CONCEPT
Permanent Democracy
The ideal of continuous democratic interaction between governors and governed—vigilance and oversight making popular scrutiny of executive power effective and ongoing, not periodic.
Permanent democracy is Rosanvallon's term for democratic governance that operates continuously rather than periodically—the ideal of ongoing interaction between citizens and those who exercise power, where counter-democratic vigilance, denunciation, and evaluation function daily rather than being activated only during electoral cycles. The concept challenges the conventional democratic picture in which elections are the primary expression of popular sovereignty and the interval between elections is a period of governmental autonomy punctuated by occasional protests or scandals. Rosanvallon's innovation is to recognize that in well-functioning democracies, the interval between elections is filled with democratic activity—citizens watching, naming, judging through institutional mechanisms that make governance continuously responsive to popular scrutiny. The AI age requires permanent democracy in its most demanding form: governance processes operating continuously rather than periodically, standing regulatory bodies with adaptive rulemaking authority, continuous citizen input mechanisms, real-time transparency requirements making AI systems' evolution visible to democratic publics as it occurs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept builds on Rosanvallon's observation that modern democracies never rest solely on periodic elections.