A volume on “democratic failure” lands today with special resonance. In a world where populism is on the rise, when the struggle against racial domination in the United States has boiled over (again) into widespread protests both peaceful and violent, in the waning days (one hopes) of a global pandemic that has killed millions of people and strained governmental capacities to the breaking point, and in the wake of a presidential election whose outcome is still widely contested and whose aftermath climaxed in an assault on the US Capitol by an angry mob, the question of whether democracy is failing, has failed, or will soon fail is not a matter of idle theoretical speculation. We are fortunate that Melissa Schwartzberg and Daniel Viehoff have assembled such a distinguished group of scholars to address this timely and vexing issue.

Like all volumes in the NOMOS series, this collection originated in an annual meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP). ASPLP conferences feature papers by a scholar from each of the society’s three constituent disciplines—law, philosophy, and political science—with commentaries on each paper by a scholar from each of the other two disciplines. The “Democratic Failure” conference was held in September 2018 and so largely or entirely predated the various crises that I have named. The editors should be congratulated for their foresight (and their speed!), but the essays lack some of the urgency—and, it is tempting to think, some of the pessimism—that recent events seem to warrant. I am inclined to see this as a feature rather than a bug: times of crisis are not always conducive to clear thinking, and it is illuminating to read these essays against the backdrop of the tumultuous years that we have just lived through.

The volume is divided into three parts; the first, with contributions from Aziz Huq, Gerald Postema, and Alexander Kirshner, considers the prospects of democracy, generally speaking; the second, with contributions from Jane Mansbridge, Yasmin Dawood, and Michael Fuerstein, plus a coauthored essay by Christian Salas, Frances McCall Rosenbluth, and Ian Shapiro, focuses on democratic representation; and the third, with contributions from Derrick Darby, Turkuler Isiksel, and Mark Tushnet, takes up the question of democratic competence, with an emphasis on racial exclusion. The essays are all of high quality, and taken together, they provide a panoramic view of contemporary democratic theory, including its deliberative, epistemic, and “realist” variants. Unlike most edited volumes, the volume succeeds (at times) in reading like a conversation: readers will be tempted to sample depending on their interests, but the whole here is greater than the sum of its parts.

What is meant by “democratic failure”? Several of the authors draw a distinction (although they give it different names) between falling short and failing; that is, between cases in which a regime fails to be fully or adequately democratic in some respect, and cases in which a regime fails in such a way that it ceases to be a democracy altogether. Although none of the authors makes this point explicitly, it is significant that the first kind of failure describes a property that might be attributed to any regime, democratic or otherwise, whereas the second describes an outcome that can only happen to democracies. The sense in which the United States “failed,” democratically speaking, as a result (say) of the disenfranchisement of women is very different from the sense in which the Weimar Republic “failed” in 1933, and the question of whether the United States was a democracy before (or after) the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment swings free of the question of whether it became more democratic as a result.

The distinction between falling short and failing yields a great deal of interesting discussion, especially in the exchange between Huq, Postema, and Kirshner: they address the question of which kinds of shortcomings are inevitable byproducts and which are remediable defects of democratic rule, of which shortcomings pose a threat to the viability of democracy itself, and of whether some democratic shortcomings are properly described as “failures” at all. I cannot do justice to the nuances of these discussions here and can only commend them to the reader’s attention.

Of course, we cannot get traction on any of these questions unless we have a clear idea of what we mean by “democracy.” Surprisingly, insofar as the authors explicitly address this question, they agree in defining democracy as a system of rule in which all citizens have a say over how political power is exercised. They also seem to agree that “populism” is an inherently undemocratic phenomenon, notwithstanding the etymology of that word. This volume largely ignores the tradition of democratic theory stretching back to Alexis de Tocqueville and perhaps most closely associated today with John Dewey, which associates democracy not with a particular form of rule but rather with an egalitarian pattern of social life.

Although some of the authors define “democracy” in a way that leaves room for direct popular rule or sortition, the political dynamic that gets the most attention is the control of elected representatives by ordinary citizens. The exchange between Mansbridge, Dawood, and Fuerstein thoughtfully explores the intricacies of this two-way relationship, and the exchange between Darby, Isiksel and Tushnet uses the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois as a lens for examining how claims about political ignorance, amplified by racial prejudice, have been used to distort it. Again, I can only commend the nuances to the reader’s attention.

Readers may turn to a volume like this not only to better understand what democratic failure consists of, but also to learn what can be done to prevent it. Here it must be said that these essays do more to name desiderata than to describe practical courses of action. Several authors emphasize that democratic institutions require the support of democratic norms of behavior, including most notably a willingness to put respect for established procedures ahead of the realization of one’s preferred outcomes and to sanction those who do otherwise. Needless to say, these norms have been severely tested in recent years, and the authors do not provide much guidance on what might be done to shore them up, or what those of us who support them should do when we can no longer be confident that our fellow citizens support them as well. Again, these essays read very differently now than when they were written.

A partial exception is the essay by Salas, Rosenbluth, and Shapiro, which is the only contribution that includes an empirical analysis. They argue that many of democracy’s recent failures are the result of party fragmentation and indiscipline—developments that they attribute to institutional innovations like the open list (in parliamentary systems), the open primary (in presidential ones), and a lowering of the threshold for party representation (in PR systems). The cure for the ills of democracy, they conclude, is in this limited sense not more democracy but less. Certainly, the recent history of the United States would be very different had this advice been followed.