📝 Article Type: Research Paper

Is Democracy in Crisis?

Disoriented in the thicket, shrouded in the fog of propaganda, people
are facing an age in which truth is vague, reduced to dogmas held by
particular groups. In the golden age of democracy, a climate of opinion,
stemming from institutional confidence, outweighed self-examination. The
reality is cold. Democracy is now in a crisis, and as it trades its
principles for performance, the confidence translates to doubt: how
could we defend the embers of democratic ideals?

By democracy, we mean a political ideal and apparatus whose legitimacy
comes from the consent of the people, whose function is constrained by
the law, and whose principles reconcile means with ends. Instead of the
populist or polarizing crisis we usually hear about, the issue of
democracy today is a constitutional crisis, where legality and
legitimacy diverge, and the rules of government are no longer followed
or trusted.

Empirically, @vdem2026 indicates that the democratic level in Western
Europe and North America has hit the bottom in over 50 years. At the
moment, 74% of the world's population lives under autocracies, many of
which have abandoned democracy. Sophisticated democracies are not
exempt. In European parliamentary countries, the rise of populist
radical right parties is provoking democratic backsliding [@bermeo2016],
where illiberal democracy has already taken hold in many states. In
America's presidential system, the political division is polarized into
a civil war --- a war that splits the state into those who support
Donald Trump and those who do not. It is needful to first recognize the
duality of democracy before diving deeper.

We propose analyzing democracy on two distinct levels, which are
democracy on paper and democracy in administration. Our definition
builds on Dingxin Zhao's tripartite legitimacy: ideological, formal, and
performance legitimacy [@zhao2009; @zhao2015; @zhao2018]. Democracy on
paper belongs to the realm of values and norms, supplying ideological
legitimacy; democracy in administration belongs to the executive and
technical realm, targeting the actual governmental mechanism. Democracy
in administration is built upon formal legitimacy, yet measured by
performance legitimacy. A structural tension exists between them,
derived from divergence of legitimacy and legality. Legitimacy is the
consensus that created democratic constitutions in revolutions, which
establishes legality through legal routinization.

Democracy is not groundless; its commitments must be conducted through
the state apparatus, by the hands of bureaucrats. Yet the logic of
bureaucracy is incompatible with them, because it prioritizes
administrative efficiency alone. On the other hand, democratic formal
legitimacy trades efficiency for ideological legitimacy, because an open
discussion must take time, and elections need debates. Both are required
to establish ideological legitimacy. The two logics collide: "one
organization cannot be governed by two distinct ultimate principles of
social action." [@blau1963 13] Efficiency is not neutral; its cost is
legitimacy. Nevertheless, bureaucracy carried no original sin; the laws
constructed by democracy gave birth to it. A fissure appears when we
study bureaucracy's erosive effect, one that segregates legality and
legitimacy.

The passage from human bureaucracy to algorithmic optimization enlarges
the fissure. Here, democracy in administration dissolves democracy on
paper. Algorithmic risk assessment in the judiciary is an
exemplification, where predictions generated by models get to decide
possibilities of criminal behavior. Their criteria are not only shadowed
from the public, but also intrinsically uninterpretable due to the
nature of artificial neural networks [@dressel2018]. The black-box
technology usurps human judgment, where democratic procedure becomes
ceremonial [@danaher2016]. Ironically, democracy, through its own hands,
euthanizes itself.

The daily dose of narcotics increases gradually. Algorithmic governance
employs predictive models within its everyday decisions, veiling them to
the public; the efficiency rationale accepts this silently, and replaces
ideological/formal legitimacy with performance legitimacy, favoring
figures over principles. Now, democracy on paper is evacuated. Internet
corporations' data mining paves the way for unbounded governance beyond
legal authorization.

The rationale discovers its proper place in surveillance capitalism,
where human behavior is claimed as "free raw material for hidden
commercial practices" [@zuboff2019]. The exposure of the Cambridge
Analytica scandal is a case in point, which revealed how easily
democratic procedures can be manipulated. According to @ico2018,
corporations like Google and Meta have accumulated sheer political
capabilities, which harvest private data as raw material for their
products, treating democracy on paper as a formality. These data
monopolies have found ways to acquire perquisites, lavishing money on
lobbying, with Google spending over $21.2 million in 2018 alone
[@dave2019]. Boundaries between commercial data extraction and public
governance have faded. The law becomes an obstacle to technology.
Through this process, democracy in administration acquires the capacity
to maintain the state of exception described by Schmitt as a basic tool.

In our case, no matter what one thinks of Schmitt's actions, his
elucidation has shown concrete explanatory power. His diagnosis points
out that a state of exception arises when an exigence (e.g. a terrorist
attack, a pandemic) enables the decision-makers to suspend the law and
expand administrative control beyond constitutional limits
[@schmitt2004; @agamben2005]. A transition in capitalism appears, from
the rule-of-law foundation of market capitalism to the
rule-of-technology of Zuboff's surveillance capitalism.

In the blank between democracy on paper and in administration, the
normative fragility invites an adventurist. With surveillance capitalism
providing technical support, a political figure decides on the
exception. Donald Trump promises to restore order through action, not
procedure, whose administration deploys ICE's technology, applying
predictive algorithms built on secretly extracted behavioral surplus,
and performing warrantless data collection via commercial big data
infrastructure [@chishti2025]. To preserve the national unity he dreamed
of, he opens a state of exception in the name of national security, and
attempts to form a Schmittian state --- a state form where, by its
logic, dissent is purged and civil society is suppressed. The sovereign
decides on the exception, but surveillance capitalism provides the
ammunition. What dissolves here is democracy on paper, which is
vacuumized by the bureaucratic machine it once cast.

In the United States, amid the furious welter on January 6, 2021, the
tension reaches its zenith. Indispensable components of American society
broke out, including business owners, CEOs, and white-collar workers,
who came together to reshape their country [@pape2022]. The event
unraveled a constitutional crisis, where trust in the system collapsed
due to deeper economic and geopolitical failures. Faith in governmental
legitimacy withered as the "stolen election" narrative spread. According
to the Pew Research Center, trust in the federal government has reached
just 16% (individual polls) in 2023, a historical low compared to over
70% in the late 1950s [@pew2025]. When citizens no longer believe the
rules will serve them, they question the rules themselves. The rioters'
logic is shown as follows: since they value outcomes over procedures,
rewriting election results seems to be rewarding. Such aggression
declares a complete abandonment of democracy on paper.

One might argue that January 6th demonstrates institutional resilience,
since rioters were arrested and the electoral results were protected;
this objection misunderstands the nature of a constitutional crisis. Of
course, violators can be incarcerated, but the well-functioning legal
procedures cannot restore the shared belief. Schmitt's insight reveals
that constitutional orders depend on a singular consensus beyond legal
mechanisms. As the consensus perishes, the constitution is invalidated.
Even if legal mechanisms survive, democracy on paper is still on the
brink of collapse.

A similar situation is identified in China, unfolding along a different
trajectory. @zhao2009 describes the transformation from Maoist
ideological legitimacy to a long period of "performance-based state
legitimacy," following Deng's successful economic reform. Nevertheless,
unlike the Schmittian model where a sovereign suspends the legal order,
the Chinese governance of exception is conducted via the routinization
of administrative and technological control --- installing the Internet
firewall, enhancing national surveillance, and tracking personal
information [@hurossi2024]. Inside the firewall's closed slaughterhouse,
Internet corporations hunt for behavioral surplus, while the state
accesses their prediction products for social control, scotching
discontents. Overriding legal procedure is embedded in the ordinary
bureaucratic governance.

As the CCP faced immense security issues during COVID-19, the
normalization of the exception entered a downward spiral. The
administrative inertia escalated the control of personal freedom.
Bureaucrats, afraid of acknowledging failures, maintained malfunctioning
policies while causing casualties, such as the tragic 2022 Ürümqi fire.
The inertia resulted in bankruptcies and economic stagnation, shattering
performance legitimacy --- decades after the Tiananmen Massacre, another
student-led protest took place. As a corollary, @mattei2020 point out a
global turn, where the law is muted, reduced to a rubber stamp, and
technology plays the role of an international Leviathan, used by both
the West and the East to sustain the state of exception. Democracy on
paper is not only shadowed, but also evacuated.

Despite this, the turn does not illustrate a permanent condition of our
world, for performance legitimacy is unstable. It is capricious, because
any failure exposes the absence of deeper ideological foundations, in
which governments are asked to deliver consistent high performance,
reaching higher benchmarks even if economic cycle says no
[@diamond2024]. Furthermore, the efficiency tradeoff becomes
irreversible without democratic constraints, which is a one-way path
along the exceptional downhill. The Chinese case, though not fully
discussed due to the word limit, illustrates the pattern. A generation
of frustrated, angry, and highly-educated youth is muted, yet the stick
without a carrot only escalates the situation. Overall, democracy on
paper is not a piece of decoration.

A civic society can release stress before it bursts, whereas public
accountability rectifies administrative wrongs. However, these are
ex-post remediation, they cannot prevent tyranny. @bockenforde2020
concludes an essential contradiction in the secularization of any modern
state, claiming that, being free from religion-based empires also leads
to cohesionlessness: "the liberal, secularized state is sustained by
conditions it cannot itself guarantee." Before politics, democracy
depends on a shared consensus, both moral and devotional, which the
efficiency logic tends to destruct. We have diagnosed the nature of such
destruction, including surveillance capitalism, state of exception, and
algorithmic governance. They are more than threats, but rather, they are
also normative threats, undermining the foundations of this consensus.
To secure this precious freedom, democracy needs a guardian.

We argue that education, as the mightiest shield against the normative
erosion, must serve this role. It must be independent from executive
control, cultivating the discernment of citizenship between efficiency
and legitimacy. Democratic legitimacy moves at its own pace, and it
should stand on a solid ground. Every procedure that engages with a
society requires time and patience. The question is not whether
democracy in administration will survive, because it will, being the
bedrock of surveillance capitalism; what needs to be protected is
trading efficiency for actual democracy. Education, as a guardian,
preserves the future generation even when the world is on fire. A
tripartite political system is designed for human bureaucracy, which
separates three powers --- the legislature, the executive, and the
judiciary. Today, facing the democratic crisis, from the rule of law to
the rule of technology, education ought to be the fourth.