracy means that the winners prevail, but not too much.  The playing field must remain sufficiently level that the losers continue to hope and not rebel.  

Democratic theory has surprisingly little to say about how these norms of reciprocity are created and enforced.  Norms are elusive and we may postulate that the system depends, in the words of William Gladstone, on “the good faith of those who work it.”  While we no doubt live in perilous times for democracies, this is not the first such challenge and any system dependent on “good faith” is unlikely to survive moments of passion or urgency. 

For the American Framers, the answer was institutional, ambition counteracting ambition, in Madison’s famous language.  But Madison erred in thinking that the institutional ambition would be that of the organs of government and that among them the legislature would be primary.  Instead, the steadying institutions turned out to be political parties and the civic institutions that backed them, from trade unions to churches to chambers of commerce.  These were interests that transcended individual leaders and outlasted mere human lifetimes.  They were the transmission mechanisms that tied elected officials to their constituents, that forced coherence onto legislative outputs, and that allowed long-term commitments to be enforced, including as to the inviolability of the bedrocks of democratic competition.

The period of democratic ascendency, the 19th and 20th centuries, was the product of party hegemony, nowhere more than in the United States, where the same two parties have controlled national politics for nearly two centuries.  But across the Western world, the parties that only a few decades ago defined democratic politics are gone or in terrible decline.  In France, the Gaullists and Socialists are all but defunct, as are the Christian Democrats and Socialists in Italy.  Labour and the Tories combined barely command 50 percent of the vote in the U.K.  The Congress Party in India is a shell of its former self.  And so on.  In their place are parties formed around loyalty to a single individual, pursuing the politics of immediacy.  

That period of party-driven politics now seems to be over.  Trade unions have dried up, church attendance is down, and local business associations are a weak countermeasure to the dominant power of a few large corporations.  In the U.S., the parties are swapping their historic bases as Republicans increasingly draw the more vulnerable sectors of the society and Democrats the wealthier and more educated.  The formal parties themselves have yielded power to charismatic individuals and well-heeled outside political players.  

As a result, how democracy works is being fundamentally altered.  In the U.S., Congress a half century ago would pass 300-400 pieces of legislation a year.  Now that number is in the 20-30 range, less than 10 percent as much.  Democracy is being defined increasingly as the election of a head of government who in turn rules by decree.  One may speak of the dignity of legislation, as per Jeremy Waldron, with the rules of deliberation and compromise.  No one waxes eloquent over executive power increasingly unchecked.  

Consider the output of recent presidents in the first 100 days in office, the measure of democratic effectiveness in the U.S. since FDR.  The legislature has disappeared in favor of government by executive order:

Modern democracies are characterized by dominant executives and weak legislatures.  In the American context, Justice Robert Jackson characterized legislative inaction as auguring a period of constitutional “twilight” with corresponding pressures on the courts to counteract executive aggrandizement without legislative guidance.  And not just in the U.S., recently we have seen the Conseil Constitutionnel restrain President Macron’s efforts to bypass the National Assembly in the selection of a prime minister, as well as the muscular Miller decisions of the UK Supreme Court curbing the prorogation of Parliament.  

Clearly we are entering a new period of democratic politics with stronger executives and weaker political parties and other intermediary civic organizations.  The challenge of the day is to preserve the fundamentals of democratic competition in an uncertain institutional environment.  For the time being, courts are an indispensable stopgap.  But that is only for now, and only temporary.