Anchors and Democratic Change

Analyses of consolidation and internal crisis need to complement each other to better explain the change within a democracy. This article integrates, revises, and develops the results of the existing literature starting from the empirical results of a systematic, comparative empirical research on the Southern European countries. The main theoretical conclusion concerns the salience of the process of democratic anchoring, when consolidation is considered, and de-anchoring with reference to crisis. The different sections of the article analyze the notions of anchors, anchoring, and de-anchoring; the connections with legitimation, democratic consolidation, and crisis; the patterns of consolidation and crisis building in the four Southern European cases; and the explanations and the theoretical background of anchoring and de-anchoring. The concluding remarks illustrate the possible research developments with reference to other areas and the salience of anchoring for every democracy.