For the Balkinization symposium on Stephen Skowronek, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Richard H. Pildes
We live in an Era of Democratic
Dissatisfaction. Over the last 10-15
years, large numbers of citizens have been continuously expressing discontent,
distrust, alienation, anger and worse with governments across nearly all
Western democracies, no matter which parties or coalitions are in power. One expression of this dissatisfaction is
that democratic governments have become more fragile and unstable. In just the past couple years, the
governments in Germany, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Canada have
collapsed prematurely, forcing those countries to hold snap elections. Spain has been forced to hold five general
elections in the last ten years, in the search for a stable governing majority;
for the same reason, the U.K. held four national elections from 2015-2024 and
might well be careening to another one, long before the presumptive five-year
term for the current government comes to an end.
Across nearly all Western democracies, many citizens have come to feel their systems are no longer delivering for them on the issues they care most urgently about. Four aspects of the way political competition and governance is being transformed as a result illustrate the turbulence of democracy in this era. First, the traditional center-left and center-right parties that had dominated politics in nearly all these countries since World War II have been collapsing. When these parties were strong, they were able to form governing majorities either on their own or with one junior partner; as a result, government could more readily deliver on the preferences of electoral majorities. Second, the voters these parties have been hemorrhaging have moved to insurgent and more extreme parties of the left, right, or more difficult to characterize ideologies. But it is the new right parties, in particular, that have emerged most significantly as an alternative to the traditional parties and political leaders (the Reform Party in the U.K., the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, the Brothers of Italy, the Chega in Portugal, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Finns Party in Finland, the Progress Party in Norway, the Sweden Democrats, and others). Across 27 European countries, these new right parties barely registered in 2010, but remarkably now in the aggregate attract the same vote share as the traditional center-left and center-right parties.
Third, young voters are particularly
dissatisfied with democratic governments across nearly all these
countries. In many countries, these new
right parties are the most popular among younger voters; where they are the
second most popular, it is more extreme parties of the left that draw the most
support among younger voters. Fourth, party
politics throughout the West had undergone the greatest realignment since World
War II, as issues of what we might call national identity have become as
important or even more so than economic ones, with working-class voters becoming
the base of parties on the right, while the parties of the left have become the
province of more highly educated, wealthier voters. I have chronicled these developments in The Decline of Political
Authority: Legal and Political
Challenges in Western Democracies, 2015-2025 and Political Fragmentation in the Democracies
of the West.
Steve Skowronek’s intriguing and masterful
book, The Adaptability Paradox, focuses on the challenges to American democracy
in this era. He doesn’t spend a lot of
time defining those challenges but nods to factors such as extreme polarization,
the breakdown of long-standing norms of governance, and a general sense of
broad dissatisfaction with government’s seeming inability to deliver effective
responses on the major economic and cultural issues roiling the nation.
In his “historical-structural” approach, he argues that the challenge
American government has faced perennially is the need to adapt to the ever
increasing demands of an expanding electorate, in the face of a rigid
Constitution whose formal institutional structures of governance have not
changed and cannot easily be changed. In
the past, he argues, that challenge has been met through extra-constitutional
adaptations: in the 19th
century, the rise of mass political parties that integrated voter demands into a
responsive government, and in the 20th century, the emergence of the
administrative state, which Steve argues did the same. His animating concern is that, in the era of
full democratic inclusion that began with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the
rights revolution of that era more generally, we might no longer have the ability
to innovate new structures – absent a new Constitution altogether -- to enable
effective government that can also elicit broad consensus.
Steve’s book fundamentally raises
the question of the relationship between institutional structures and political
culture. How much is our unique
institutional architecture of governance, which the Constitution birthed, a
major cause of the democratic dissatisfaction that exists today; if we could
just change those structures or invent some new mode of organizing the
effective expression of today’s democratic demands, would we find the consensus
Steve seeks? Or does our toxic,
tribalistic politics and dysfunctional political process reflect profound cultural
and political divisions and conflict that makes illusory the hope that there is
some mode of “adapting” governance that would overcome these divisions. Steve’s conditions for successful adaptation
are stringent: (1) adaption must satisfy
the policy demands of our vast, heterogenous society; (2) maintain fidelity
with the underlying “principles” of the Constitution; (3) generate widespread
social buy-in.
Yet America politics over this past
10-15 years strongly resembles politics across most Western democracies. The same constant turbulence and
dissatisfaction has been stirring our politics.
Since 2000, in every election but two, partisan control of the House,
the Senate, or the White House has changed hands, with significant likelihood this
fall will continue that pattern. We have
never had such an extended period of partisan churn. That pattern also expresses how sharply and
closely divided the country has been over at least the past decade. Support for the major parties has plummeted;
the combined approval rating for the two parties is the lowest ever recorded,
while Gallup Polls calls this “The Independent Era” as self-identified
independents now constitute over 40% of citizens. In our two-party system, this dissatisfaction
gets expressed through the appeal of outsider candidates, whether Donald Trump
or Bernie Sanders (an Independent who nearly unseated the Democratic Party’s
most establishment candidate in 2016). The
issues driving the new right parties in Europe have been channeled within the
Republican Party, given our two-party system.
The same income and education-based realignment of the parties of the
left and right has taken place here. As
in Europe, young voters are particularly attracted to more extreme options,
whether the Democratic Socialists of America on the left or the post-liberal
visions rising on the right.
I’m of two minds about the
institutions v. culture question Steve’s book raises. At heart, I’m a scholar of institutions and
an institutional designer. During this
period of democratic dissatisfaction in the U.S., I’ve proposed a number of
institutional reforms, ranging from the more practical to the less realistic,
that I’ve suggested might play a role in Combatting Extremism:
changing the structure of primaries, voting rules, the way we design
election districts, campaign finance, or changes to the presidential
nominations process. Others will take Steve’s
book as support for more radical structural and institutional changes, such as
abandoning the electoral college, changing the structure of the Senate,
reducing the role of the Supreme Court, or other proposals.
On the other hand, I believe democratic
dissatisfaction in the U.S. in this era has to be understood in the context of
the pervasive dissatisfaction across nearly all Western democracies –
regardless of their institutional structure.
The U.K. has about as pure a majoritarian parliamentary system as any
major country. No written constitution, no
separation of powers, no meaningful bicameralism. Yet political alienation there is profound. Widespread disaffection with the
Conservatives led to a Labour landslide in 2024, yet in little time, voters
turned so strongly against Labour that its current leader, Prime Minister Keir
Starmer, polls as the least popular British Prime Minister on record.
The current Fifth French Republic was specifically designed
to empower a strong, independently elected President and a strong government. Its system of two-round elections was chosen to
empower electoral majorities, as a rebuke of the Fourth Republic’s
proportional-representation system, which was thought to have paralyzed French
government. Yet France is close to
ungovernable. In another variation,
Germany uses a mixed-member parliamentary system that ensures proportional
representation, with significant power residing in the individual states (the Länder). The prior, completely dysfunctional
government was replaced in 2025; yet since then the Chancellor who had been elected,
Friedrich Merz, has suffered the steepest decline in popularity, with his current
“favorability” rating plummeting to -48%.
Most democratic governments in the West have been unable during
this period to deliver significant economic growth and are riven with conflicts
over the rise of national identity issues, including immigration. The technological revolution constantly disrupts
democratic politics and weakens political authority.
Steve Skowronek’s new book teems with arresting insights, but the
question whether our current democratic struggles lie in our institutions, or
our deeper political culture, remains open.