Towards a Concept of Political Robustness
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721999974 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721999974
Political Studies
2023, Vol. 71(1) 69 –88
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721999974
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Towards a Concept of Political
Robustness
Eva Sørensen1,2 and Christopher Ansell3
Abstract
How effective are different political institutions, policy-making processes and policies when it
comes to mediating, mitigating and managing vertical and horizontal political tensions caused by
disruptive societal challenges and political polarization? The present crisis for liberal democracy
places this question high on the research agenda. A concept of political robustness is helpful
for identifying the properties of political systems with a strong capacity for coping with political
instability and conflict. This article defines political robustness, draws the contours of a conceptual
framework for analysis of the political robustness of political systems and applies it illustratively
to the political robustness of liberal democracies. We propose that the robustness of a political
system depends on how much those who voice political demands—which differs greatly over time
and between regimes—are involved in aggregating and integrating political demands into binding
decisions.
Keywords
polity, politics, policy, robustness, legitimacy
Accepted: 12 February 2021
Introduction
How effective are different political institutions, policy-making processes and policies
when it comes to mediating, mitigating and managing vertical and horizontal political
tensions caused by disruptive societal challenges and political polarization? The present
crisis for liberal democracy signifies that the search for answers to this question is as
important as ever. The crisis surfaces along with the decline of trust in politicians, the
surge of populist political leaders with an authoritarian leadership style, the intensifica-
tion of political polarization as seen in the case of Brexit, and the advent of movements
that question the willingness and capacity of democratically elected governments to stop
race-related violence, contain pandemics and prevent climate change. These develop-
ments reveal that Fukuyama’s (1992) much proclaimed End of History has yet to arrive.
1Roskilde Universitet, Roskilde, Denmark
2NORD University, Bodø, Norway
3University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Corresponding author:
Eva Sørensen, Roskilde Universitet, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.
Email: eva@ruc.dk
999974PSX0010.1177/0032321721999974Political StudiesSørensen and Ansell
research-article2021
Article
70 Political Studies 71(1)
Books entitled Democracy in Decline? (Diamond et al., 2015), How Democracies End
(Runciman, 2018), How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018) and Why We Are
Polarized (Klein, 2020) have found their way to the bookshelves in growing numbers,
and we are once again reminded of how the dynamic endurance of a political system, be
it democratic or not, hinges on its ability to tackle inherent political tensions related to the
authoritative allocation of societal values in legitimate ways (Easton, 1965: 3; Kane and
Patapan, 2012; Runciman, 2014).
The growing concerns among researchers and commentators regarding the future of
democracy revitalize the need to understand the properties of a political system endowed
with a strong capacity to cope legitimately and effectively with political instability, con-
flict and disruption. We propose that the concept of political robustness has much to offer
in this regard. The importance of systemic robustness is recognized in a range of scholarly
disciplines. In biological systems, ‘robustness is a property that allows a system to main-
tain its functions against internal and external perturbations’ (Kitano, 2004: 826). In engi-
neering, robustness refers to ‘the maintenance of some desired system characteristics
despite fluctuations in the behaviour of its component parts or its environment’ (Carlson
and Doyle, 2002: 2539). Statistics are claimed to be robust when they exhibit ‘insensitiv-
ity to small deviations from the assumptions’ (Huber, 1981: 1), and scientific results are
robust when they are ‘detected by numerous, diverse means’ (Schupbach, 2018: 276).
Social scientists have also become increasingly aware of how robustness is a property of
human behaviour and social systems, applying the concept to political economies (Leeson
and Subrick, 2006), socio-ecological system (Anderies et al., 2004; Anderies and Janssen,
2013; Ostrom, 2011), federalism (Bednar, 2008), polycentrism (Thiel, 2017), policy
design (Capano and Woo, 2017), international norms (Deitelhoff and Zimmermann,
2020), decision-making (Lempert et al., 2010) and governance (Ansell et al., 2017b).
What unites these literatures is an emphasis on the systemic capacity for adaption and
innovation.
Although the interest in robustness is growing among political scientists (Ansell et al.,
2020; Bednar, 2008; Capano and Woo, 2017; Howlett, 2019; Trondal et al., 2020), few
have considered political robustness as a systemic capacity to cope with the centrifugal
political forces in terms of political disagreements, conflicts and disruptive events that
threaten to tear a society apart. This article aims to answer the key question of how politi-
cal systems can absorb, monitor and cope with and perhaps even build back better in the
wake of political turmoil and contestation through adaption and innovation. Instead of
looking for the systemic properties that facilitate the return to a stable equilibrium (static
resilience) that is neither feasible nor desirable, a robust political system remodels itself
to continue to perform key political functions in the face of disruption (Ansell and
Trondal, 2018; Capano and Woo, 2017).
Based on this argument, the article pursues three interconnected objectives. First, it
endeavours to conceptualize and theorize political robustness as a systemic ability to
respond to disruptive vertical and horizontal political tensions in dynamic and construc-
tive ways, and to specify how this ability is a property of political institutions processes
and policies. Second, it seeks to illustrate the relevance of the generic concept of political
robustness by applying it to the current crisis liberal democracies. Since the political
demands voiced in liberal democracies tend to be numerous (and growing; Almond and
Verba, 1963; Dalton and Welzel, 2014), their political robustness hinges on their ability
to acknowledge, manage and transform multiple political voices. Finally, we draw the
contours of a conceptual framework for future studies of political robustness. The main
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