Abstract of the Guest Talk "Is There a Crisis of Democracy in Europe? On the Conditions for Democracy to Survive"
There is a lot of talk about democratic backsliding across the world and in Europe in particular. In my talk, I shall discuss the general and specific conditions for democracies to survive. The general conditions include a general consensus on the rules of the game among the citizens and among the political elites. In Europe, there is no danger from the side of the citizens, even if there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works among them. The real danger comes from the political elites who may increase polarization and deliberately undermine democracy. However, there are a number of specific conditions – institutional, partisan, international, market and, last but not least, democratic constraints and opportunities, which ultimately determine the maneuvering space of the elites. Most problematic is a situation, where the citizens come to tolerate the elites’ undemocratic actions for purely opportunistic reasons.

About Hanspeter Kriesi
Hanspeter Kriesi was born in 1949 in Bischofszell (Switzerland). He studied sociology at the Universities of Bern, Zurich and Chicago. He obtained his PhD in sociology at the University of Zurich (1976), where he also did his Habilitation in sociology (1980). In 1984 he became a professor for collective political behaviour at the University of Amsterdam. In 1988, he went to the University of Geneva, where he taught as a professor of comparative and Swiss politics until 2002, when he took up the chair for comparative politics at the University of Zurich. He was the Stein Rokkan Chair holder at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence from 2012 to 2020. He is now part-time professor in the Department and a Principal Investigator of the SOLID project, in collaboration with Maurizio Ferrera and Waltraud Schelkle. In Fall 2022, he was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Lucerne.

Organizers
This guest talk takes place in the context of the Lucerne Master Class 2023 co-organized by the Department of Political Science and the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Lucerne. For further information go to the Lucerne Master Class Website. For questions please contact gslremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch.