There are even growing doubts about how long the constitutional structures of democracy can survive amid prolonged economic suffering, severe inequality, rampant crime, venal and feeble justice systems, growing vigilante movements and chronically weak and ineffectual political institutions. In consolidated democracies there may be intense conflict, but no significant political or social actors attempt to achieve their objectives by illegal, unconstitutional or anti-democratic means. Further, there may be severe problems of governance and widespread disapproval of the government of the day, but elites and the public at large believe 'that democratic procedures and institutions are the most appropriate way to govern collective life'. The consolidation of democracy thus implies, and indeed requires, the emergence of a democratic political culture. Democratic cultures may vary across countries in many of their particulars, but unless democratic institutions are braced by such broadly shared norms as political trust, tolerance, willingness to compromise and most of all belief in democratic legitimacy, those institutions will be vulnerable to breakdown in times of crisis.
Democratic consolidation is fostered by a number of institutional, policy and behavioural changes.
Many of these improve governance directly by strengthening state capacity, liberalising and rationalising economic structures, securing social and political order while maintaining basic freedoms, improving horizontal accountability and the rule of law and controlling corruption in particular. Others improve the representative functions of democratic governance by strengthening political parties and their linkages to social groups, reducing fragmentation in the party system, enhancing the autonomous capacity and public accountability of legislatures and local governments and invigorating civil society. Underlying all of these specific challenges, however, is an intimate connection between the deepening or extension of democracy and its consolidation. None of the 'nonliberal' electoral democracies that have emerged during the third wave has yet achieved consolidation. Professor Larry Diamond is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.