Social Contracts for Resilient Democracies: Conceptual and Normative Dilemmas

The last two decades saw a steady decline in the quality of democracy around the world. The widespread democratic erosion led authors to speak of a ‘third wave of autocratization’ (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). The erosion of social contracts in our increasingly post-liberal societies is arguably undermining even well-developed liberal democracies. The panic about the state of democracy globally prompted an interest in studying the resilience of both the democratic state and of its underlying social contract. The present paper will aim first to map the conceptual terrain, which links ‘resilience’ with the social contract and the democratic state. Drawing on the vast literature on the concept of resilience more generally, and on the rapidly growing more recent scholarship on democratic resilience in particular, I will first outline the meanings this protean concept takes when referring to democratic social contracts specifically. I will next spell out some of the conceptual dilemmas in defining ‘resilient social contracts’: does the conservative bent of ‘resilience’ (the capacity to rebound and resume unperturbed in the face of adversity) allow for sufficient adaptability, maybe even transformation, necessary for the survival of democratic states? Turning next to ‘resilient democracy’, I will argue that resilient democracies need a social contract that is inclusive and sufficiently egalitarian, one that can be perceived as just by the vast majority of citizens. Democracy can withstand assaults by radical right populists and other aspiring autocrats, only when it can rely on the loyalty of its citizens to stand in its defence. Loyalty depends on citizens viewing themselves as parties to a social contract they perceive as just. As the current social contracts are neither sufficiently inclusive nor egalitarian - and can thus hardly be perceived as just - trying to make them more resilient may be counterproductive, as this may weaken rather than strengthen citizen loyalty, and may thus further undermine democracy. Thus, I will argue, the link between democratic resilience and social contracts is contingent on how just - rather than how ‘resilient’ - the respective social contract is. To ensure citizen loyalty, democracies need social contracts that are open to continuous social construction (renegotiation) from positions of increasingly equal negotiation power of the citizens.