Democratic Disaffections in India and Israel: How Liberal Democracies Erode Themselves

Around the globe, policies that codify the superiority of one collective over another have gained ground in established democracies. The recently passed Israeli-Nation-State law as well as the Citizenship Amendment Act in India mark a disenchanting breach with democratic values and principles of equality and freedom. The following paper seeks to add a new perspective to the study of democracy, its quality, stability and capability to withstand crises. In order to do so, a tenable concept of democracy is formulated that possesses the necessary ‘width’ to measure potential contemporary challenges to democracy. This conception highlights the crucial relation between the outputs and outcomes a democracy produces and the preconditions it has prescribed itself to. Following this idea, a democracy of high quality is understood as a ‘responsible’ democracy, which is considered in crisis if a long-term decrease of the elaborated variables of democratic quality can be observed. The employed case studies, Israel and India, are to show which attributes of democratic quality are affected by the newly enacted laws. In order to grasp the question on how the democratic quality of these countries declines, a matrix of fifteen democratic attributes is operationalized, applying data supplied by the Democracy Barometer. The method seeks to determine the democratic status prior to the enactment of a policy, analyses the output and then assesses the impact of the policy.