Fixing Democracy from the Inside: Deliberative Paths to Stronger Constitutional Democracies

Democratic crisis has become an entrenched condition across many liberal societies, marked by declining trust, rising polarization, and the increasing ability of anti-democratic actors to exploit democratic procedures from within. This paper argues that these developments are not merely contingent shocks but manifestations of deeper structural vulnerabilities within representative democracy itself. It identifies three such vulnerabilities—epistemic fragility, accountability failure, and constitutional backsliding—and examines how deliberative democratic innovations might strengthen representative institutions against these threats. Representative democracy is conventionally justified through two core ideals: legitimacy, secured through elections that embody the people’s will, and accountability, achieved through electoral sanctions that ensure governance “for the people.” Yet in practice these mechanisms function imperfectly. Citizens often vote with limited information and high susceptibility to bias or manipulation, raising concerns about whether electoral outcomes reliably track democratic legitimacy. Majoritarian electoral systems further distort representation and encourage short-term political opportunism, and even proposed reforms to voting methods cannot fully address underlying weaknesses. To respond to these challenges without resorting to epistocratic restrictions on participation, the paper explores institutional designs that expand citizens’ opportunities to participate meaningfully and foster democratic judgments that uphold constitutional principles. The paper first diagnoses the three main structural weaknesses undermining contemporary democracies: epistemic fragility, accountability failure and constitutional backsliding. Epistemic fragility arises from media ecosystems that privilege speed and emotional engagement over accuracy, allowing misinformation to outpace truthful communication and enabling powerful actors to distort public deliberation. Accountability failure stems from incentives that reward symbolic politics over substantive policymaking, allowing elected officials to evade responsibility and eroding the public’s trust in representative institutions. Constitutional backsliding, or “autocratic legalism,” occurs when anti-system actors use formally democratic procedures to incrementally weaken checks and balances, capture oversight bodies, and consolidate power. To conceptualize pathways of democratic renewal, the paper evaluates three influential alternative models of democratic legitimacy. Participatory democracy enhances engagement but risks unequal participation and citizen overburdening. Lottocratic democracy reduces elite domination through random selection but raises questions about legitimacy and the place of expertise. Deliberative democracy, by contrast, synthesizes the advantages of both: it promotes inclusive participation while structuring discussion to improve the epistemic quality and public justification of decisions. The paper argues that deliberative democracy offers the strongest normative framework for addressing the identified vulnerabilities in representative systems. Building on this framework, the paper examines deliberative innovations in practice, distinguishing between mini-publics—small, randomly selected bodies that enable informed, high-quality deliberation—and mass-public deliberation, which scales participation and confers democratic authorization. While each model has limitations, their complementary strengths can be harnessed by integrating them into constitutional procedures. Mini-publics provide depth, reflection, and epistemic safeguards; mass-public forums supply breadth, contestation, and legitimacy. When connected through institutional feedback loops, they strengthen citizen–institution linkages, reinforce accountability through public justification, and bolster constitutional resilience against disinformation, polarization, and opportunistic manipulation. The paper concludes by outlining how such deliberative reforms can be feasibly incorporated into representative democracies, offering a model of democratic governance that is more legitimate, accountable, and resistant to internal and external threats.