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What is the most fundamental challenge facing democracies today? One major concern comprises democratic backsliding, regression, and the rise of illiberal democracies. Another closely related worry is the rise of populism, especially when it views the “people” as a “moral, homogenous entity whose will cannot err.”1 In less virulent form, populists on the left and right express impatience with institutional structures and norms—such as judicial review, independent institutions, or the separation of powers—that stand in the way of direct, unmediated expression of the popular will. Good reasons exist for these concerns in many modern democracies. But the deepest and perhaps most enduring challenge to democratic government in the West is the emergence in recent years of what I call political fragmentation.2 Briefly, when political authority—the power to make and influence public decisions and policy—is dispersed into so many different hands and power centers both inside and outside the state, it becomes difficult to marshal and sustain the necessary political power for governments to function effectively.
To take the United States as an example, there is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government. That is so whether effectiveness is measured by the number of important bills Congress enacts per session, the proportion of issues important to the public that the legislature addresses, or the number of enacted bills that update policies from decades earlier. While twenty years ago, Congress passed 225 laws in a year, in 2020 it only managed 28—the 116th Congress was the least productive since the 1970s. Social-media use among legislators, by contrast, soared in 2020; one data analysis concludes that Twitter has replaced Congressional floor debates.3 According to Gallup polls, as late as the mid-1990s, about half of Americans approved of Congress, but in the last ten years that figure has dropped as low as 9 percent and has never gotten above 30 percent, save for a few months in 2021 when Congress passed a massive relief and stimulus package in response to the covid-19 pandemic. Social scientists now write books with titles such as Can America Govern Itself?
The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues that their populations care about most poses enormous dangers....