Democracy as a Security Asset - European Evidence Review
Democracy as a Security Asset - European Evidence Review
Source: Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD). WFD is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, serving as the UK's primary democracy-support organization, working to strengthen democratic institutions, political systems, and open societies in over 50 countries globally. More about WFD can be found here.
Date of Publication: May 2026
Author: Katharina Merkel. Merkel is an independent research and evaluation consultant specializing in governance, security, and development policy. She has over 16 years of experience leading research and evaluations across multiple regions, working with international organizations, governments, and civil society actors. Her work spans democratic governance, conflict and peacebuilding, information environments, gender and inclusion, and institutional resilience, combining comparative analysis with mixed-method approaches. She holds an MPhil in Evidence-based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree in Conflict, Security and Development from King’s College London.
A PDF of the WFD article can be found here.
Executive Summary: This review examines the two-way relationship between democratic governance and security, analyzing both how democracy functions as a security asset and how security pressures, including securitization and militarization, reshape democratic systems. It builds on a preceding global evidence review, which synthesised cross-national and comparative research and identified robust associations between democratic governance and outcomes such as lower risks of interstate and internal conflict, more constrained use of coercion, and stronger institutional resilience, alongside evidence on how insecurity affects political behaviour, executive authority, and governance practices.
The present analysis applies these insights to the European context through a structured comparison of global mechanisms and regional evidence. It distinguishes between general findings in the literature and how they are mediated by Europe’s multi-level governance system, institutional capacity, and variation across countries. The tables below synthesise these findings, contrasting global analytical patterns with European observations across the main domains covered in the review.
Taken together, the evidence supports a qualified but consistent conclusion: democratic governance functions as a security asset in Europe, not as a guarantee of stability, but through a set of institutional mechanisms that shape how insecurity is managed. Across the domains reviewed, the most important of these mechanisms are the institutionalisation of political contestation, constraints on coercive power, the generation of legitimacy and trust, and the capacity for policy learning and adaptation over time. In the European context, these effects are reinforced by the region’s dense supranational architecture, which extends accountability, coordination, and rule-based decision-making beyond the nation state.
What is distinctive about Europe is therefore not simply the coexistence of democracy and comparatively high levels of stability, but the extent to which democratic governance is embedded within a multi-level political order that amplifies its security-relevant effects. The European Union, NATO, and the Council of Europe contribute not only to external coordination, but also to the regulation of coercion, the management of crises, the governance of information environments, and the maintenance of long-term resilience. At the same time, the evidence is clear that these effects are conditional. They are strongest where democratic institutions are robust, administrative capacity is high, and political and legal constraints remain effective. Where institutional quality is weaker, or where democratic systems operate at the geopolitical margins, the security effects associated with democratic governance are more limited and more vulnerable to erosion.
Why We Are Recommending This Article:
For ISSE, this report contributes to an important shift in how emergency governance should be understood. Rather than treating democracy and security as competing objectives, it argues that democratic institutions, constitutional accountability, legislative oversight, judicial independence, and public trust are themselves sources of long-term security and resilience. This perspective closely aligns with ISSE’s broader research into states of exception, reinforcing the proposition that the preservation of democratic guardrails is not merely a constitutional concern but also a strategic one. At a time when governments increasingly invoke security threats to justify expanded executive authority, the report provides an evidence-based framework for evaluating how democracies can respond effectively to genuine crises while preserving the institutional constraints that underpin constitutional governance.
