Introduction

Reversibility is essential to democracy, which is often defined by the rotation of officeholders following competitive elections. And those elections are animated by the possibility of reversing the course of laws and policies. Although in practice there is a lot of policy persistence in democratic systems (Coate and Morris 1999, cited in MacKenzie 2021b), a system in which elections did not have the potential to remove officials and change significant policies would be hard to count as a democracy. Thus, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble's comment that ‘elections cannot be allowed to change an economic programme of a member state’, following the election of a left-wing government in Greece in 2015, seems clearly undemocratic in spirit (Varoufakis 2016; cf. Lagerspetz, Chapter 2, this volume). While we often talk of democracy involving the idea that the people, as sovereign, has the ‘final say’ in decisions, in a wider sense, ‘the ongoing series of elections and the possibility of reversal means that no-one has the final say in the long run’ (Whelan 2019: 559, added emphasis).

Reversibility is widely seen to be a crucial motivation for individuals and groups to support democratic systems even when they lose elections or particular decisions (Przeworski 1999). It is also at the heart of richer normative accounts of democratic legitimacy. Gutmann and Thompson (2004), for instance, emphasise the importance of ‘provisionality’ in generating democratic legitimacy. And Urbinati insists that ‘democracy is an open game of political decisions and revisions of previously made decisions’ (Urbinati 2014: 101). As Albert Hirschman (1986) puts it, ‘accepting uncertainty about whether one's own program will be realized is an essential democratic virtue: I must value democracy more highly than the realisation of specific programs and reforms, however fundamental I may judge them to be for further progress, democratic, economic, or otherwise.’ Paraphrasing Hirschman, Urbinati notes that ‘the only truly essential virtue of democracy is love of uncertainty’ (Urbinati 2014: 98, italics in original; see also Müller 2021). Reversibility thus seems to be an essential feature of democracy.