The condition of many democracies at present has provoked a range of reactions and interpretations. One view stresses the dysfunction of contemporary democracies, with the party system often cited as a major source of malaise. Another view, however, stresses the superior performance of democracies over time, pointing to the strong record of consolidated democracies in weathering all kinds of challenges. Although democratic performance is presented strikingly differently in these two narratives, they together prompt the question of why some countries and political systems seem more able to adapt – that is, navigate changing social and governance challenges – than others. This paper engages this question by fleshing out a framework to understand and compare such adaptive capacity. To do so, it builds on the notion of “adaptive efficiency”— coined by Douglass North (2005) to analyze economic performance over the long run — but recasts it to study democratic performance in a dynamic setting. It considers a range of institutional mechanisms that may foster or frustrate adaptation, opening up a new approach to the analysis and evaluation of political systems.
