Contemporary democratic societies are in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. This crisis relates to different dimensions of democracy: a breakdown in meaningful representation of citizens’ interests; a spreading tendency to resort to an unrestrained use of power that calls into question the liberal-democratic promise to protect individual rights and to cater to a stable system of checks and balances; and extreme and widening asymmetries in the distribution of power, status, and wealth among citizens. It is therefore not surprising that political theorists are called to investigate and possibly propose a way out from the so-called phenomenon of democratic backsliding, that is, a spreading perception that democratic ideals and practices are losing ground in the face of contemporary authoritarian and illiberal challenges and populist waves.
As a general diagnosis, we can posit that these phenomena, although different in quality and relating to different aspects of democracy, are fostered by a general and widespread erosion of trust. This erosion of trust concerns both the horizontal relationships between fellow citizens as members of the same polity and the vertical dimension of political authority, that is, the relationship between citizens and political institutions and representatives. These dynamics fuel an ongoing crisis of representation, for citizens feel that democratic governments, and, by extension, democratic ideals as well, are not responsive to their needs and preferences. Consequently, widespread social mistrust dramatically erodes the stability of political systems and demotivates citizens from adhering to a general democratic ethos. We are indeed entangled in political contexts of mistrust and frayed relationships, exacerbated by deep polarization, in which citizens have lost incentives to behave as trustworthy agents, both epistemically and socially.
To properly function, however, democracies rely on the expectation that, notwithstanding extensive disagreements over evaluative matters and the best solutions to collective problems, a multitude of individuals will be motivated, most of the time, to trust not only one another but also the rules producing collective decisions. This expectation can be sustained if and only if stable relationships of reciprocal trust between citizens and institutions can be maintained and fostered. Contemporary literature has investigated possible remedies to this wide breach of trust we have been observing in recent times.
First, many contend that contemporary liberal-democratic societies have cut loose with the expectation, partly satisfied in the decades after World War II, to shrink economic inequalities and keep at bay the insurgence of economic monopolies and disparities in wealth and opportunities. Over the past decades, scholars have shown that economic inequalities are widening in many countries, and some economists have started describing this state of affairs as “a new gilded age,” characterized by a small group of citizens who are enormously well off compared with the rest of the population. Extreme material and social inequalities usually go hand in hand with economic deprivation, lack of opportunities, and fewer resources and benefits for the less privileged members of the constituency. From this often follows disaffection for democratic institutions, as the promise of political equality entrenched in the democratic ideal is indeed betrayed by these brazen structural forms of inequality that have been generating new material and status hierarchies. Thus, some theorists have concentrated on showing that massive inequalities in income and wealth undermine the ideal of political equality and consequently the value of democracy, thus pushing for wide political and economic reforms to limit the wealth that any one person can accumulate.
Second, many analyses concentrate on the adverse conditions for democratic representation in contemporary democracies. There is widespread frustration among citizens with what they perceive to be systemic lack of responsiveness to their interests and needs among political elites and parties. Moreover, the weakening of institutional checks and balances, plebiscitarian tendencies, and the impairment of public reasoning, prompted by hyperpluralism and polarizing forces fueled by social media, foster doubts about the deliberative power of democratic societies. Here we encounter various recommendations, from an investigation of renewed forms of deliberative mini-publics to more radical proposals to let go of classic forms of democratic representation, in favor of substituting elections with an institutionalized random selection. This latter option is to prevent corruption and to improve the epistemic performance of individuals making legislative decisions.
Third, defending democracy, both as a practice and as an ideal, requires an intellectual effort to clarify that democratic legitimacy is an intrinsically tensive notion. The legitimizing force of the idea of popular sovereignty, which heavily relies on a voluntaristic interpretation of the notion of the people brought to the extreme by populist movements, partly stands in contrast with central tenets of liberal constitutionalism, instantiated by the protection of individual rights and the framework of checks and balances and procedural rules. Sharing Rousseau’s intuition about the paradoxical relationship between democratic authority and individual freedom, we can then characterize democratic procedures as joint actions by coauthors. According to the coauthorship account, democratic decisions are legitimate to the extent that all the individuals subjected to them can—allegedly—be described as authors of such decisions. An effective system of coauthorship relies on the establishment of stable and reliable relations of mutual trust among citizens, in which each is included as a putative source of valid claims. Citizens should not simply be respected and considered as equal subjects with claims and preferences, they should be treated as capable deciders, thereby not becoming victims of structural inequalities that endanger their ability to equally take part in decision-making processes.
This proposal relies on the intuition that the best way to capture the democratic ideal is to relate it to a relational version of liberalism, according to which the quest for democratic legitimacy rests, ultimately, upon the possibility of assuring appropriate interactions among citizens, by which no one’s status can be publicly dismissed as irrelevant or unworthy. The open question is whether we can establish a social system in which a majority of citizens respect the relational dimension of justice as expressed by the joint action among agents sharing equal status. Contemporary democracies fail badly with respect to these normative requirements, as unduly asymmetric relations of power coupled with brazen inequalities in income, wealth, opportunity, visibility, and social status bring about systemic forms of oppression that are inconsistent with the possibility of democratic citizens relating to one another as equals and jointly acting as coauthors of collective choices.
This conclusion, though quite depressing, should push us to clearly state that, possibly, most contemporary liberal-democratic societies are failing wide sections of their constituencies so deeply that their actual legitimacy ought to be put into question. Democratic self-defense requires an honest appraisal of the failures of contemporary democracies with regard both to the breakdown of meaningful representation of citizens’ interests and to the lack of willingness to address systemic inequalities and injustices perpetrated toward some members of the constituency, often members of unprivileged groups. To counteract the backsliding of the democratic ideal and the wide erosion of trust among citizens and with their democratic governments, it is necessary to push for wide structural reforms and to embrace a version of democratic participation that welcomes social protest and disobedience as much as possible. These forms of activism, hopefully, might propel a wide criticism of the current state of affairs and pave the way for systemic amendments of unacceptable inequalities and status asymmetries.
Editor’s note: This is an extra edition of the Perspectives on Democracy series for January 2026.
Federica Liveriero
Federica Liveriero is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Pavia (Italy). Liveriero’s main areas of interest are normative theories of justice and legitimacy; democratic theory; social epistemology and gender studies. She is currently working on a book on democratic backsliding and the erosion of trust among citizens.
