Modern liberal democracies face an increasingly difficult balancing act. As societies accelerate – technologically, socially, and in everyday life – the pressures on democratic institutions mount. Citizens demand faster, more effective responses to urgent problems. But democratic decision-making is often deliberative by design: slow, careful, and bound by rules.

This mismatch between the pace of societal change and the rhythm of democratic politics gives rise to a fundamental dilemma for democratic problem solving. Should we speed up political decision-making possibly at the cost of the erosion of democratic norms and procedures? Or should we preserve those norms and risk that slow responses leave pressing problems unresolved and citizens frustrated?

SLOMODEMO (slow-motion democracy) is a five-year research project that investigates this dilemma. It examines how democracies cope with the tension between legitimacy and efficiency in a high-speed society. And what this means for their long-term capacity to solve problems effectively and democratically.

While it is tempting to view democratic “slowness” as a flaw, the project does not start from the assumption that speed is good and slowness is bad, or the other way around. Democratic politics can sometimes move quickly, especially in moments of executive centralization or legal shortcuts. At other times, slowness is deliberate and valuable. What matters is how societies and their political systems cope with the trade-offs between speed and democratic quality.

At the heart of SLOMODEMO is the recognition that liberal democracy is a problem-solving system. Its legitimacy depends not only on procedures and elections, but also on delivering effective responses to collective challenges. The project reconceptualizes liberal democracy in this direction and studies how the accelerating pace of change affects this problem-solving capacity.

The research agenda combines theoretical innovation with ambitious empirical work. It refines and operationalizes social acceleration theory, develops a unique dataset that tracks the pace of technological, social, and life-pace change across eight liberal democracies from 2000 to 2024. It studies how constitutions and lawmaking processes respond to social acceleration by asking 1) whether laws are outdated more quickly and 2) whether constitutional arrangements hinder or enable timely responses? Moreover, SLOMODEMO explores how citizens and politicians make trade-offs between democratic process and speedy problem solving, using survey and laboratory experiments in multiple countries. The project also analyzes the strategies governments adopt to deal with the dilemma, such as digitalization, executive action, or institutional reform, and assesses their consequences for democratic legitimacy.

The eight case countries are Denmark, Estonia, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries represent diverse institutional designs and political traditions. Together, they allow for a systematic comparison of how democracies with different configurations are coping with the pressures of social acceleration.

SLOMODEMO does not focus on crisis politics, such as war or pandemics, but on the more pervasive and ongoing forms of temporal pressure that democracies face in a fast-changing world. These include among others technological disruption, shifting work patterns, cultural transformation, and the increasing expectation of immediate political response.

Ultimately, the project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the deeper causes of democratic dissatisfaction. Much research has focused on trust, populism, polarization, and media dynamics. SLOMODEMO suggests that a crucial and underexplored part of the story lies in the growing disconnect between what citizens expect from democracy and what it can deliver, especially under conditions of social acceleration. By addressing this dilemma head-on, the project opens new ways to think about democratic resilience, reform, and innovation in the 21st century.