What Makes Democracy Resilient? A Deliberative Account

As democracies face a range of threats, the concept of democratic resilience has moved to the centre of scholarly and policy debates. Yet despite its growing use, democratic resilience remains weakly theorised. This paper develops a deliberative account of democratic resilience grounded in the normative theory of deliberative democracy. From this perspective, many contemporary threats to democracy do not only destabilise institutions but also erode the deliberative qualities of the public sphere. Rather than equating resilience with stability or institutional endurance, the paper argues that contemporary democratic challenges require a capacity to respond, reflect, and innovate. Building on this argument, the paper identifies the key characteristics of a resilient public sphere, drawing on comparative examples of how different democracies respond to similar types of threat. In doing so, it advances debates on democratic resilience by moving beyond an understanding of resilience as a regime-level property and shifting attention to the actors, practices, and discourses that shape deliberation in the public sphere.