Abstract
Democratic theorists often argue that democracy is in crisis, but nonetheless maintain democracy can be revived. In contrast, this paper argues that modernisation and democracy have become opposed. Drawing on the work of Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, it argues that as modernisation intensifies, it erodes the preconditions necessary for democracy to credibly make the promises long associated with it. This process of debilitation involves ‘ratchet effects’, such that it becomes steadily less possible to restore lost capacities. The regime that remains is like a marathon runner who has been subjected to an amputation – it continues on in a minimalist sense, but its horizons of possibility are irrevocably altered. Because this debilitated democracy is unable to check or manage modernisation, it will remain subject to the process that has debilitated it, further reducing its horizons in the years to come.
Looking at the political science book market of recent years, one notices a clear increase in titles that deal with democratic ‘retreat’ (Kurlantzick, 2013), ‘decline’ (Allan, 2014; Diamond & Plattner, 2015), ‘regression’ (Schäfer & Zürn, 2024) or ‘crisis’ (Howell & Moe, 2020; Przeworski, 2019). There's talk of a ‘threat’ (Galston, 2018) or even signs of a process of ‘dying’ (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018), a fear that ‘our freedom is in danger’ (Mounk, 2018), that ‘authoritarian populism’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) or even ‘fascism’ (Albright, 2018; Stanley, 2018) is spreading. Indeed, there are good reasons to be concerned. The latest report by Freedom House, for example, notes a long-term democratic decline that has now lasted 19 years, affecting 60 countries (Freedom House, 2025). The Varieties of Democracy dataset also comes to a sobering conclusion: ‘Democracy across the world is in decline. All metrics used below show a rollback of democratic rights and institutions’ (V-Dem, 2024, p. 9).
Colin Crouch, whose diagnosis of post-democracy (2005) almost 20 years ago arguably initiated the current crisis debate, also shares this assessment in his new work Post-Democracy After The Crisis (2020). Crouch refers not least to the European financial crisis and the measures adopted to contain it, which have led to a considerable increase both in the power of the executive and in the power of non-majoritarian institutions such as the European Commission and the European Stability Mechanism. At the same time, he makes no secret of his aversion to a ‘politicised pessimistic nostalgia’ (2020, p. 67). Similar judgements about ‘right-wing populist’ or even ‘right-wing radical’ parties can be found in a large number of current political science publications, such as Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) or the contributions by Jan-Werner Müller (2021) and Yascha Mounk (2018).
But how, then, should democracies respond to contemporary right-wing populism? Books in this vein frequently conclude with a moral appeal to the reader, typically on the last page. For example, in The People vs. Democracy, Mounk (2018, pp. 265–6) writes, ‘Thankfully, there is a lot that those of us who want liberal democracy to survive the dawning age of populism can do.’ For example, ‘we can take to the streets to stand up to the populists’ or ‘We can remind our fellow citizens of the virtues of both freedom and self-government’. Jan-Werner Müller (2021, p. 226) follows the same line when he states at the end of his latest book that only ‘mobilised citizens’ can ‘save’ democracy: ‘The paths are there; the rest is up to us. Democracy, after all, is not about trust (be it in individuals or institutions); it's about effort’. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, p. 230) also end with a raised finger: ‘Democracy is a shared enterprise. Its fate depends on all of us’. Crouch (2020, p. 111) joins the moral appeal to citizens at the end of his book as well, placing his hope in the ‘young and educated’ who are involved in social movements: ‘Provided they exist, continue to reproduce themselves, and receive from millions of others what they need to flourish – money, demonstrators in the street, active volunteers – democracy will revive’. Last but not least, Schäfer and Zürn (2024, p. 178), after previously offering a series of reform proposals such as internal party reforms, more political education and stronger ‘public control over non-majoritarian institutions’, show themselves in the last sentence simply convinced that the ‘defence of democracy requires more democracy’. Well, who can say no to that? We contend that these moral injunctions are themselves instances of the nostalgia to which they purport to be a response. The thesis we develop in this paper is that we are currently dealing with a fundamental change in the social, spatial and temporal conditions of Western societies that has successively undermined and continues to undermine the preconditions of democracy. These changes generate a right-wing reaction, but they also generate a call for forms of democratic response that are increasingly anachronistic. This process of change is not temporary. This is no mere illness, and there will be no return to the status quo ante – the good old liberal democracy with its strong parties in the centre and only small ‘extreme’ parties on the fringes. Nor will there be a breakthrough to something better. We will not see ‘more’ democracy, as suggested by Schäfer and Zürn. Rather, democracy is in a process of becoming permanently debilitated.
We argue that democracy and the process of modernisation have grown opposed to each other and that we have now reached a state in which the last prerequisites of democracy have fallen away. The crisis literature would then be primarily an expression of a phantom limb, a pain in an area of the body that no longer exists. We present our argument in three steps. First, we briefly recall theoretical considerations that assert a positive relationship between the process of modernisation and democracy. However, it seems to us that the optimism associated with these perspectives has been exhausted. Then, following Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, we argue that modernisation and democracy are not mutually supportive, but that modernisation erodes the foundations of democracy, at least beyond a certain threshold. This leads to the concluding thesis that we are no longer dealing with positive but increasingly with negative ratchet effects. It is easy for the capacities of democracy to further diminish, but extraordinarily difficult to restore these capacities, even in a partial or fleeting way.
Modernisation and democracy: A process without end?
To articulate the relationship between modernisation and democracy, it must be made clear at the outset what is meant by both terms. In recent years, ‘democracy’ has increasingly become an empty term denoting what is somehow ‘good’, to which we all (must) feel committed. But there are deep disagreements about what democracy concretely involves. A certain amount of disagreement may be essential to the concept of democracy – it might be regarded as an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956). But there is also a danger that this presumption of contestation is taken too far, to the point at which democracy becomes an empty signifier (Laclau, 1996) or its historical underpinnings are obscured (Meckstroth, 2015). The mutability of the concept of democracy should not lead us to associate it with almost arbitrary content, for example by ennobling the decision-making processes of the European Commission as deliberative and thus democratic (Joerges & Neyer, 1997), or to interpret the mere existence of transnational media, such as CNN or even Facebook, as harbingers of a global public sphere. Such an understanding departs from what Greven calls the Sartori criterion: ‘While democracy is more intricate than any other political form, paradoxically enough it may not survive if its principles and mechanisms are not within the intellectual reach of the average citizen’ (Sartori, 1987, p. 13).
The failure to take Sartori's criterion into account in scientific as well as elite discourses thus leads to an increasing distance from the everyday understanding of democracy held by large parts of the population. The discrepancy between the scientific theory of democracy and common sense theories of democracy can lead to an intensification of the ‘crisis’ of democracy, e.g., when large parts of the population no longer find themselves represented in elite discourses. In this context, an observation by Przeworski is instructive: ‘While elites see democracy in institutional terms, several surveys indicate that mass publics often conceive it in terms of “social and economic equality”’ (2019, p. 102). Therefore, we would like to propose understanding modern democracy not in terms of an institutional setting or specific norms, but in terms of two central promises:
1
Democracy contains, firstly, the promise of being able to collectively and equally shape the fate of the respective political community. This implies that the mere existence of general elections, for example, says nothing about the quality of democracy. It could be that the representatives who are elected to office do not have the power to fulfil the expectations of the represented. And these expectations also include those of a substantive nature, such as who may belong to the demos and, quite centrally, the desire for more social equality. Therefore, the second central promise of democracy is to achieve an improvement of social circumstances, such as more social equality (not necessarily only in the material sense) by means of democratic procedures.
While democracies may not be able to keep these promises, they must at least appear credibly committed to keeping them. If large parts of the population gain the impression that both promises are not (and can hardly) be realised, crisis symptoms will occur, e.g., in the form of a decline in voter turnout or the election of parties commonly referred to as ‘populist’. Both can be observed in the societies of the West over the past 30 years (Baro & Jenssen, 2025; Kostelka & Blais, 2021). Our central thesis is that accelerated modernisation is responsible for the failure to realise these democratic promises or to even appear credibly committed to their realisation. Elites still frequently refer to the resulting regime as ‘liberal democracy’. But growing parts of the citizenry do not experience the system as a properly functioning democratic regime. To capture this, we will refer to the form of regime that is democratic in the sense that it appears credibly committed to keeping the two promises as ‘modern democracy’. By contrast, when we use the term ‘liberal democracy’, we refer more broadly to the competitive multiparty regimes that are conventionally referred to as democracies in the academic literature.
The term ‘modernisation’ has a long history in the social sciences. For Rosa (2013, p. 58), it ‘can be and has been culturally interpreted as rationalisation, social-structurally as differentiation, with respect to the development of the predominant subjective self-understanding or personality type as individualisation and in terms of the relation to nature as instrumentalization or domestication’. These processes are the central themes in the classical sociological theories of Weber, Durkheim, Simmel and Parsons.
Modernisation theory, which had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to provide an answer not just to the question of the causes but also of the obstacles of the development toward modern democracy. Modernisation was understood by authors such as Daniel Lerners, Seymour Martin Lipset, Karl W. Deutsch and Sidney Verba as a process towards modern democracy and it was asked which social, technical and cultural factors promoted this development and which hindered it. The basic thesis was that there is a connection between a market economy, on the one hand, and modern democracy, on the other, and that the best and most stable form of society exists where markets are embedded in liberal society. An advanced degree of economic development would lead to modern democratic structures, which in turn would have a positive effect on economic dynamics, so that above a certain threshold, the market economy and democracy would mutually stabilise each other. Five assumptions were central to this:
2
Modernisation is a global process which, starting in Europe and North America, is increasingly affecting all societies and consists essentially in the differentiation of functional social systems, such as the strict separation between politics, economics and religion. The historical development from traditional to modern societies is irreversible. Specific obstacles to modernisation nonetheless existed in traditional societies. These were mainly cultural factors such as role patterns and individual attitudes, but also traditional practices such as corruption. In contrast, modern societies are characterised by individualism and the overcoming of particularistic moral concepts in favour of universal values. A special feature is the development of functionally specific role patterns, i.e., the fact that ‘modern’ people can experience themselves as powerful managers during the day, but as loving family fathers in the evenings and at weekends. Finally, modernisation theorists assumed that social change in all societies would be ‘relatively uniform and linear’ (ibid.: 431).
3
Empirical research was conducted to find out which traditional structures blocked the development of modern democracy, and practical political questions were asked about how these obstacles to development could be overcome. The focus was on economic prosperity, but at the same time international organisations and national reform movements endeavoured to implement modern, western cultural mores and political institutions. This was not merely about helping newly independent states to ‘catch up’ – it was also about further extending the process of modernisation in Western democracies.
By the end of the 1960s, modernisation theory was considered convincing by only a few social scientists; the ideological components were too obvious, the normative distinction between backward traditional societies, on the one hand, and modern democracies, on the other, was too problematic. A closer look has also shown that the strict distinction between traditional and modern societies is not tenable; there are, after all, many traditional structures even in societies classified as modern, such as the widespread religiosity in the USA or the rigid gender hierarchies that characterised all Western democracies in the 1950s and 1960s.
Despite this widely articulated criticism, basic assumptions of modernisation theory continue to be widespread in social science theories. For instance, Pippa Norris and Inglehart (2019) argue a shift from materialist to post-materialist values has been taking place in Western democracies since the 1970s and will continue despite the current authoritarian revolt. They base this on the assumption that the materialistic and, relatedly, authoritarian orientations, which they regard as regressive, predominate among older citizens, while younger citizens are becoming increasingly post-materialistic. From their perspective, Western societies are currently experiencing a temporary revolt, but in the medium and long term, there will be a triumph of post-material values and thus values that are conducive to democracy. 4 Norris and Inglehart thus assume a kind of modernisation will occur – post-materialist values will spread universally – and that this modernisation will support the continued existence of democratic systems, if not their further democratisation.
We think such hopes are misplaced. In this paper, we will use the concept of modernisation in a manner that resists the excesses of mid-century modernisation theory. But, drawing inspiration from Rosa (2013), we will also retain a sensitivity to its many facets. We will understand modernisation as an interconnected set of economic, social, technological and environmental tendencies:
A tendency for wealth and labour to move more easily across interstate borders, pushing states to compete for access to these flows or to control or limit their exposure to rapid changes in them. A tendency for more areas of social life to be commercialised, commodified, or marketised, to be optimised for consumption. A tendency toward individualism in the culture and the spread of an attendant scepticism of authority – especially institutionalised authority. A tendency for the development of technology that has considerable effects on human society and on the human environment. In so far as the modernisation tendencies are left unchecked, there is a tendency for them to operate with an increasing speed, i.e., there is acceleration.
These modernising tendencies are sometimes halted or turned back for a period by countervailing factors. They can suffer considerable setbacks brought about by wars, pandemics and political instability. But often, even when one of these tendencies slows for a time, others may speed up. For instance, the Second World War arguably disrupted the first three tendencies, but it accelerated the fourth (Gross & Sampat, 2020; Roland, 2016). In the post-war era, rapid technological development spurred by the war helped to facilitate the speedy return of the other tendencies. It is because these tendencies support each other that they can be considered as an interconnected set and bear a single name – modernisation. No one of these tendencies needs to be considered primary, on our account. Any one of the tendencies may be capable of jumpstarting the others.
The modernising tendencies operated in contexts that would have been regarded by enlightenment thinkers as ‘pre-modern’, but in these societies they were more frequently disrupted or checked by other tendencies and forces. The period we refer to as ‘modernity’ would be the period in which the modernising tendencies became dominant, overcoming competing logics emanating from religious institutions and social and political hierarchies.
The modernising tendencies do not simply destroy pre-modern social and cultural practices. Nevertheless, they alter some of those practices, incorporating others (Gauthier & Martikainen, 2020). This means that the modernising tendencies weaken many countervailing tendencies over time. But this does not mean that modernisation cannot be disrupted or reversed. For now, we remain within modernity in the sense that we remain in a period in which the modernising tendencies remain dominant – even when some of them are disrupted, the continuation of others tends to return all of these tendencies to the fore in due course.
The tendencies do not require (but also do not preclude) deliberate attempts by agents at their furtherance. They operate primarily by structuring the contexts in which agents make decisions, so that it is easier (or more attractive) for agents to further the tendencies than it is for agents to oppose them. In the rest of this paper, the term ‘modernisation’ refers to this set of tendencies considered together as an interconnected set.
A social, spatial and temporal process
The thesis we will develop in this section is that the theories that claim a positive relationship between modernisation and democratisation are no longer convincing. Certainly, one can agree with the assumption that democracy requires citizens who do not unquestioningly submit to traditions and authorities and who are willing and able to question – not necessarily abandon – their own convictions. And it cannot be denied that modernisation has been a factor in dislodging and transforming socially and politically entrenched dogmas. In this respect, there is a connection between modernisation and democracy. But at the same time, the process of modernisation also has a dynamic that increasingly undermines the social preconditions of democratic coexistence and decision-making. As modernisation continues to intensify, the positive relationship between modernisation and democracy comes apart, and the preconditions for democracy are undermined both spatially and temporally. It becomes impossible for democratic social and political organisations to operate over a spatial territory relevant for efficacious governance, and it becomes impossible for such organisations to process events and issue decisions in a temporally relevant time frame. The spatial problem and the temporal problems develop at the same time and exacerbate one another. As the efficacy of democratic social and political organisations breaks down, the demos fractures beyond the point at which a functional level of social unity can be generated, further annihilating any possibility of recovery.
To make this case, we now turn to Michael Th. Greven's essay Was die Demokratie jemals modern - oder des Kaisers neue Kleider (Was democracy ever modern - or the emperor's new clothes). In this essay Greven focused on the social preconditions of democracy, arguing that modernisation and democracy are characterised by opposing logics. Modernisation erodes ‘the residual metaphysical apriori’ of any purportedly modern democracy (2009a, p. 181). Among these, Greven lists three prerequisites:
A ‘demos preceding democracy and its relative homogeneity’. ‘the assumption of significant autonomy of the collective will-forming process’. the ‘differentiation between private and social inequality and political and legal equality in collective self-rule’ (ibid.).
Since for Greven (2009b, pp. 86, 88), ‘modern democracy rests on contingent normative principles’ and on ‘contingent practices’, it is possible for a process of modernisation to not merely create, but also to destroy, the contingent situation necessary for democratic principles and practices to obtain. Greven's three preconditions might be taken to be democracy's legs – to run and jump, all three legs must work in tandem. If any one of the legs is ripped off, democracy may continue to limp along, but only in a debilitated way.
We argue that as the first modernisation tendency has intensified, the third leg – the ‘differentiation between private and social inequality and political and legal equality in collective self-rule’ – has been irrecoverably lost. The loss of the third leg puts increasing stress on the other two legs. Without the third leg, the other legs cannot support democracy in its quest to fulfil the two central promises. In attempting to carry on without the third leg, they suffer repeated injuries, becoming ever less effective at accomplishing their tasks. And, as democracy is debilitated in this specific way, the other modernisation tendencies further attack the other two legs from a plurality of directions. Over time, these processes of debilitation accelerate.
There is an overwhelming literature establishing the loss of the ‘differentiation between private and social inequality and political and legal equality in collective self-rule’. Greven himself refers here to the increase in power of private actors within the framework of ‘public-private policy networks’ (ibid.: 186; cf. Greven, 2005). But beyond this, democracies are empirically substantially less responsive to the poor, even in the marginally more equal democracies of Europe (Elsässer et al., 2020; Gilens, 2014); they have been described as existing under a ‘shadow of unfairness’ (Green, 2016) in which large-scale inequality – or even civil oligarchy (Winters, 2011) – is a ‘default condition’ (Scheidel, 2017) to which they are fated to return. But where authors like Scheidel frame this as a return to a transhistorical default, we frame this as a consequence of modernisation.
As wealth becomes increasingly mobile across interstate borders, territorial nation-states find it increasingly difficult to credibly commit to redistributive policies (Boix, 2003; Studebaker, 2023). They are, spatially, ill-equipped to govern international financial markets, and that allows the power of international financial markets to steadily grow (Streeck, 2017). It seems indisputable that a kind of oligarchisation of democracy has occurred (cf. Elsässer & Schäfer, 2023; Piketty, 2020). This oligarchisation is a direct consequence of modernisation as we have defined it – it stems straightforwardly from the first modernisation tendency. This tendency undermines the capacity of democracies to govern a relevant unit of space, and this leaves democracies unable to guarantee the ‘differentiation between private and social inequality and political and legal equality in collective self-rule’. As this third leg is cut out from under democracy, this loss puts further strain on ‘the assumption of significant autonomy of the collective will-forming process’. For Greven (2009a, p. 185), this autonomy is ‘increasingly proving to be an illusion’ because of a spatial transformation of governance, i.e., processes that have been negotiated for a good 25 years now under the catchwords globalisation, transnationalisation and supranationalisation. But this spatial transition is necessitated by the increasing mobility of wealth and by the growing power of financial markets over more and more areas of life. It is because democracies are no longer able to govern wealth internally that they are pushed to turn to supranational structures. These supranational entities are not directly responsive to citizen demands – instead, they operate by using the democracies as mediators. In this mediating role, the democracies do not act on the basis of an autonomously formed will. Instead, national governments take their subjects’ complaints to the supranational structures and explain the decisions of the supranational structures to their subjects. In this explaining role, the democratic states seek to legitimate the decisions of the supranational structures, to make those decisions politically acceptable. Instead of acting on the basis of the subjects’ demands, democratic states attempt to shape the subjects’ will so as to reduce conflict and tension between the subjects and the supranational system. Yet in a crisis – in a situation where this legitimation proves difficult or impossible – the democratic states leverage their mediating position politically. They deflect blame for conditions they are unable to shift onto the supranational system, using the supranational system as an excuse.
Consider how the United Kingdom came to leave the European Union. British politicians – on both the left and the right (Labour Leave, 2019; Stewart & Mason, 2016) – explained their inability to respond to the demands of their citizens by accusing the European Union of frustrating them. But the UK transferred power to supranational structures precisely because it found the modern competitive global economy too difficult to navigate independently. It was too difficult for the UK government to defend its currency, and events like the 1992 sterling crisis seemed to necessitate a greater level of integration into a supranational bloc. Yet, when the Eurocrisis and refugee crisis arrived in the 2010s, the British democracy reverted to the position that it could and would respond to its citizens’ demands, if only the powers it chose to alienate were restored to it.
This ‘blame avoidance’ (Weaver, 1986) by the British government left the citizens of the UK in a difficult and confused position – they joined the EU because their democracy was too spatially constrained – it could not respond to them effectively without some capacity to influence decisions taken outside of British territory. But it then became clear that their democracy could not respond to them effectively whilst inside the EU, either, because the UK's influence over European decision-making was insufficiently strong. So, they voted to take the UK outside again. But this just puts them back outside – it doesn’t solve the problem of increasingly severe spatial constraints producing democratic non-responsiveness. Brexit has once again made the British subjects of the whims of increasingly powerful international markets. British governments face runs on the pound if they attempt radical, dynamic action, of either the Trussite or Corbynite variety. So, increasingly, the British political parties have economically converged on policies that keep these markets satisfied (Eaton, 2023; Ivens, 2023). This effectively allows British policy to continue to be dictated by international forces.
And who goes unsatisfied? The citizens of the UK, who now increasingly despise all the party leaders (Difford, 2025). Yet, while these citizens are united in their dissatisfaction, they lack any shared vision of how best to move forward. There is no obvious way in which the nation-state can be retrofitted to accommodate the new spatial constraints it faces. Greven (2009a, p. 185) argues that modernisation has undermined the ‘relative homogeneity’ of the demos through immigration, individualisation, spatial mobility and a decline in religious ties. 5 But beyond these standard communitarian laments, there are now deep disagreements about whether democracy should remain in a mediating role between the demos and the supranational system and, if so, what form this mediation should take.
Consequently, new organisations that attempt to build a civil-social base struggle to situate themselves in a spatially relevant way. Local and national politics seem unable to grasp the problem (Agrawal et al., 2024; Boadway & Shah, 2009), while international and supranational structures are difficult to access in any direct way (Christensen, 2020; Dahl, 1999). This deep, intractable problem produces deep, intractable disagreements about how to proceed. Those disagreements further undermine social unity, fragmenting the demos, and that fragmentation adds another layer of impediments. It becomes difficult for any party or leader to represent a coherent social movement or to generate a meaningful, sustainable level of support.
So, even when social and political organisations think they know what to do, they find that the demos has fragmented. It is as if they come prepared to hammer a nail into a block of wood, but discover that the block of wood is in fact a pile of sawdust. To proceed, they must first establish a functionally sufficient unity – they must first reconstitute the demos. But just as a hammer is not the appropriate tool for making particleboard out of sawdust, the organisations that are effective for intervening in an existing demos are nonidentical to the organisations that might plausibly be effective at reconstituting one. This non-identity is, however, non-obvious. This means that many organisations will act in an oblivious way, attempting anachronistic interventions.
The other tendencies of modernisation also drive the dissolution of the demos and its ability to act, both independently and in combination. An increasingly digitised public sphere undermines the forms of in-person organising characteristic of democracy's ‘saddle period’, producing a population whose engagement with politics is mediated by online algorithms. Social media works with (and strengthens) the tendency toward individualisation, nurturing anxiety and depression, suspicion and mistrust (Alfano & Sullivan, 2021; Keles et al., 2020). In this way, the digital enables citizens to be spatially driven apart while retaining a facimile of connection.
Ingolfur Blühdorn (2022) insightfully argues that individualisation makes it harder to persuade subjects to forgo self-realisation in cases where their self-realisation conflicts with environmental and social imperatives. So, attempts to herd increasingly epistemically divergent citizens back into a demos – whether by the epistemic credibility of experts housed in supranational bureaucracies or by the charisma of particular leaders – run up against the individualisation that is itself one of modernisation's constituting tendencies. And because this individualisation is fuelled by new technology, which makes it easier for citizens to become siloed in online echo chambers, attempts to reunite the demos through a fusion of charismatic leadership and technocratic expertise become so many attempts to run up a wall (Accetti & Bickerton, 2021; Habermas, 2022). Yet, as the environmental effects of modern technology mount, they create new emergencies that place a still greater emphasis on rapid decision-making.
Modernisation also undermines democracy by reducing the windows of time in which democracies can effectively process new information and act effectively. New large language models require an enormous amount of energy to operate (Jegham et al., 2025; Samsi et al., 2023). Afraid to be left behind and pressed to make rapid decisions, political actors rush to accommodate the needs of this technology and the digital consumers it aims to satisfy, making it more difficult to reduce carbon footprints and address the emerging climate crisis. The British Prime Minister, for instance, calls this technology the ‘defining opportunity of our generation’ (Starmer, 2025). New technology does not necessarily aid in reducing the carbon foortprint – in this case, it generates new consumptive demand for energy that state actors feel no choice but to satisfy, exacerbating stress on the global energy supply chain (Thompson, 2022). Political instability fuelled by climate change could drive (and may already be driving) refugee crises (Neef et al., 2023; Reuveny, 2007). Rapid demographic shifts put stress on public resources in receiving countries. At the same time, pressure to maintain competitive tax rates in the face of wealth mobility erodes the fiscal base for addressing these pressures. The effects of this pile up and compound rapidly, faster than states can respond. Individuals struggle to process this rapid technological and cultural change, and these reduced temporal windows create additional confusion.
At earlier points in the modernisation process, it might have been more plausibly argued that the tendencies of modernisation check one another's excesses. Technological growth might be framed as a way of fostering community or of cleaning up energy production. Individualisation could have helped us to think independently and question whether particular technological developments or ways of structuring the economy and society are in fact conducive to individual freedom and well-being. But when the modernisation tendencies are accelerated beyond a certain threshold, the tendencies instead blindly intensify one another. Rapid technological growth drives social and political accommodation. Individualisation makes it harder to coordinate any other kind of response, to articulate any credible alternative. Digital subjects develop new needs, new consumptive desires, that are increasingly highly differentiated and require more and more resources to satisfy. When the first four modernising tendencies – increased wealth and labour mobility, the commercialisation of additional areas of social life, the spread of individualism in the culture and the development of new forms of technology – all fuel one another, this unleashes the fifth tendency, the tendency for modernisation to accelerate beyond the point at which it can be comprehended or meaningfully addressed. This temporal shift happens at the very same time that the nation-state becomes spatially incapable, and in this way the temporal and spatial problems compound, yielding polities that are neither spatially nor temporally fit for purpose.
Hartmut Rosa (2013), following Scheuerman (2004), identifies a fundamental trend in modernity towards the ‘acceleration’ of social processes. According to Rosa, modern democracy presupposes a capacity for ‘political steering’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 252). This rests on the idea that: ‘…the diverse, institutionalized temporal structures of political will-formation, decision-making and decision-implementation in representative-democratic systems are compatible with the rhythm, tempo, duration and sequence of social developments: in other words, that they are essentially synchronized with the path of societal development such that the political system has time to make fundamental decisions and to organize the deliberative, democratic process for this purpose’.
Modernisation doesn’t just increase the need for speed. Rosa (2013, pp. 231–232) also argues that modernisation increases the need for time-consuming mediation. A ‘second wave of individualisation and hence pluralisation’ increases ‘possible choices and contingencies with respect to the shaping of one's biography’, leading to a heterogeneity of identity, both within society and across a given individual's lifespan. The reservoir of shared convictions is very much reduced. Working through these differences takes more time even as less is available. But Rosa is reluctant to bite the bullet. Rosa (2013, pp. 259, 262) acknowledges that the ‘modern conception of the pattern of time in politics’ or even ‘the interface between politics and society’ seems ‘to become unstable’ or to have been brought ‘to the brink of collapse’. But it is only in the conclusion that Rosa (2013, p. 319) goes so far as to acknowledge that modernity's ‘broken promise of autonomy’ ‘can no longer be redeemed’. Unable to process events within a temporally relevant window, ‘the collective will-forming process’ has broken down. The second of Greven's three legs has also been weakened beyond repair.
Even if it were possible to reconstitute a demos in the face of all of this, to produce a substantial degree of political and social unity in one or some number of the democracies, such a demos would find that, in its absence, the pace of modernisation has increased to such a degree that it would be very difficult for the demos to adequately process these changes in real time. A demos could only govern if it can formulate a will with sufficient speed and deploy that will in a spatially relevant area. But these capacities have been lost in and through the acceleration of modernisation itself.
And now, the various ‘crises’ of the last decade, i.e., the Euro crisis, the migration crisis, the COVID crisis and now the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine, have led to a clear shift of power from the legislative to the executive. Talk abounds of ‘post-parliamentarism’ (Marschall, 2016), ‘presidentialism’ (Bennister & Worthy, 2024) and ‘executive federalism’ (Bulman-Pozen, 2016). The growing importance of the executive has both spatial and temporal causes. It can be attributed to increasing supranational integration and to an attendant need for nation-states to speak quickly and with once voice on the international stage to even stand a chance of contributing to decisions on a relevant timeline.
Admittedly, these developments pose less of a challenge to thin models of liberal democracy in the mould of Schumpeter (1942) than they do to normatively demanding conceptions of modern democracy that rely more on a deliberative mode. It remains possible for liberal democracies to cycle through government after government, even if these governments increasingly move too slowly and preside over too much pluralism to build and sustain strong governing majorities able to distil and act upon a comprehensive program. But since these theories of democracy do not require meaningful choices, it is hard to see how they could meet the Sartori criterion. Debilitated democracies may remain democracies in the Schumpeterian sense, but they have become debilitated in other, further senses of more pressing relevance to the average citizen. They have lost Greven's three preconditions for democracy. And without these, they cannot hope to keep the two central promises. As the possibility of modern democracy falls away, liberal democracies remain modern by ceasing to be meaningfully democratic. Attempts to remain democratic estrange these polities from the current stage of modernity, committing them to retrograde (Kemmerzell & Selk, 2024), anachronistic resistance strategies that have no realistic chance of success.
Conclusion
The term ‘ratchet effects’ expresses that progress has been made in a process of social evolution that can no longer be reversed. Particularly in the work of Jürgen Habermas, one finds what Helmut Dubiel (1989, p. 509) terms a ‘historically optimistic basic attitude’, namely the conviction that normative as well as institutional standards have been established in Western societies that provide a certain guarantee that a democratically developed society will not fall back to a pre-democratic level. Habermas sees the formation of cosmopolitan institutions and forms of consciousness, which would prevent a relapse into nationalist patterns of action, as such a ratchet effect, sometimes also referring to it as a ‘learning process’: ‘A mobilisation of the masses through religious, ethnic or nationalist agitation will gradually become less likely the more the expectations of tolerance inherent in a liberal civic ethos permeate political culture also at a national level’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 327).
There are further ratchet effects. Consider the ways oligarchs alter political and economic arrangements when there is no demos able to oppose them. These changes to the distribution of power are themselves difficult to reverse. They also increase the speed at which modernisation occurs by removing barriers to the mobility of wealth. Rising inequality generates division in the experiences of the citizens, further fracturing the demos, while an increase in speed sows confusion, making it still more difficult for these changes to be grasped, much less effectively grappled with.
Along similar lines, changes to communication technology – from the written word, to television, to online social media – make it steadily harder to unite society around any epistemic authority. It is difficult to imagine how there could be any reversion to legacy media or to the literary culture of previous eras. It's no easier to imagine a return to the forms of in-person social organisation that prevailed in prior epochs, such as churches and trade unions. Those that remain become increasingly isolated from one another, diminishing bonds of solidarity and diminishing the likelihood that these organisations will come to one another's defence.
And, as carbon emissions mount, climate change passes a series of points of no return, imposing onerous, unavoidable material costs. Yet the more digital technology develops, the more energy seems to be required to maintain a competitive economy, and the harder it is for governments to adopt a preventative environmental policy. Technological change is irreversible, and yet it also gives rise to irreversible environmental change. The reduction of temporal windows for processing and decision-making also seem irreversible.
Each of the modernisation tendencies would, if operating at a sufficiently high pace, pose major challenges for democracy, but when we understand modernisation as an interconnected set of mutually reinforcing tendencies that transform the spatial and temporal terrain of the political, it becomes clear that this is no mere ordeal. A series of points of no return, across many different domains, have been passed. Democracy is not merely in trouble or in crisis, it has been debilitated permanently and irreversibly.
In sum:
While modernisation initially invites citizens to question established institutions that concentrate wealth and power, beyond a certain limit its first tendency destroys the capacity of democracy to intervene in a spatially relevant way. The spatial dislocation caused by the internationalisation of markets overwhelms the capacities of states, unleashing oligarchisation and gutting Greven's third prerequisite for democracy. Overwhelmed by pressure from international markets, states supranationalise decision-making. These supranationalisations, once made, further alienate decision-making power from the national space. They require mediation that distorts ‘the autonomy of the collective will-forming process’. They also generate new kinds of authority that cannot reliably earn the trust of increasingly digitised, individualised citizens. Yet these supranationalisations are extremely costly to reverse – they have ‘ratchet effects’. The other modernisation tendencies simultaneously reduce temporal windows for processing and decision-making, inflicting a confusing barrage of technological growth, environmental degradation, and unchecked hyperindividualised consumerism. Disagreements about #4 and #5, as well as an inability to process #4 and #5 within a relevant time frame, confuse and fracture the demos beyond previous limits. The fractured demos is therefore less able to take decisions, to manage modernisation and its effects.
The first four modernising tendencies, if they are not disrupted, tend to accelerate, and this acceleration makes it even more difficult for a demos to process modernisation and its effects, intensifying the significance of 1–7. Taken together, 1–7 destroy all three of Greven's preconditions for modern democracy, thereby discrediting its two central promises – the promise of being able to collectively and equally shape the fate of the political community and the promise of achieving improvement in social circumstances.
The process of modernisation has not only led to the formation of modern democracy, but also to the exhaustion of the preconditions on which the process of democratisation rests. The process has reached a point at which it can only be checked or reversed with very considerable upheavals. Such upheavals would have to happen in the absence of the three preconditions, and without the three preconditions, they could hardly be in service of the two promises. They would not be democratic in these key senses – they would be of an altogether different kind.
This possibility – that for some time now we have been experiencing the ‘transformation of democracy into something new, something that can only be described inadequately’ (Greven, 2009a, p. 181, emphasis added) needs acknowledging. It is not simply that democracy has become alienated from capacities it can restore – these capacities, once lost, are irrecoverable. Democracy may continue without these capacities, but in much the same way that a marathon runner may go on living after the legs have been ripped off. It is a different kind of life, with different horizons of possibility.
Today's debilitated democracies may have to settle for little more than competitive multiparty elections (Schumpeter, 1942) – a circulation of elites that manages increasingly endemic resentments and frustrations. This circulation may be ‘inclusive’ (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012) in the sense that rising elites are able to join in, but it will not do very much more than that. Such regimes retain some capacity to pacify disgruntled subjects, at the cost of permanent, irreversible reductions in political dynamism.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors are particularly grateful to Veith Selk and Oliver Weber for bringing them together. John P. McCormick and William E. Scheuerman kindly hosted presentations of early drafts at the University of Chicago and Indiana University, where the paper received substantial constructive feedback. Finally, the authors express their appreciation for the reviewers and editorial staff at the European Journal of Social Theory.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors are grateful to TU Darmstadt for providing Studebaker with funding for a guest stay in early 2025.
