Stability and crisis: fears about threats to democracy *

. A familiar theme in contemporary democratic theory is that of the ‘crisis of democracy’, but it can be misleading to approach the subject through equilibrium analysis. An examination of occasions on which democracy has been terminated illustrates that military coups and foreign invasion feature predominantly. Where democracy is of long standing, foreign invasion has been much more likely than extremism to be the cause. Cultural and ethnic cleavages may call for special institutional arrangements, though often they may prevent democracy being set up at all. Ideological and socio‐economic conflict, leading to public disorder, certainly preceded the interwar overthrow of democracy in Italy and Germany; but there were special features of their situations, and analogies between Weimar and the position of long‐standing democracies today are most inapposite. While there may be some disturbing aspects of modern democratic society, the ‘crisis of democracy’ literature vastly exaggerated their threat to the democratic process. Ordinary democratic citizens, with more stable attitudes than intellectuals, contribute greatly to the legitimacy of democratic regimes.