Elite Forbearance as a Requirement of Democratic Stability

• In Event: Democracy at Risk

Abstract

Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). More precise characterizations of the concept are hard to find, however. Without a more precise specification, the potential contribution of this concept to explanations of democratic backsliding, as well as the normative implications of such explanations, remain unclear. This paper explains the shortcomings of existing definitions and proposes an alternative, according to which the concept is defined neither in terms of a distinction between formal and informal rules, nor in terms of the degree (“maximal” or “limited”) to which an actor exercises their power, but rather in terms of actors’ higher-order beliefs about institutional rules. Elites exercise for- bearance when they refrain from actions whose compatibility with those rules is not (sufficiently close) to common knowledge among the relevant parties. I illustrate the implications of adopting this definition for questions about how democrats should respond to violations of democratic norms.

Author

• Sean Ingham, University of California, San Diego