Institutional Forbearance as a Mechanism of Democratic Stability

Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018). The article proposes a novel conception of forbearance as a mechanism of democratic stability. According to this view, public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of uncertain legitimacy, actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy’s constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions, by provoking divergent reactions among citizens, create uncertainty about the extent to which others are willing to resist breaches of democracy’s rules. This uncertainty undermines their ability to coordinate responses to genuine abuses of power in the future. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the “Democrat’s Dilemma” to illustrate the difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to practice forbearance.