“The Democrat’s Dilemma: A Theory of Institutional Forbearance and Democratic Stability”

Lecture by Sean Ingham (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California San Diego)

Thursday, March 13, 2025, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Thomson House Ballroom. Open to everyone, reception will follow.

Registration is appreciated, by e-mail at the following address or via Facebook. One McGill student, chosen at random from among those registered for the event and who are currently students at McGill, will receive a copy of Sean Ingham’s book Rule By Multiple Majorities, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Organized by the Research Group on Constitutional Studies Lecture Series (RGCS), a unit of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds.

Summary

Some scholars argue that democratic stability requires political elites to practice forbearance: roughly speaking, “restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The paper proposes a novel account of forbearance and the mechanism by which it stabilizes democracies. Public officials exercise forbearance when they refrain from actions of “dubious legitimacy,” actions that, while in fact compatible with democracy’s constitutive rules, are not commonly known to be. The argument is that such actions gradually undermine citizens’ ability to coordinate their responses to genuine abuses of power because they create uncertainty about the extent to which other citizens are willing to condone breaches of democracy’s rules. The article concludes with observations about the normative implications of the theory, introducing the concept of the “democrat’s dilemma” to illustrate the practical difficulties of knowing when democrats ought to exercise forbearance.