Democratic Resilience in Australia: Institutions, Public Spheres, and Communities

Abstract

Democracies around the world are under stress. Political polarisation, democratic backsliding, the proliferation of mis- and disinformation, and rising economic inequality are placing established democracies under sustained strain. Acute shocks, from natural disasters to violent extremism, have further exposed the fragility of the institutional, cultural, and civic foundations on which democratic life depends. Australia has not been immune to these pressures. In recent years, the country has experienced deepening social division, the rise of the far right, major party instability, and the failure of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum, which laid bare enduring fault lines around inclusion, trust, and institutional legitimacy. These developments have disrupted the practices that underpin democratic resilience, weakening Australian democracy's capacity to sustain public trust and foster meaningful civic engagement. Against this backdrop, the concept of democratic resilience has acquired renewed urgency in both academic and policy circles. Yet its promise as an analytical framework remains incompletely realised. As Merkel (2025) has observed, despite the concept's extraordinary popularity, it has "nowhere fully transformed into an analytical approach." Existing scholarship tends to treat democratic resilience primarily as a regime-level attribute, an indicator of a political system's capacity to resist backsliding or withstand polarisation. While valuable, this perspective risks conflating the endurance of democratic structures with the vitality and quality of democratic life itself. A complementary strand of scholarship, rooted in deliberative democratic theory, broadens this focus by shifting attention from institutional endurance to the quality of public communication and the capacity of the public sphere to sustain meaningful, inclusive, and reflective dialogue. This panel draws on and extends both strands, treating democratic resilience as neither purely institutional nor purely discursive, but as the product of dynamic interactions between structures, actors, and deliberative processes across multiple arenas of democratic life. It asks not only what democratic resilience means, but how it can be observed, measured, and practised, in institutions, public spheres, and communities, in response to a range of shocks and stressors specific to the Australian context. This panel presents findings from a cross-disciplinary group of Australian scholars and directly previews contributions to a forthcoming special issue of the Australian Journal of Political Science on democratic resilience in Australia. Together, the papers advance both the theory and empirical study of democratic resilience, with implications for scholarship and practice well beyond the Australian case.

Title	Details
How Australians perceive misinformation threats	View Paper Details
Disadvantage and democratic resilience: The role of the cost of living crisis in shaping democratic attitudes and participation in Australia	View Paper Details
Strengthening Democratic Resilience through Disaster Resilience: An Evidence-Based Governance and Research Agenda	View Paper Details
Adaptive democracy and its institutions	View Paper Details
Deliberating after violence: Parliamentary debate after the Bondi attack	View Paper Details