When eighteenth-century revolutionary elites set about designing new political orders, they drew on commonplace theoretical understandings of “democracy” as highly undesirable. They therefore designed government institutions in which popular participation was to be extremely limited. The new political constructions, in both France and the United States, never worked as planned. The mobilizations of the revolutionary era did not vanish as the constitutional designers hoped. More profoundly, challenging social movements were unintentionally woven into the fabric of modern democracy due to the confluence of three processes: The legitimacy claims of democratic powerholders also legitimate protest; the institutional architecture of modern democracy, especially the allocation of office through elections, provides structural support for social movements as well; and the practices of democracy recurrently trigger politically powerful emotions that energize protest. Understanding democracy therefore demands a theory of the interplay of social movements and governing institutions from the foundational moment.

中文翻译：

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渠道泛滥：民主如何无法按计划进行（也许是一件好事）

当18世纪的革命精英开始设计新的政治秩序时，他们借鉴了对“民主”的极端普遍的理论理解，认为这是非常不受欢迎的。因此，他们设计了政府机构，在这些机构中，公众的参与是极其有限的。法国和美国的新政治建设从未按计划进行。革命时代的动员并没有像宪法设计者所希望的那样消失。更深刻地讲，由于三个过程的融合，具有挑战性的社会运动无意间融入了现代民主的组织中：民主掌权者的合法性主张也是合法的抗议；现代民主的制度架构，尤其是通过选举分配职位，也为社会运动提供结构性支持；而民主的实践又一次引发了政治上强烈的抗议活动。因此，要理解民主，就需要从基本时刻起就社会运动与治理机构之间相互作用的理论进行研究。