Is There a Democracy “Overload”?

A principal feature of recent neoconservative thought has been the scapegoating of democracy for a host of political and economic ills—from declining governmental competence to budget deficits and inflation. Our political system, the argument goes, has become “overloaded” by demands from the citizenry, and democracy itself is to blame for stimulating these excessive demands. Less democracy is the proposed remedy.

Samuel Huntington provided the first influential formulation of this argument in the Trilateral Commission’s Report on the Governability of Democracies. A “democratic surge” in the 1960s had raised the level of popular expectations and group demands on the government, he argued, an...