In the ancient world, rulers usually staked their legitimacy by proclaiming their divinity. The Persian emperor Shapur I claimed on his coins to be “Divine Shapur King of Iran whose seed is from gods.” Julius Caesar had himself declared a god, and his heir Augustus claimed to be Divi filius, son of god. The Romans executed Jesus at least partly because they took his claim to be “son of god” as a challenge to their secular authority.

Even rulers who didn’t think they possessed superhuman powers pretended to, because the public expected it. Plutarch wrote of Alexander the Great that he “was not foolishly affected or puffed up by the belief in his divinity, but used it for the subjugation of others.”

In the Middle Ages, as the notion of a single, jealous God was spread through monotheistic Christianity and Islam, assertions of divinity fell from favor. Christian kings instead ruled “by grace of God,” and Muslim kings ruled as God’s “deputy” or “representative.” The first Umayyad Caliph, Mu’awiya, exemplified the cosmological claims to political legitimacy common throughout the medieval and early modern Christian and Muslim worlds by claiming that “the earth belongs to God and I am the deputy of God.”

Several rulers who posed as God’s chosen representative were simply catering to popular expectations. Frederick the Great of Prussia mocked Christianity when writing to the philosopher Voltaire (a vociferous critic of Christian dogma), but claimed divine sanction on his coins.

Divine legitimacy requires some religious consensus. An impious king might lose his claim to the divine mandate and be overthrown. Religious minorities suffered persecution not only from religious intolerance, but also because defying the dominant faith meant defying the king. During the Reformation, both Catholics and Protestants declared that the faithful should rise up against a heretical king. One French tract from 1590 explicitly justified the assassination of unbelieving kings. Centuries of warfare resulted.

But the violence and destructiveness of the Reformation’s religious wars eventually drove European thinkers to seek a basis for political legitimacy that rested on non-sectarian principles. Their efforts bore fruit in a new theory about political legitimacy: the social contract.

The big idea of the social contract was that legitimacy really lay with something called “the people” or “the nation,” imagined to have a collective will. Contract theory derives legitimacy from parables about the rational self-interest of the people. Thomas Hobbes, one of the first social contract theorists, supported absolute monarchy as the only means of preventing a “war of all against all.” But by 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the collective will of the people as “the sovereign,” able to legitimately oppose, and supplant, the royal will. Rousseau treated the social contract itself as sacred, suggesting that it could form a simple “civil religion” to replace complex Christian theology.

Social contract thinking inspired the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and other revolutions that have transformed most of the world. Yet the spread of social contract thinking, or the idea of the “national will,” does not automatically establish a truly democratic government. Instead, there is usually a long period of transition.

Consider a few examples. In France, the great revolution of 1789 quickly descended into a period of bloody civil war and ideological persecution known as “the Reign of Terror.” Shortly after, Napoleon established a tyrannical dictatorship, tried to conquer neighboring countries, and was only stopped by a coalition of major European powers. Military defeat at Waterloo restored absolutist monarchy to France, but a further revolution in 1830 led to constitutional monarchy, and still another in 1848 led to another dictatorship. Only after military defeat in 1871 did a stable French republic emerge. The process took almost a century.

Germany’s path to democracy was equally arduous. A popular revolution in 1848 decisively failed. Military defeat in the First World War led to another popular revolution, and in the interwar period, the democratic Weimar Republic survived some 14 years. Then Adolf Hitler established a murderous police state and set about conquering most of Europe. Only from the ashes of a chastened and defeated Germany did a stable German republic emerge, its new constitution engineered by the occupying Allied forces. Again, the process took about a century.

But the Germans and French moved quickly compared to the British. The first English republic came into being in 1649, led by the dictatorial Oliver Cromwell, who launched aggressive wars against neighboring Ireland and Scotland. The Stuart dynasty returned to power in 1660, but the largely non-violent Glorious Revolution of 1688 established a constitutional monarchy. Democratic government did not emerge in practice until the 19th century, though the United Kingdom, as its name suggests, remains nominally monarchical.

Perhaps this centuries-long timeline is the yardstick for setting our expectations today about the chances for democracy in the Arab world. In Egypt, hopes raised by the 2011 Arab Spring have been dashed. But skeptics of Arab democracy have forgotten how long and painful the path to democracy was in Europe.

Throughout the Middle East, the slow progress of genuinely democratic government masks how rapidly democratic ideas are spreading. Indeed, even emirs and kings feel the need to go through the motions: Parliaments have been established in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. These parliaments have limited powers, and are elected on limited franchises. Nevertheless, the line between ritualistic and genuinely democratic elections is hard to draw.

Still, when compared to the absolutist monarchies of centuries past, even unfair elections and backsliding represent progress toward real democracy. Perhaps a long tradition of unfair elections will eventually create demand for fair elections. Slavery in the early American republic made a mockery of the famous boast from the declaration of independence that “all men are created equal.” Nevertheless, the empty boasts of 1776 have, perhaps, been gradually fulfilled over time.

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Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University, and Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington.

Margaret Levi. Photo by Nikki Ritcher Photography.

A condensed and edited transcript follows:

Q: How did you first get interested in studying government legitimacy?

A: It well predates my being a trained social scientist. My mother was taking us on marches for civil rights when I was just a little teeny girl. I think the issue of when government is serving its populations—and which part of its populations—has always been a question that fascinated me. That morphed into studying the question of under what conditions people will resist government and under what conditions do they find it legitimate.

Q: You did research on how soldiers go to war for a government. When we talk about government legitimacy we have this idea that it’s a big monolithic thing, but in many ways it’s a very intimate thing between each individual and the government.

A: The research was on young men who were choosing whether or not to volunteer for military service at the beginning of World Wars I and II in the U.S., Australia, Canada, England, and France. Some of them were also deciding whether to allow themselves to be conscripted when it was no longer a question of volunteering. That’s a time when the population is being mobilized to pay a very high price to show their allegiance to the government.

Yes, it is an individual decision but … it is one very much informed by one’s social network and the community in which one lives. If we go back to my interest in [the] civil rights [movement], parts of the population were happy with the status quo and thought everything was hunky-dory, and parts of the population were literally oppressed and suppressed and didn’t think things were good at all.

You see a huge difference, for example, between how Francophones in Canada reacted to the request for volunteers and how Anglophone Canadians responded. The Anglophones were far more likely to respond positively and the Francophones were more likely to respond negatively. The reason had to do with their feelings about how well the federal Canadian government was serving them and how trustworthy it was. The Francophones had been promised bi-lingual education and general respect for their language, but in some provinces that didn’t occur. Francophones were also worried—and reasonably so—that military orders would only be given in English, which not all of them spoke.

We can see this kind of problem occurring all over the world: Some part of a population feels like they are not getting what they were promised by the national government. We can see that in some of the midwestern and southern towns that supported Trump, where white populations feel let down by the federal government. We can see that in some black populations and some urban areas, where people have gotten promises for many, many, many decades about fair police treatment and fair access and equality of opportunity that they don’t feel have been delivered.

Before I looked at conscription I looked at taxation. Of Rule and Revenue (published in 1988) started with trying to understand why tax systems look so different across countries and across eras. I started in ancient Rome and ended in contemporary Australia. I thought my answer was going to have to do with economic transaction costs. But it turns out that the major issue was political transaction costs. That is, no ruler can really force everyone to pay up. They can’t have a fed under every bed, and it doesn’t matter how much they use the military or the police. They need to get what I call “quasi-voluntary compliance,” where people feel like they have some obligation to pay but they will do so only under certain conditions. Those conditions include the trustworthiness or reliability of the government. There has to be some confidence that the government is trying to keep its promises. There has to be some belief that the process by which the policy was made is fair according to the norms of the place, which can vary a lot. And people have to believe that government will enforce the rules against those who don’t comply; no one wants to be a sucker, one of the few paying taxes or signing up for military service in a full-blown war.

One example from Australia in the 1960s and ‘70s was that the tax system began to fray in part because of a supreme court justice who’d been a tax lawyer. He began to create all sorts of loopholes for all kinds of relatively well-off people. As a result, the government allowed rich people to get away with not paying taxes, and they faced a tax revolt from everyone else. The whole system had to be reconstituted to be more trustworthy: first to be more equitable and secondly to ensure that everyone paid their share given a better set rules.

Australian men at the Town Hall in Melbourne enlisting for service in World War I.

Q: It’s an interesting thing: We might think that democracy happens by dropping off a ballot, but it actually happens in these struggles over taxation and conscription. Your research suggests that one of the hallmarks of democracy is this ongoing struggle.

A: That’s right. That’s what democracy involves: an ongoing struggle, ongoing conversation—that reconfiguration of norms and ethics and values, who is included, what the government’s responsibilities are, what the processes are. You want to feel the government is actually trustworthy and fair and that you are, as a citizen, contributing. And that you’re not going to be alone.

I really do think that the feeling of being a sucker is part of what’s going on in the U.S. Feeling betrayed or feeling suckered and feeling like you’re doing your share and others are not. When that begins to get too rampant, whether it’s right or wrong, it is really important.

Q: One of the points you’ve made is that mudslinging and skepticism are pretty much hallmarks of democracy. The fact that there’s a lot of noise doesn’t necessarily mean that the government is suffering a crisis of legitimacy. Where are we now?

A: That’s the question. Before the election we were seeing people claiming in surveys and on media that they distrusted government, and we read and heard analysts arguing about how important that distrust would be in affecting votes. But there wasn’t evidence of much non-compliance or demonstrations against government; people weren’t really taking to the streets. What we’re seeing now is something quite different. We’re seeing a lot of people mobilizing in ways that go well beyond the vote. We’re seeing big demonstrations. They’re anti-Trump, but I think it’s democratic, with a small “d.” It seems to be from people who want certain kinds of government action. It’s a pro-government, but anti-this-particular-administration, mobilization.

That raises a lot of questions about legitimacy for me. I think that there is a real feeling among a large number of people in the current population of the U.S. that Trump is in many ways an illegitimate president. He may or may not have been elected illegitimately. But his practices and policies have raised real alarms about whether he is engaging in legitimate democratic practice. There’s concern about this particular administration in an effort to ensure that government continues to be democratic, with a small “d.”

That’s why it’s really not the Tea Party. The protests have some similarities in form, but the substantive concerns are vastly different. These protestors are really talking about what our education system is going to look like, what social security is going to look like, what health is going to look like. We want to protect government; we believe in climate change and want the government to act to do something about it. There’s a lot of government in it. It’s not anti-government as an institution.

Q: You said in one of your interviews that we’re still governed by institutions designed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then tweaked some in the 20th century. Now we’re at an inflection point where we must outline better economic and political practices that suit the world of the 21st century. Are we experiencing the spasms of the inflection point right now?

A: Yeah, I’m in a lot of discussions of exactly that … There’s a set of short-term questions that have to be confronted as well as some really significant long-term questions—which is frankly where I’m putting most of my energy because of my own particular capacities. The short-term issue about our democratic institutions is to make sure that they hold and that, depending on your partisanship, we change this particular administration or make it ineffective as soon as we can. Those are the short-term goals.

The long-term ones are really big. I don’t think we can take our eye off [them]. Trump and Brexit didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are reflections of some fundamental flaws in the way in which democracy has evolved and our institutions have not. There really needs to be some rethinking about how a democracy is affected in a world that no longer is a group of white patrician men basically running the show.

Less than half of the eligible population voted in this last election. I have my own doubts whether this election was about populism. There is a population that felt left out and voted for Trump and are very angry. But that portion may not even be half of the people who voted for Trump. We’re talking about a very small portion of the population. We’re not talking about the mass movements that created Perón or created Hitler. Populism is an issue that we have to interrogate. We have to really think where the populations of various countries are, why they have the beliefs they have.

The media, our sources of information, the kinds of civic education we need to provide: All of those things are really up for grabs. The false news issue is not really the issue. The issue is how people come to believe the things they believe and under what conditions those things can be changed. How do we get to a world in which people can agree on some basic facts? And create institutional arrangements that allow people to find their commonalities and to argue about their differences—learning from each other and agreeing to disagree, in some cases.

Student protesters marching down Langdon Street at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the Vietnam War era. Photo courtesy of UW Digital Collections.

Q: If you were thinking ahead, maybe 40 or 50 years, can you describe one institution that could be really dramatically changed?

A: One thing that we really need to rethink is our education system. I don’t mean just making sure everyone can read and write. We have to find ways to enable people to think critically, to be nimble, to acquire certain skills. We have to give people the kind of information that enables them to make government work for them. We don’t need to know absolutely everything that all of the various agencies do, but we should know how to find out what’s going on when we need to. That would be part of creating a population that is able to argue about policies but not think that those who disagree are bad people. To have an actual discussion and recognize facts. That’s one institution that I would change … It might be a really major overhaul rather than a reform.

And you know that Congress is not working very well … We need to create a set of incentives, positive or negative, to get people to be our representatives—to serve the interests of their constituents, but also to be focused on the national interest. And to make those tradeoffs at the appropriate moment. There were all these little rules that turned out to have huge consequences. Pork barreling and earmarking actually served a purpose of enabling representatives to serve their districts. We have to redesign the ways of Congress so that they really can represent their constituencies and be part of a national conversation that serves the larger general interest.

The Senate was designed to solve a problem in creating democracy—how to get states to buy in if they’re tiny. So it’s a problematic institution in terms of representativeness. Whether we can ever change the Senate is a very open question, but if we raised these issues we may be able to find ways … institutionalizing new norms, new rules, new procedures, that bring people together rather than constantly push them into camps.

This relates to a book I wrote with John Ahlquist, In the Interest of Others. What we’re really struggling with is, how do you create an expanded community of fate? What kind of institutional arrangements bring out people’s willingness to recognize others, strangers, as part of their community? We know about the ways in which people resort to sort of tribal communities. We wanted to think about the ways in which you get people to think in broader communities. John and I established proof of concept that it can happen by looking at labor unions, which are in fact mini-governments … We found how rule changes made a difference, how different constitutions made a difference.

Looking at longshore unions is not exactly looking at the U.S. government, but it’s still a proof of concept, showing that it’s actually possible to build a democratic set of institutions that can evoke from people their best selves.

Q: Yeah. If institutions are hitting this inflection point—in a different kind of capitalism, a different kind of political culture—we’ll be searching for new structures and new recipes.

A: We really need to put our heads together and do that. There might be people out there with some of the answers but we have to get them together in the same room and start figuring it out. I don’t think this is something that will be done at Davos. We need a lot of different voices in that room. It cannot be just corporate leadership and it can’t be just government leadership. It has to be serious academics; it has to be journalists who have been in the trenches; it has to be folks from various communities. There are a lot of voices that need to be heard as we think through what institutions we need to have a democracy that really thrives and a political economy that really thrives.

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In a paper published in the Journal of Democracy, Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard University, and his colleague Roberto Stefan Foa showed that public satisfaction with democratic governments was the lowest it had been since the advent of opinion polling. Mounk and Foa argued that this discontent wasn’t the product of local conditions, but truly global. They also showed that citizens of democracies were increasingly open to nondemocratic alternatives.

Why are democracies losing their legitimacy? Mounk, the author of two previous books, is at work on The People versus Democracy: How the Clash Between Individual Rights and the Popular Will is Undermining Liberal Democracy, that gets at the question. In a recent phone interview, he addressed questions about the democratic crisis of legitimacy. In particular, he suggested that support for democracy has been less grounded in democratic institutions and more in the rising living standards that democracy has produced.

Yascha Mounk.

A condensed and edited transcript follows:

Q: Can you measure the legitimacy of a government?

A: I don’t think there’s a way of measuring it. But I think that the legitimacy of a democratic government involves people recognizing two things:

First, that getting elected to government gives you a mandate to pursue certain policies, but in doing so, you have to recognize the limits on your party. And you have to preserve the ability of your opposition to vote you out of office again.

The second part of a legitimate democratic government is that while you have the mandate to pursue policies, you should be rooted in a vision of the common good, rather than in the narrow sectional interest of one economic, religious, or ethnic group.

Q: Do Western societies confer too much legitimacy via elections?

A: No. The importance of elections is not that they necessarily lead to the smartest government or the right political decision. The point is to lower the temperature of politics.

When you have a dictator, you might very well wind up dead if you lose power. That makes your incentive to stay in power relatively high. You have an incentive to do some very extreme things to stay in power. In a democracy, you can always live to fight another day. You might lose your election today, but you can organize, you can revitalize a political program, you can get ready for the next election.

Q: As democracy loses support in the West, are we seeing a change in the sources of political legitimacy?

A: I think what’s been revealed over the last year is something that was true all along, but that was not recognized. There was an assumption that what political scientists call “input legitimacy” was very important: In this theory, people like democracy because they can vote. The idea was, roughly, that there was something naturally legitimate about the institutions we have.

But in fact, a big part of the reason for ordinary citizens’ commitment to democracy was what political scientists call “output legitimacy.” By output legitimacy, I mean that people like democracy because it gave them quite a lot of wealth, political stability, and a rapid improvement in living standards from one generation to the next. And as some of these things are going away—as the system is becoming less stable, as we’re seeing living standards stagnate–output legitimacy isn’t as strong as it used to be. And as a result, people are turning away from that political system.

Q: Are authoritarians and the military gaining in legitimacy, and if so, how?

A: I think they are gaining in relative legitimacy. It’s not that people didn’t used to trust the army and now they do. They used to trust the army and congress and the press. Now the only institution they trust is the army. The army is the last man standing.

Q: How legitimate is Trump?

A: He has legitimately been elected President of the United States. But the government is now in danger of becoming illegitimate because Trump doesn’t seem to recognize the importance of democratic norms or the limits on his power. And he seems to be governing not in the interest of all Americans but only in the interests of those people he considers real Americans.

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These two points help us better understand why the Chinese sense of legitimacy is vastly different from the Western one; for China is not a typical nation-state, but rather a deeply historical and civilizational state. It is an amalgam of the world’s longest continuous civilization, and a super-large modern state with its sense of legitimacy rooted deeply in its history.

An apt analogy would be to something like the Roman Empire, if it had endured into the 21st century—with all its regional and cultural diversities, with a modern economy and a centralized government, with a population nearly equal to that of 100 average-size European nations combined, situated on a vast continent, with its people speaking thousands of different dialects while sharing one written language called Latin.

This kind of state, a product of hundreds of states amalgamated into one over its long history, would become ungovernable if it were to adopt an adversarial political model. Such was the case in China beginning with the 1911 Republican Revolution, when the country attempted to copy the American model and degenerated into chaos, with rival warlords fighting each other and tens of millions of lives lost in the decades that followed.

As a civilizational state, the legitimacy of China’s government is deeply rooted in its own historical tradition, shaped over the millennia since the country was first unified under the Emperor Qin in 221 B.C. China’s one-party governance today may look illegitimate in the eyes of many Westerners, yet it is to most Chinese nothing extraordinary. For most of the past two thousand years, China has practiced a kind of one-party rule: governance by a unified Confucian elite that was selected through public exams (the Keju) and which claimed to represent—or genuinely represented—most if not all under heaven. Furthermore, during much of the one-party-rule era, China was arguably a better-governed, more peaceful and prosperous state than the European states of the same epoch. China began to lag behind Europe when it closed its door to the outside world in the 18th century and missed the Industrial Revolution.

Chinese paramilitary policemen stand guard in front of a sculpture of the ancient philosopher Confucius on display near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Jan. 2011. Photo by Andy Wong/Associated Press.

Three key concepts have underpinned the Chinese sense of state legitimacy:

The first is the Confucian doctrine of the “mandate of heaven,” which has prevailed since the Han Dynasty (201 B.C. to 220 A.D.). Confucius admonished Chinese rulers that “water can carry a boat but also overturn it,” which meant that unless the rulers worked with diligence to ensure good governance (liangzheng shanzhi)—with a particular emphasis on promoting the country’s unity and people’s livelihood—ordinary people could rise up and rebel in the name of “heaven.” In other words, the Chinese mandate of heaven was not a God-given right; the people’s acceptance of the rulers’ legitimacy rested on the condition that the rulers had to perform. This Chinese idea of a “social contract” between the rulers and the ruled preceded the French philosopher Rousseau’s by over two millennia. China’s leaders today have adapted this idea into a sense of mission to realize the Chinese dream of restoring the country’s standing in the world and creating a more just and prosperous society for all.

Despite its various weaknesses, over the past thirty years the Chinese state has presided over the world’s fastest economic growth and improvement of living standards in human history. Key independent surveys, including those by the Pew Research Center and Ipsos, show consistently that the Chinese central authorities command a high degree of respect and support within the country. The latest Ipsos survey (Oct. 2016) showed that 90 percent of Chinese are satisfied with the track the country is taking, while only 37 percent of Americans and 11 percent of French feel the same about their countries. Depicting China’s polity as lacking legitimacy, or even being on the verge of collapse, is out of touch with China’s reality.

The second concept, which is related to the mandate of heaven, is the idea and practice of meritocracy (xuanxian renneng, or selecting and appointing the virtuous and competent). As Dr. Francis Fukuyama has observed in his book The Origins of Political Order, “It is safe to say that China invented modern bureaucracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection.” China’s Keju system, or civil service exams, was long used to select the most talented individuals into leading positions in government.

The Communist Party of China has adapted this tradition for modern China, building a system for selecting its leaders based on merit and performance. For example, China’s top decision-makers (members of the Standing Committee of the CPC Political Bureau, including President Xi Jinping) have almost all served at least twice as party secretaries or governors of a province, which means, given the size of China’s population, they have administered populations of 100 million or more, and performed well, before being promoted to their top-echelon positions.

The third concept of legitimacy derives from the Chinese philosophy of political governance, including, among other things, the two distinctive concepts minyi and minxin. The former approximately refers to “public opinion,” and the latter to “the hearts and minds of the people,” and the pair was first put forward by Mencius (372 – 289 BC). Minyi, or public opinion, can be fleeting and change overnight (especially in today’s internet age), while minxin, or “hearts and minds of the people,” tends to be stable and lasting, reflecting the whole and long-term interest of a nation. Over the past three decades, the Chinese state has generally practiced “rule by minxin.” This allows China to plan for the medium and long term, and even for the next generation, rather than for next 100 days or until the next election, as is the case with many Western democracies.

To sum up, while the West has for so many years engaged in promoting the Western political model in the name of universal values, China has pursued its own experiments in the political domain since 1978, drawing lessons from the disastrous Cultural Revolution, in which ideological radicalism expunged China’s governance traditions and dashed people’s hope for prosperity and order. Thanks to this effort, China has since managed to varying degrees of success to re-establish a connection with its own past as well as borrow many useful elements from the West.

China’s meritocratic system today is essentially a mechanism of “selection plus election,” with the former originating from China’s own tradition and the latter imported from the West. Pioneered by China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, this institutional arrangement has succeeded in ensuring an orderly transition of power for this vast country over the past three decades, and this year may mark a new milestone as the CPC will convene its 19th National Congress.

However imperfect, this system is in a position to compete with the Western political model. Indeed, it would be inconceivable for the Chinese system today to produce an awkward leader like Donald Trump.

The Chinese experience since 1978 shows that the ultimate test of a good political system is how well it ensures good governance as judged by the people of that country. The stereotyped dichotomy of “democracy vs. autocracy” sounds so hollow in today’s complex world, given the large numbers of poorly governed “democracies” around the world. China’s experience may eventually usher in a paradigm shift in international political discourse from the dichotomy of the so-called democracy vs. autocracy, to that of good governance versus bad governance, with good governance taking the form of the Western political system or of a non-Western one. Likewise, bad governance may take the form of the Western political system or a non-Western one.

It follows that, from the Chinese point of view, the nature of a state, including its legitimacy, has to be defined more by its substance, i.e. good governance broadly acknowledged by the people of that country rather than by mere correct procedures. China emphasizes substance over procedures, believing that ultimately the pursuit of right substance will evolve and produce the right procedures, appropriate to each nation’s own traditions and conditions. A plethora of uncertainties are gripping the world today for reasons directly related to how government legitimacy has been defined by the West, and it’s high time to pause and reflect on this issue, and in this context, that China’s age-old wisdom and well-tested practices may be interestingly relevant.

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Moral assessments of political authority are always to some extent relative. People may not love their system of government, but it is important that they at least see it as better than any alternative they can imagine. Social scientists thus have increasingly been inclined to measure political legitimacy with Winston Churchill’s famous declaration in mind: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

With the defeat of fascism in World War II, then of communism in the Cold War, and with the general decline of various other forms of military, one-party, and personal (strong-man) dictatorships since the mid-1970s, democracy came to be seen globally as the one truly legitimate form of government. But there is a difference between popular acceptance of a regime in the absence of any immediate alternative and a deep popular commitment to its moral worth.

Monument to Humanity was a nearly completed statue in Turkey that depicted two humans reaching out to each other. After Recep Erdoğan criticized the monument, while still Prime Minister, the statue was demolished in 2011. Photo courtesy of Ggia/Wikimedia Commons.

Lipset, a sociologist and leading theorist of American democracy, and other social scientists have also distinguished between what we call “performance legitimacy” and “intrinsic legitimacy.” The former is more superficial: People support a political system because it works for the moment to maintain order, generate economic growth, and produce other public goods. But the danger with legitimacy that is based purely on performance is that it can evaporate when the performance goes bad. A democracy is thus only truly “consolidated” when most of its citizens come to believe that the constitutional system is the most right and appropriate for the country, irrespective of how well it performs in any given period of time. Lipset argued that once democracies had functioned well over an extended period of time, they would build up a reservoir of intrinsic legitimacy that they could draw on in difficult times.

But what happens if “difficult times” last a very long time?

Political legitimacy has many possible sources. As the German sociologist Max Weber wrote, legitimacy may be based on tradition—people see authority as morally right because it has a long and deeply rooted historical vintage. It may be forged by the personal charisma of a transformative leader, whether democratic, such as George Washington or Nelson Mandela, or autocratic, such as Lenin, or Fidel Castro, or Ayatollah Khomeini. But charismatic authority is fleeting, as it depends on a personality.

So to be sustained, legitimacy must be institutionalized through rules and procedures, what Weber called “rational-legal” bases of authority. People will obey rules when the rules are perceived to work fairly and well over the long run—or in the absence of any alternative. But in the face of an extended crisis of performance—for example, a protracted increase in economic inequality; two or more decades of stagnant or declining incomes for a large swath of the population; or a broader sense of unaddressed threat to group identity and national sovereignty—much of the population may lose faith in the political system. And when that happens, a systemic alternative is bound to present itself. This can be the military, an authoritarian movement or party, or simply an authoritarian individual leader who denounces the system as weak and corrupt and who claims, “I alone can fix it.”

The ultimate guarantor of any democracy is that its citizens are committed to it unconditionally—again, independent of what it produces for them at any moment in time and of whether the party they favor is in power or not. A reasonable minimum threshold for democratic consolidation is that no less than 70 percent of the public express commitment to democracy as the best form of government, and no more than 15 percent of the public express support for an authoritarian regime option. This is a tough standard that is met by only a few democracies outside the West.

We have generally presumed that popular support for democracy remains extremely high in the established Western democracies. However, recent analysis by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, published in the Journal of Democracy, shows that support for democracy in the U.S. and Europe has declined over the last 20 years in almost every age group, and that the young are the most skeptical (with more than 20 percent of those below age 35 saying that “having a democratic political system” is a “bad” or “very bad” way to “run this country.”) Moreover, the percentage of Americans saying it would be good or very good for the “army to rule” rose from about 6 percent to 16 percent between 1995 and 2011.

More disturbing still, the percentage of Americans who answer that having “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” increased in this same period from about 20 percent to 34 percent. Most of the countries surveyed by the World Values Survey between 2010 and 2014 showed similar increases. In fact, in all of the advanced industrial democracies surveyed in this period, support for a “strong leader” is at or above 20 percent (for example, 21 percent in Germany, slightly above a quarter in Sweden, Australia, and the Netherlands, and 40 percent in Spain).

Surely not all of the above surveyed citizens imagined that they were expressing support for non-democratic rule. But the real danger that the established democracies face is not an army takeover, or a blatant suspension of the constitution by a would-be civilian dictator. The peril is rather the creeping path to autocracy in which a “strong” elected leader would seek to sideline or undermine established institutions and constraints—the Congress, the courts, the media, and the political opposition. Then such a leader would not need to “bother” with constitutional constraints, and could simply “get things done.”

President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan waves to the crowd on Mar. 1, 2014. Despite being a democracy, Turkey has been internationally criticized for human rights violations and suppression of free speech under Erdoğan’s rule.

This is a playbook that has been utilized in the last two decades by a number of “strong leaders” who came to power in competitive elections and then proceeded to dismantle checks on their executive power—and eventually the ability of opposition parties to challenge them on anything like a level playing field. The early practitioners of this incremental assault on democratic constraints were Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In the early 2000s, Thaksin Shinawatra pursued a similar path in Thailand, but the military overthrew him before he could consolidate power. More recently, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have gradually strangled democratic pluralism in their countries. The Law and Justice Party led by Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland is attempting to do the same in Poland, but it lacks the parliamentary strength to amend the constitution to rig the system in favor of the ruling party, the way Orbán did in Hungary.

It is important to note that all the instances of “creeping autocracy” have been accomplished in political systems that lacked the long duration, deep historical roots, and strong countervailing institutions that characterize the democracies of North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. It would be a much greater shock if any of these democracies were to succumb to the wave of (largely right-wing, nativist) populist authoritarianism sweeping through Central and Eastern Europe and several developing countries, most recently the Philippines since the election of Rodrigo Duterte last year. In the long-established democracies, the institutional underpinnings of democracy are much stronger.

But institutions in the end are rules and patterns of behavior that are perpetuated by people and must be defended by people. If people abandon the unconditional commitment to democracy as the best form of government, if they come to put short-term programmatic or partisan advantage above the most fundamental rules of the democratic game, then democracy will be endangered. Political polarization—which has been steadily increasing in the United States—facilitates this slide toward the autocratic abyss, because it makes politics a zero-sum game in which there is no common ground uniting opposing camps. Therefore anything can be justified in the pursuit of victory. Over the last century, this dynamic of polarization eroding the rules of the democratic game, paralyzing the democratic process, and paving the way for a strongman has been a common scenario for the failure of democracy.

If there is a lesson that stretches across the history and the public opinion data, it is that nothing should be taken for granted. The laziest and most fatal form of intellectual arrogance is to assume that what has been will continue to be, simply because it has a long history. Legitimacy is nothing more than a set of individual beliefs and values. If we do not work to renew those beliefs and values with each generation, even long-established democracies could be at risk.

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In the democratic upheaval of the 21st century, citizens still want the protection of laws and the ability to choose representatives, but those powers may no longer be enough to make government legitimate in the eyes of the people. In the future, governments may rise or fall depending on whether they give citizens meaningful roles in decision-making, problem-solving, and community-building.

Changes in democracy are occurring now because of tectonic shifts in the relationship between citizens and government. As a population, we are better educated than ever before. We are not as deferential to expertise and authority as we once were. And we are networked through the internet to an almost infinite number of potential connections and sources of information. In other words, the people have more capacity. The question of whether governments, civil society, and other institutions can develop the ability to unleash that capacity underlies most of the public problems we face.

This new reality of rising citizen capacity makes some public servants uncomfortable. Trapped in systems designed to protect their expertise, besieged by people who no longer believe their data or respect their authority, and faced with hostile constituents at public events, public officials are understandably skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their fellow men and women.

In turn, citizens are skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their public officials. People are used to having choices in every other aspect of their lives—what to buy, where to live, how to earn a living—but there are few choices they can make in the public sector, other than which of two candidates to pick in each election. In the U.S., the level of trust in government has reached the lowest point on record.

The official, conventional processes for public engagement consist mostly of boring meetings in which citizens are given only a few minutes at a microphone to complain to their public officials. These meetings are almost completely useless for overcoming the divide between citizens and government; in fact, they seem to be making matters worse. The mismatch between what citizens expect and how governments operate is wide. For the most part, our political systems are still republics, not functioning democracies.

But over the past three decades, some governments have pioneered new processes, formats, and structures for engaging the public. The innovations that have emerged in recent years include intensive face-to-face deliberations, convenient online tools, and “high-impact volunteering” initiatives that tap the potential of citizens to solve public problems. Many of these innovations satisfy the fundamental needs and goals of citizens, illustrating the potential of public engagement for making difficult decisions and addressing formidable challenges. So far, these kinds of efforts are the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, the principles and practices they demonstrate are not deeply embedded in the ways that governments and communities operate.

If governments can move further, from temporary democratic projects to embedded democratic practices, they may achieve greater legitimacy by giving citizens more of what they want:

Transparency—not just making government information and data available to the public, but the extent to which that information is presented in ways that make it easier for people to absorb, understand, and act on it.

Public work—opportunities for people to work together, with the support and recognition of government, to solve problems or seize opportunities to improve their communities.

Choices—the extent to which governments provide people with options, including:

-Decisions that individuals and families can make about how they want their public services delivered and how they want public information provided.
-Decisions that citizens can make collectively on critical issues like education, budgets, planning and land use, public health, and public safety.

Deliberation—good processes for making those collective decisions, including opportunities for people to:

-Talk about why they care about an issue or policy question.
-Learn the facts they need to make informed decisions.
-Figure out what values they share, and how those should be reflected in policies.
-Find common ground among differences of background, ideology, and opinion.
-Decide what they want to recommend to policymakers.
-Decide whether and how they want to take action to implement their ideas.

Employing these small ‘d’ democratic practices as part of standard government operating procedures can be transformative. In countries and communities that have more participatory forms of governance, citizens are more likely to trust government, trust their neighbors, and pay their taxes. Governments are more likely to complete planned projects and manage public finances efficiently, and have fewer incidents of corruption.

Finally, there is another promising way to build government legitimacy, one that is frequently overlooked because it is a quality we tend to associate with community rather than government. When people come together regularly to socialize, form relationships, and feel like they belong to something—and if the people in those settings feel like they can interact with government in some meaningful way—then the society as a whole seems to have a greater sense of confidence, well-being, and trust in public institutions. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Democracy needs a place to sit down,” and that sentiment may be even more true today, even though these gatherings may now be online networks and not just face-to-face meetings.

Whether and how people get together may seem more like a private matter than a government concern. But some of the best examples of thriving local democracy have come about because public officials helped to support, connect with, and learn from citizens meeting in community centers, schools, bars, restaurants, and online.

The city of Decatur, Georgia has found creative ways to include the community, from a Budget Expo, complete with ‘Touch the Budget’ and Budget Bingo, to hosting “Budgets and Beer” nights at a downtown bar, where city employees brought poster boards to help explain public finance issues and surveys to gather citizen input. “Meet and Eat,” a weekly lunch in Buckhannon, West Virginia, has helped citizens plan and establish a new farmer’s market and new bike trails. The residents and employees of Jun, Spain, use Twitter to communicate about everything from streetlight replacement to matters of EU policy—along with advertising social events, booking doctor’s appointments, and finding lost pets. The Brazilian cities that first began organizing Participatory Budgeting over twenty years ago made it work in part because the process has always been highly social, regular, and sustained (PB is now one of the most widespread democratic innovations, having reached over 3,000 cities worldwide).

In all of these places, engagement works because it meets a diverse array of people’s needs. These cities have succeeded because they pulled the social world and the political world closer to one another, showing how governance can become more congenial, more rational, and more fun.

For decades, we have clung to a political system that provides basic human rights, the opportunity to vote for our representatives, and little else. All over the world, this limited form of democracy is losing ground to authoritarian rulers. To establish trust and legitimacy with citizens, the next democracies must embody a better understanding not only of what citizens want, but of what citizens can contribute to government.

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The deeply unpopular Rousseff wasn’t the first Brazilian leader, and likely won’t be the last, to lose her legitimacy after millions of people took to the streets. Over the last 50 years, Brazilians have raised street demonstrations to an art form akin to the country’s effusive Carnival celebrations. Both protests and Carnival parades rev up participants with raucous samba music, dancing, and truck-bed “floats.”

Brazilians often are characterized as politically passive, tolerant to a fault, and overly indulgent of their leaders’ many failings. In this context, gargantuan street protests have been seen as occasions when the sleeping giant of the Brazilian public is stirred to action.

I’m a native Brazilian who has lived in the United States for long periods, and I now split my time between Rio de Janeiro and New York. In a society like the U.S., there are so many democratic instruments through which to participate, and so many ways to celebrate your political identity. But as a Brazilian you don’t have that many options. The major parties are all but obsolete, and the minor parties are disgusted with traditional politics; as a result, no party engages in policy. So to express yourself politically, the street demonstration is one of your few openings.

It’s no wonder, then, that Brazilian governments of wildly different types—from autocratic military regimes to democratically elected presidents—have taken their cues from the street in determining whether they had the legitimacy necessary to hold onto power, or could cling to it by their fingernails. At several crucial points in post-World War II Brazilian history, mass street protests have catalyzed public sentiment and propped up or brought down governments.

One such time was in March 1964, when a military coup d’etat toppled leftist President João Goulart, ushering in a right-wing military dictatorship. A show of support for the dictatorship in the streets legitimized the overthrow. It was organized by conservative Brazilian forces who feared, in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, that South America’s largest country might go down the revolutionary socialist path of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

But just four years later, as the military regime turned more repressive—through growing censorship of the media, outlawing of opposition parties, and even the compulsory expulsion of targeted professors from universities—the streets turned the other way, with protestors taking on the military rulers. The outpouring came in alliance with protests in France, where students turned out en masse in 1968 to decry established power, and in the United States, where campuses erupted in protest against the Indochina War.

Demonstrators gather in São Paulo to demand the impeachment of Brazil’s then-President Dilma Rousseff in March 2016. Rousseff was eventually toppled over alleged fiscal mismanagement. Photo by Andre Penner/Associated Press.

The dictatorship survived, however, by cracking down on protest backers (removing many people from the streets to the prisons). The regime also was boosted by the perception (fair or not) that the military regime deserved credit for the so-called “Brazilian miracle” of economic expansion between 1968 and 1973, when the nation’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 11 percent.

But then Brazil’s economic engine sputtered under the burden of its soaring sovereign debt payments. By the early ‘80s, Brazilians were blaming the military government for their shrinking purchasing power, and in 1984 hundreds of thousands of Brazilians in São Paulo and other major cities went on the march demanding the return of free elections. Realizing it no longer could hold back the popular tide, Brazil’s military regime relinquished power in 1985, and democracy was restored.

One galvanizing leader of the ‘80s protest movements was the Brazilian soccer idol Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira (AKA Sócrates), whose São Paulo club team, Corinthians, joined in the calls for new elections. The team’s advocacy efforts, along with its egalitarian organizational style, became known as “Corinthian Democracy,” a sporting microcosm of how Brazil itself could become a more open society. The team also served as an example of how socially active celebrities and pop culture figures can upstage political leaders and serve as a loudspeaker for popular movements.

Democracy didn’t end the mass demonstrations. Indeed, people in the streets would eventually bring a conclusion to the presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello, who took office to high expectations as a self-styled crusader against corruption and privilege. He lasted only two-and-a-half years before being driven from office in 1992 amid corruption allegations.

While mass street protests often were decisive in legitimizing or delegitimizing Brazil’s ruling powers, in some cases the protests had the exact opposite effect desired by the demonstrators. The anti-military outcry of 1968 provoked a harsh response by the generals; by many measures, 1969 was the darkest year of the two-decade dictatorship, as jail cells filled with dissidents and government opponents “disappeared,” and prominent artists, activists, and intellectuals fled into European or U.S. exile.

Perhaps the most ironic example of these unforeseen effects was when the besieged President Collor called for Brazilians to show their support for him by turning out on the streets wearing green and yellow, the national colors. Instead, tens of thousands showed up the next day decked in black—and Collor was soon gone.

The fact that street protests can knock governments out of power in a manner of weeks, or even days, speaks to Brazil’s shaky democratic traditions. In the past half-century, only two of the country’s democratically elected presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have managed to serve out their full terms in office. It’s noteworthy that no mass protests arose during President Lula’s eight-year rule, even though his administration was marred by a massive vote-buying scandal. Why did most Brazilians stay off the streets? Likely because the economy was booming, fed by China’s insatiable demand for soy, iron ore, and other commodities.

But the economy began to sour after da Silva was succeeded by his protégé, Rousseff, sparking a new round of mass demonstrations from April to July 2013. Their suddenness and intensity caught politicians by surprise and shocked the watching world. Though the nominal cause was a transit fare hike, the protesters’ true target was a state-capitalist system that over-taxed Brazilians felt had short-changed them by delivering second-rate services and inefficient government.

The police cracked down violently. Black blocs and anarchists smashed ATMs and auto dealerships’ windows, overturned cars, and set buses ablaze. The anger unleashed in 2013 continued to simmer as Brazil sank into what would become its worst recession since the 1930s, and an epic political scandal, dubbed “Operation Car Wash,” unfolded around the giant state-run Petrobras oil company. Rousseff’s government and her tainted Workers’ Party were showing signs of fatigue and had lost the moral high ground, and her congressional coalition was dangerously eroded.

The pressure cooker finally exploded in the first months of 2015. Grassroots groups like Vem Pra Rua (Come To the Streets) tapped a non-partisan mood of popular disenchantment. Some protesters took to wearing rubber masks depicting Sergio Moro, the hard-charging federal judge heading the Petrobras case. Social media brought demonstrators together without any need for formal political leadership, giving citizens a new sense of their own autonomous power. Although she defiantly resisted the verdict of the streets for many months, Rousseff accepted the impeachment vote, and power was peacefully transferred to her successor and former vice-presidential ally turned enemy, President Michel Temer.

And Temer? Less than a year after effectively taking power, he has faced scattered demonstrations challenging his legitimacy and calling for his removal. But Temer has summoned an experienced and competent group of bankers and policy makers who form the core of his teams at the Finance Ministry, the Central Bank, and some state-owned enterprises.

As a consequence, Brazil’s macroeconomic numbers are no longer deteriorating. Inflation levels are falling. Petrobras, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) and the electric company Eletrobras are well-managed. Some structural adjustments in limiting public expenditures to fiscally-responsible levels, reforming social security, and modernizing labor legislation are going forward. Brazil’s GDP will resume expansion in 2017.

Now, if Temer remains unharmed by corruption investigations, not only will he have helped jump-start the economy and moved forward on institutional reforms, but he will hand his successor a much more stable country on January 1, 2019. Given Brazil’s recent tumultuous trajectory of dysfunctional politics and economic mismanagement, this will be no small accomplishment.

But in order to support his ruling coalition, Temer must deal with a political class that is largely vulnerable to the ongoing investigations of the “Car Wash.” If senior members of his administration end up being engulfed in the scandal, Brazil will face a long, rocky road to October 2018 presidential elections—and, no doubt, more and bigger crowds taking to the streets.

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All presidents run up against the limited power of the office. To some extent, Trump’s efforts have been stymied by institutional limits on presidential powers and the separation of powers that are built into the American Constitution. The U.S. Presidency was designed to be limited by the courts and Congress.

But the forces that have been holding some of Trump’s changes at bay go well beyond the separation of powers. They reveal something about the nature of power itself and the impotence of self-proclaimed strongmen like Trump when they fail to properly grasp it. Power is not strength. It can never belong to a single individual, nor can it be a feature of a particular office. It is a phenomenon that rises up—and dies—with a group. As soon as the group disperses, power also disappears.

Hannah Arendt, political philosopher and scholar, in 1969. Photo by Associated Press.

The sharp distinction between power and strength comes from the work of Hannah Arendt, the German-American political thinker who was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Strength, Arendt explains, is a function of the instruments one can literally possess and hold, whether these are the muscles one has or the instruments one wields. Strength helps an individual act. Power, though, is something entirely different; Arendt defines it as the human ability not just to act, but to act with others. And as such, power can arise only from within a broad, plural, group of people encompassing differences both big and small.

The distinction between strength and power becomes even starker when contrasted with violence. Arendt explores these distinctions in her 1970 essay On Violence, which she wrote against a backdrop of violent student movements around the world and the glorification of violence by thinkers like Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. Responding to what she saw as a dangerous conflation of power and violence, Arendt argues that the two are antithetical. Violence, for Arendt, is closely related to strength: It is an instrument that augments strength. But while violence and strength certainly command obedience (it’s difficult, to say the least, to dissent at the barrel of a gun), we shouldn’t confuse either with power, Arendt explains—nor can we conflate obedience with legitimacy. A strongman made even stronger by his possession of the instruments of violence is not, Arendt shows us, more powerful or more authoritative.

American democracy presumes power and resists strength. Resting on the will of the people, our republic was designed to do away with government as the “rule of man over man”—a government that, Arendt notes, the American founding fathers thought “fit for slaves.” Institutions and offices of governance have no power of their own; they are manifestations and materializations of power, which lies only with the people. Thus, if it is to be an office of power and not violence, the Presidency, as much as Congress, needs numbers of people. Without the people, the Presidency loses that “living power” that prevents it from petrification and decay.

But power is not just numbers. The distinction between power and strength is not merely a preference for majority rule. Being powerful isn’t, as political organizers would often have us believe, about speaking with one voice. Power is predicated on plurality. For Arendt, the assemblage of different, if not opposing, opinions and identities is the very thing that gives power to a movement. Arendt describes plurality simply, if a little enigmatically, as “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” What she means here is that power demands more than the many, or even the majority or everyone, acting together. The group must comprise individuals who meaningfully differ in their opinions from one another such that there are others with whom one acts. It is in acting “in concert” with those who hold different opinions that the power created by a movement remains with the people. If the group can be summed up by one opinion or identity—white working class, conservative, immigrant—the group is no better than an undifferentiated mob that might be swayed to carry out the orders of a dictator. It is no better than a potential instrument of violence.

That potential clarifies the first weeks of the Trump presidency—for both his supporters and his opponents. People have questioned Trump’s legitimacy on a number of grounds: He lost the popular vote, Russia may have interfered in the election, he lacks experience in government. But in some ways the biggest long term threat to his legitimacy lies in his lack of power. By reducing the office to his dictates as a “strong leader,” Trump has signaled that he might see the Presidency more as an instrument of strength than a manifestation of power. His assaults on anyone who questions his decisions, from the press and the judiciary to his own federal bureaucracy, portend a President for whom governance looks suspiciously like the imposition of strength from above that the Founding Fathers sought to eradicate. When Trump revels in the possibility that he might rule solely through the strength of his leadership, he threatens to strip the American political sphere of the various perspectives that make it a constant source of power and legitimacy. He threatens the very power of American democracy.

Through this lens, it is not clear that those who support Trump have much to celebrate, no matter how ardently they may share his views. In acceding to this kind of ruler, we undermine democracy as a system of self-rule and undermine our own power as a people to govern. Indeed, many support Trump precisely because he is “strong” and presumably willing and able to take over the reins of governance from the people. As efficient as strong leaders may be in affecting change, we must be cognizant of what we are giving up in complying with this kind of rule.

At the same time, those who oppose Trump shouldn’t take their own democratic credentials for granted. Power has high standards. Numbers are not enough—not the numbers of the popular vote or the unanimous decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (captured by Hillary Clinton’s “3-0” tweet). The burgeoning anti-Trump movement will only become a powerful force in American society when it is a coalition of different opinions that come together for a public good beyond any particular interest. If the opposition can capture plurality, it not only enacts the kind of American society it purports to embrace, but also can serve as a legitimate, democratic force of governance. Its power and legitimacy will come from that fact that such a group can claim to speak and act as a true public—a group of diverse opinions, interests, and identities. Because, as Arendt tells us, what is at stake in politics is not one’s own life and the particular interests one holds, but the world itself.

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