Democracy endures when every significant actor expects to do better by losing an election and trying again than by overturning the system.
Przeworski's formulation is a bet about expectations, not values: democracy is stable when everyone's expected return from playing again exceeds their expected return from flipping the table.
In practice
- A losing party concedes because it expects to contest the next election on similar terms; the arithmetic changes when it does not.
- A minority faction accepts an unwelcome committee decision because it expects to win the next one, and stops accepting them when it does not.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works