liberal democracy

Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Democratic Innovations: free to access from 1 February – 30 April 2025

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by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton

Welcome to our first themed collection of 2025, featuring our most popular, recent research published in Policy & Politics! Our first collection centres around themes of Democracy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on democracy or doing research in that area, or are just interested in keeping up to date with the latest concepts in democratic innovations, we hope you will find these highlighted articles interesting!

Our first article in this collection, is a conceptual article which presents a new theory of robust democracy. In this powerhouse of an article, authors Sørensen and Warren argue that such a theory is needed to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to change. While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, the authors argue that  what enables such reform is rarely considered. The authors posit that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate in ways that enable them to serve their core democratic functions, even in the face of disruptive political demands and events. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. This theorising becomes all the more urgent in response to three current challenges that the authors highlight which urgently demand the adaptation and innovation of liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. The new theory suggests that when a political system serves these three core democratic functions, this not only deepens democracy, which is justifiable on its own terms, but it also increases political robustness.

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Curbing the democratic crisis by advancing the robustness of liberal democracy

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by Eva Sørensen & Mark E. Warren


Contemporary liberal democracies suffer from a legitimacy crisis. The visible signs are rising levels of political polarisation and growing distrust in politicians and democratic political institutions. In a new article in Policy & Politics entitled Developing a Theory of Democratic Robustness, we argue that the crisis is at least in part due to a certain rigidity in the institutions of representative democracy that hampers their ability to change when society changes. This rigidity renders it difficult for them to continue to serve three core functions that categorise them as ‘democratic’: (1) empowered inclusion of those affected by collective decisions; (2) collective will formation and agenda setting that builds on inclusion; and (3) the capacity to make collective decisions that are broadly perceived as legitimate and binding. The current democratic crisis accentuates the question of how to build more robust democracies. 

Over the last few decades, many researchers have stressed the need for democratic reforms, but few have discussed the capacities of democratic political systems to carry out such reforms in response to social chances—capacities that generate political system robustness. By robust democracies we mean democracies that possess a capacity to adapt and innovate the way they operate when changing societal conditions call for it. To be robust, a democracy must be ready and able to rearticulate the meaning of its core functions so that they are relevant to emerging challenges, adjust its modus operandi to shifting levels of politicisation, creatively combine the available channels for political participation, experiment when existing ways of tackling political contestations become ineffective or illegitimate, and flexibly relocate decisions to a level that is conducive to responding to specific political demands.  

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