Claims that democracy is in crisis are certainly not new, but recent history has given the claim a new urgency. Over the past decade or so, there has been no shortage of people expressing concern that democratic institutions are under strain.

Recent studies have indeed shown declining levels of trust in democratic systems around the world. The trend is evident in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. In Australia, too, a recent study found that trust in politics was at record lows.

We asked 5 experts to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of democratic governance, taking as their prompt Winston Churchill’s famously backhanded observation that “democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others that have been tried”.

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise,” Churchill told the House of Commons in 1947, before delivering his famous line.

Democracy is not meant to rest on blind faith. It makes room for wariness, disappointment and ambivalence. Once we accept its built-in flaws and its tendency to decay from within, a lot of the anxious commentary about “eroding public trust” starts to look misplaced.

For a start, people are mostly losing trust in the governments of the day, not in democracy itself – 95% of Australians say living in a democracy is important to them. And a certain level of scepticism toward whoever currently holds temporary power is not a crisis; it’s a safeguard.

That kind of circumspection is what a living........

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