When democratic crisis is invoked today, what is largely designated is a crisis of belief: citizens are said to no longer believe in their institutions, their representatives, or the regime’s capacity to deliver on its promises.
This diagnosis structures a considerable part of the literature — declining political trust, abstention, electoral volatility, the rise of populist appeals — and now calls forth a varied repertoire of remedies. Citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, and deliberative mechanisms are mobilised to restore the adherence of the governed, as though democracy had to produce new proofs of its legitimacy.
This panel seeks to test the assumption shared by both the diagnosis and its remedies: that democracy rests on belief insofar as belief constitutes a democratic virtue. This assumption deserves scrutiny.
Is it desirable to link believing to living democratically? Political legitimacy is regularly understood as resting on the belief of those who obey; yet many approaches conceive of democracy instead as a procedural equilibrium requiring no particular adherence. More radically, others contend that the democrat is precisely the one who cannot believe, since the indeterminacy of an absolute truth or of the place of power forecloses full and complete adherence. In this sense, distrust and doubt appear less as pathologies than as resources of the regime.
The panel gathers theoretical and empirical contributions around three questions.
What exactly is lost when faith disappears: democracy as a regime, or only its representative form? Do distrust, critical citizenship, and apathy produce comparable political effects, or do they reflect fundamentally different relationships to democracy?
On what grounds can democratic adherence be founded — procedural, epistemic, or substantive? Can legitimation through the quality of decisions withstand the claims of experts and algorithms to decide better?
Finally, who must believe? If all common faith presupposes a bounded community, how do populist mobilisations exploit this requirement?
We welcome comparative analyses, survey-based research on regime support, evaluations of the political effects of participatory innovations, studies of elite behaviour, and contributions in political theory.
