Fundamentals

Liberal Tolerance and Institutional Crisis: Living with Disagreement Without Destroying the Rules

By Daniel Sardá · Published on July 26, 2026

9 min read1,816 words

Democracy does not require permanent agreement. It requires equal rights and rules that can survive conflict. Liberal tolerance helps explain what breaks when an adversary comes to be treated as an enemy.

A democracy can withstand fierce debate, mass protests, and extremely close elections. What it withstands less well is each side viewing the other's very existence as illegitimate. When losing no longer means “competing again” and starts to mean “being left at the mercy of an enemy,” common rules lose their value. Every election begins to look like the last one, and every constraint on one's own power like an unforgivable concession.

Liberal tolerance matters precisely at that point. It does not eliminate conflict or ask people to temper every conviction. It allows people who disagree profoundly to recognize one another as holders of the same rights and to accept procedures that no side controls completely.

Its decline does not by itself cause an institutional crisis. Constitutional design, electoral incentives, government performance, and the strength of checks and balances also matter. But political intolerance can set a dangerous mechanism in motion: it delegitimizes rivals, weakens institutional forbearance, and makes it acceptable to wield power to its limit—or beyond—to prevent the other side from governing.

Key idea: The test of shared rules is not whether they favor those we believe are right today, but whether they also protect those who may defeat them tomorrow.

Tolerance Is Not Approval

In everyday language, “tolerance” can sound like indifference, condescension, or resignation. In the liberal tradition, liberal tolerance has a more precise structure: someone disapproves of a belief or conduct but finds stronger reasons not to use coercion against the person who holds or practices it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains this combination of objection and acceptance. If there is no objection at all, we are dealing instead with approval or indifference. If an objection automatically authorizes force, there is no tolerance. The concept occupies the space between criticizing an idea and denying its peaceful advocate an equal freedom to hold it.

This distinction clears up three common misconceptions:

• Tolerance is not approval. A person can challenge a doctrine through argument while defending other people's right to express it.
• Tolerance does not mean anything goes. Pluralism recognizes persistent disagreement without concluding that all ideas are true, reasonable, or morally equivalent.
• Tolerance does not mean remaining passive in the face of harm. One person's liberty does not include a license to assault, coerce, or deprive another of their rights.

Liberal tolerance primarily protects people and their sphere of freedom. Ideas, by contrast, remain open to criticism, refutation, satire, and public rejection. This distinction keeps coexistence from becoming compulsory silence.

Why Disagreement Needs Institutions

Open societies bring together incompatible religious, moral, and political convictions. Some of this disagreement does not necessarily arise from ignorance or bad faith. Evidence may be complex; people may assign different weight to values; and personal experience may lead to opposing judgments. In the political theory of John Rawls, reasonable pluralism describes the foreseeable persistence of rival conceptions among people capable of acting in good faith.

If no one can expect complete consensus, coexistence requires something else: rules that do not depend on one faction imposing its entire worldview on everyone else. Political liberalism responds by limiting power, guaranteeing freedom of conscience and expression, and subjecting both rulers and citizens to a common legal framework.

Elections are one part of that arrangement, not the whole of it. For competition to be meaningful, the opposition must be free to organize, speak, and seek office; majorities must face limits; judges must be able to decide independently; and citizens must have avenues to challenge abuses. This is why tolerance is connected to general and impartial rules: rights cannot change according to the political identity of the person affected.

Tolerance thus becomes an institutional practice, not merely a private virtue. Accepting an electoral defeat, allowing a peaceful protest that makes the government uncomfortable, or preserving an adversary's due-process protections are all ways of recognizing that power has limits even when it is exercised for ends we consider good.

From Legitimate Rival to Existential Enemy

An institution can deteriorate without its formal text changing immediately. The process often begins with expectations and with how existing powers are interpreted.

Imagine two opposing parties. As long as each regards the other as a legitimate rival, losing is costly but temporary: the defeated party retains rights, representation, and a real opportunity to compete again. That expectation makes respecting the rules during defeat a rational choice.

The calculation changes when one party portrays the other not merely as wrong but as a threat whose accession to power would be intolerable by definition. If the rival is an existential enemy, almost any instrument used to exclude it can seem justified. Exceptional measures are presented as defense; abuse as prevention.

This can weaken institutional forbearance: the willingness not to exploit every formal power to the fullest when doing so would contradict the purpose of the rule or threaten future competition. An influential framework associated with the work of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt—and later examined more precisely in academic research—connects mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance with democratic stability.

This does not mean that every informal practice is virtuous or that public authorities should give up their lawful powers. The point is more specific: an action can fall within the letter of a formal power yet, through repeated partisan use, hollow out the purpose of the rules. A majority might, for example, routinely invoke emergency procedures, alter oversight mechanisms to avoid scrutiny, or design requirements that selectively make it harder for its opponents to participate.

Warning: A measure's formal legality does not by itself settle its institutional legitimacy. Its purpose, impartial application, and effects on rights, oversight, and competition also matter.

The sequence is neither inevitable nor monocausal. Hostile rhetoric does not automatically bring down a constitutional order, and intense conflict can be resolved through stable channels. The risk grows when delegitimization coincides with concentrated power, weak checks and balances, and opportunities to turn temporary advantages into permanent exclusion.

When Conflict Becomes an Institutional Crisis

An institutional crisis is not synonymous with polarization, poor government, or unpopularity. Nor is a dispute between branches of government enough to establish one. In a functioning democracy, the legislature may block the executive, courts may overturn decisions, and citizens may protest forcefully. Such friction often shows that checks and balances are working.

The institutional threshold is crossed when the rules and safeguards that limit power, protect rights, and keep competition open deteriorate significantly. The Venice Commission provides useful criteria for assessing the rule of law, including legality, legal certainty, prevention of abuse of power, equality before the law, and access to independent justice. These criteria do not form an automatic crisis scale, but they help replace alarmism with observable questions:

• Are rules applied according to general standards, or are they designed against particular opponents?
• Can oversight bodies investigate and correct those in power without retaliation?
• Does the opposition retain its freedoms, representation, and a real possibility of taking office?
• Can citizens speak, associate, and protest peacefully?
• Are public decisions subject to independent review and predictable procedures?

Deterioration can be gradual. International IDEA warns that rules themselves can be instrumentalized for partisan ends while preserving the appearance of legality. It is therefore important to look not only for sudden ruptures but also for cumulative patterns: weakened oversight, normalized exceptions, selectively applied rights, and increasingly hollow competition.

This distinction also prevents disagreement from being mistaken for disloyalty. An opposition that denounces the government, organizes demonstrations, or seeks to replace its policies is performing a democratic function as long as it respects rights and rules. Likewise, an electoral majority has authority to govern, but it does not receive an unlimited mandate to close off the political future. This is the point of the limits of majority rule.

Tolerance Has Limits, but They Are Not Arbitrary

The most serious objection to tolerance is that it can become a demand that victims endure abuse or that society allow certain actors to destroy the freedoms that protect them. The objection is sound if “tolerance” means unconditional passivity. But that is not the liberal answer.

Equal rights define the limits of what can be tolerated. Violence, coercion, threats, and conduct that violates rights may justify prevention, punishment, or redress under law. There are also specific legal categories—such as certain forms of incitement—that permit restrictions when defined thresholds are met.

This does not authorize labeling every offensive statement “violence” or banning ideas because they are unpopular. Articles 19 through 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights tie restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, and association to conditions such as a basis in law and necessity. A legitimate response must be grounded in verifiable conduct, pursue a permissible aim, and avoid granting the government discretion that could be turned against any dissident.

The same caution applies when judging political actors. Some conduct justifies withholding trust, demanding accountability, or imposing sanctions. But “illegitimate” should not simply mean “radical,” “offensive,” or “opposed to our platform.” Exclusion requires public criteria tied to acts against rights and rules, not to the partisan identity of the person who commits them.

Nor does institutional forbearance require naivety toward anyone who exploits the system without reciprocating. If an actor abuses the rules, the answer cannot be to grant unlimited power to that actor's opponent. It should be to strengthen oversight, close loopholes through general rules, and ensure that any sanction is reviewable and impartial.

Practical test: Tolerance ends where rights are violated, but the power to draw that boundary must itself be limited by law, evidence, and due process.

Rebuilding Rules That Adversaries Can Share

Liberal tolerance does not promise harmony. It offers something more modest and more valuable: a way to keep disagreement within an order in which no one needs to dominate completely in order to live freely.

That order rests on four connected principles. Equal rights, so that today's opposition does not depend on the government's goodwill. The rule of law, so that restrictions have a public basis and are applied impartially. Limits on power, so that a temporary victory cannot end the possibility of alternation. And legitimate adversaries, who can criticize one another severely without denying each other a place in political competition.

When these principles survive, even intense conflict can remain democratic. When they are abandoned, apparent calm does not guarantee institutional health: it may be merely the silence produced by exclusion.

The decisive question, then, is not how much political opponents like one another or how moderate their ideas are. It is whether they accept that their adversaries' rights are not revocable prizes and that common rules must remain standing when power changes hands.