№ 3 - 2002
Eisenstadt S.N.
The Paradox of Democratic Regimes: Fragility and Transformability (II).

In the 2nd part of the article (for the 1st part see Polis, 2002, No. 2), the author substantiates his thesis that the revealed fragility of constitutional-democratic regimes is related to the openness of the political process in such regimes — particularly with regard to protest movements — and to a concomitant tendency toward continual redefinition of the political realm. This openness, being major contributor to the fragility of modern democratic regimes, at the same time ensures their continuity. The potential for the continuity is rooted in the fact that the very openness of the modern political process may give an impulse to the development of a non-zero sum conception of the political “game”. The author then analyzes the conditions under which non-zero sum conceptions of politics may develop, accentuating, in the course of the analysis, a number of issues, in particular: development, construction, and reproduction of trust between different sectors of society; relationships of such sectors with the centers of society; construction of different types of collective identity.