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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In
Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the façade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class.
Crouch’s provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse. The global financial deregulation that was the jewel in the crown of wealthy elite lobbying brought us the financial crisis and helped stimulate xenophobic movements which no longer accept the priority of institutions that safeguard democracy, like the rule of law. The rise of social media has enabled a handful of very rich individuals and institutions to target vast numbers of messages at citizens, giving a false impression of debate that is really stage-managed from a small number of concealed sources. Crouch evaluates the implications of these and other developments for his original thesis, arguing that while much of his thesis remains sound, he had under-estimated the value of institutions which are vital to the support of a democratic order. He also confronts the challenge of populists who seem to echo the complaints of Post-Democracy but whose pessimistic nostalgia brings an anti-democratic brew of hatred, exclusion and violence.
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Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface
Post scriptum
1 What Is Post-Democracy?
Democratic Moments
The Weakening of Democracy
Liberal Democracy and Other Forms
2 Inequality and Corruption
Inequality and Democracy
From lobbying to clandestine opinion manipulation
Redefining Corruption
Imperfect competition and corporate neoliberalism
New public management
The outsourcing of public services
Conclusion
3 The 2008 Financial Crisis
How Financial Markets Were Deregulated
What Does 2008 Tell Us About Post-Democracy?
Would stronger democracy have performed better?
Conclusion
4 The European Debt Crisis
The Handling of the Eurozone Crisis and Post-Democracy
European Post-Democracy
5 Politicized Pessimistic Nostalgia: A Cure Worse than the Disease
Understanding Pessimistic Nostalgia
The US
Central and Eastern Europe
Western Europe
The UK and Brexit
Conclusion: The Non-Democratic Supports of Democracy
6 The Fate of Twentieth-Century Political Identities
The Decline of Class and Religion
Cultural and Economic Politics
7 Beyond Post-Democracy?
The Dependence of Democracy on Non-Democratic Institutions
Reviving Democratic Alternatives
Changing Formal Politics
The revival of environmentalism
The potentiality of gender politics
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 What Is Post-Democracy?
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Dedication
To the memory of Alessandro Pizzorno (01/01/1924–04/04/2019), who, in 1973, enabled me to embark on a career of research on comparative European industrial relations; who, in 1995, welcomed me to Florence and the European University Institute; who, in 2002, interested Giuseppe Laterza in my Fabian Society pamphlet, Coping with Post-Democracy, which led to my writing, in 2003, Post-Democracy.
Post-Democracy After the Crises
Colin Crouch
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Colin Crouch 2020
The right of Colin Crouch to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4156-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4157-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crouch, Colin, 1944- author.
Title: Post-democracy after the crises / Colin Crouch.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Crouch’s provocative argument in Post-Democracy has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033304 (print) | LCCN 2019033305 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541560 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541577 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541584 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy--Philosophy. | World politics--21st century.
Classification: LCC JC423 .C7673 2020 (print) | LCC JC423 (ebook) | DDC 321.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033304
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033305
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Acknowledgements
My wife, Joan, has, as always, been an unfailing partner in developing arguments and ideas, and in reading successive drafts.
From the initial writing of Post-Democracy in 2003 to this current volume, I have enjoyed invaluable encouragement and support from Giuseppe Laterza.
I have benefited greatly from discussions and seminars with Donatella Della Porta, Mario Pianta and their colleagues and students at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, where I was a visiting professor during 2018.
Abbreviations
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation
BCBS
Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
EC
European Commission
ECB
European Central Bank
ECJ
European Court of Justice
EEC
European Economic Community
ERM
Exchange Rate Mechanism
EU
European Union
FAA
Federal Aviation Authority (US)
FN
Front National (France)
FPÖ
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austria)
GATT
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GDP
gross domestic product
IIF
International Institute for Finance
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IT
information technology
LTCM
Long-Term Capital Management
M5S
Movimento Cinque Stelle
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NPM
New Public Management
OECD
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
ÖVP
Österreichische Volkspartei (Austria)
PiS
Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Poland)
SVP
Schweizerische Volkspartei (Switzerland)
UK
United Kingdom
US
United States
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
WTO
World Trade Organization
Preface
In my book Post-Democracy, first published in 2003, I argued that in much of the western world we were drifting towards a condition where democracy was becoming a shadow of itself. Its institutions and habits remained: contested elections took place; governments could be brought down and peacefully replaced; political debate seemed fierce. But its vivacity and vigour had declined: parties and governments did not so much respond to desires articulated autonomously by groups of citizens, but manipulated issues and public opinion. Meanwhile, the real energy of the political system had passed into the hands of small elites of politicians and the corporate rich, who increasingly ensured that politics responded to the wishes of the latter. No one was to ‘blame’ for this in the normal sense, even those who gained from it. The two principal causes were beyond easy human manipulation. First, globalization had removed major economic decisions to levels that could not be reached from where democracy was concentrated: the nation-state. This was rendering much political economic debate futile. Second, the divisions of class and religion that had once enabled ordinary citizens to acquire a political identity were losing their meaning, making it increasingly difficult for us all to answer the question: ‘Who am I, politically?’ And unless we can answer that question, it is difficult for us to play an active part in democracy.
Because of these major forces of change, the worlds of politics and of normal life were drifting apart. Politicians responded to this by resorting to increasingly artificial means of communication with voters, using the techniques of advertising and market research in a very one-sided kind of interaction. Voters were becoming like puppets, dancing to tunes set by the manipulators of public opinion, rarely able to articulate their own concerns and priorities. This only intensified the growing artificiality of democracy; hence, post-democracy. I did not argue in 2003 that we had already reached a state of post-democracy. Most contemporary societies with long-established democratic institutions still had many citizens capable of making new demands and frustrating the plans of the puppet-masters; but we were on the road towards it.
I made three important mistakes in this account. First, I concentrated too much on the importance of what I called ‘democratic moments’, points in time when political professionals lost control of the agenda, permitting groups of citizens to shape it. I did not pay attention to the institutions that sustain and protect democracy outside those moments. Second, although I recognized xenophobic populism as one of the movements in contemporary society that seemed to challenge post-democracy, I both underestimated its depth and importance, and did not see how it would mark more an intensification of post-democratic trends than an answer to them. Third, I talked of both the failure of the middle and lower social classes of post-industrial societies to develop a distinctive politics, and the important role of feminism as another challenge to post-democracy, but failed to perceive that some elements of feminism are in part the distinctive politics of those classes.
These mistakes are linked. In the initial years of this century it seemed possible to take for granted the viability of the constitutional order that safeguards democracy – and indeed disguises post-democracy as democracy. The xenophobic movements that have achieved such prominence since that time in Europe, the USA and elsewhere have made it clear that they do not accept the priority of such institutions as the autonomy of the judiciary, the rule of law or the role of parliaments. Since these movements stand predominantly on the political right, it tends today to be parties of the centre and left that defend these institutions. In a longer historical perspective it may seem strange that the left is defending constitutions against a right that has always claimed to have that role; that is a mark of how politics is changing. Further, xenophobic movements are becoming the main bearers, not just of fear and hatred of foreigners, but of a pessimistic, nostalgic social conservatism in general, including resentment at recent advances made by women. Movements guided at least in part by feminist ideas then become their major antagonists, going beyond ‘women’s issues’ as such. I hope by the end of this book to have remedied these mistakes.
Post-Democracy also appears not so much in error, as dated, for other reasons. It began with an account of the taken-for-granted complacency that surrounded democracy in many parts of the world at its time of writing. This was the period when Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of liberal capitalist democracy as the summit of human institutional achievement, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was still in vogue. It was several years before books were to appear with titles like the late Peter Mair’s The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013), but it was in 2018 that such a literature became a flood, with David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s How Democracies Die, Robert Kuttner’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. The annual democracy index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit considered that 13 per cent of the world’s population lived in ‘fully functioning’ democracies in 2006 – the first year in which the report was published. By 2017 it had dropped to 4.5 per cent (Economist Intelligence Unit, annual).
I was also writing before the financial crisis of 2008 was to demonstrate one of my core arguments: that lobbying for the interests of global business had produced a deregulated economy that neglected all other interests in society. I had not fully appreciated the special place of the financial sector in the array of capitalist interests, and the particular challenge it presented to democracy. Two years later the European debt crisis seemed to produce perfect examples of post-democracy in action, as parliaments in Greece and Italy were presented with a choice: vote for the appointment of prime ministers designated by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and an unofficial committee of leading banks, or receive no help out of the crisis. The forms of democratic choice were preserved: the new prime ministers – both of whom had formerly been employees of Goldman Sachs, one of the banks at the heart of the crises – were not simply imposed; parliaments had to vote for them. That is how post-democracy works. But that account is itself over-simple. There are serious questions over the democratic credentials of the previous governments of both countries.
Finally, the years since I wrote Post-Democracy have seen the extraordinary rise of social media and their use in political mobilization. In my book, I welcomed the role of the Internet as enabling civil society groups to organize and spread discussions, providing some useful countervailing power against large corporations and media organizations. This we now know was naive. Since the early years of the century, the Internet economy has produced its own colossal enterprises, compounding further the potential political role of capitalist power and wealth. The Internet has also facilitated the distribution of extraordinary outbursts of hate speech, a deterioration in the quality of debate and a capacity to broadcast falsehood. Much of this is linked to the rise of the new xenophobic movements of the far right, the self-styled ‘alt.right’. Social media do continue to enable civil society groups and individuals who previously lacked any chance of political voice to find one, but the possessors of colossal wealth have been purchasing technology and expertise that enable them to discover the salient characteristics of millions of citizens and target them with vast numbers of persuasive messages, giving the impression of huge movements of opinion, apparently coming from millions of separate people, that in fact emanate from a single source. It is difficult to imagine a more perfectly post-democratic form of politics, giving an impression of debate and conflict that is really stage-managed from a small number of concealed sources. What seemed to be a liberating, democratizing technology has turned out to favour a small number of extremely rich individuals and groups – those wealthy persons having the temerity to pose as the opponents of ‘elites’. The relationship of social media to democracy and post-democracy requires a re-examination.
These various developments make necessary the revision, updating and changing of the arguments in Post-Democracy. In Chapter 1 of Post-Democracy After the Crises, I restate what I meant by the idea in the first place and why it seemed relevant to write about it. Chapters 2–6 deal in turn with the forces that seem to be exacerbating post-democratic trends: the corruption of politics by wealth and lobbying power; the financial crisis and the conduct of measures to end it; the European debt crisis; the rise of xenophobic populism; and the erosion of democracy’s roots among citizens. Post-Democracy was a dystopia. A dystopia says: this is the direction in which we are heading, and it seems bad. But if the author wants to avoid bleak pessimism, she or he must also say to the reader: if you do not like where we are heading, here are some things we can do about it. Chapter 7 tries to do what was attempted in the final chapter of Post-Democracy, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’, but the mood as well as some of the substantive ideas are different.
Post-Democracy was based on a pamphlet I wrote in 2002 for the Fabian Society, entitled Coping with Post-Democracy. Most Fabian pamphlets are addressed to policymakers and tell them what they should do to tackle various problems. But policymakers themselves constituted an important part of the problem that I was discussing. I therefore addressed ordinary citizens who stood little chance of doing anything about the major social, political and economic forces standing behind the development. They could, however, work out how to cope with it, alleviating its impact on their lives. Post-democracy as I saw it was a disappointing and worrying process, but it was not frightening; it could be ‘coped with’. The situation today is worse. Not only are the main new weapons of civil society, those of information technology, being turned against it, but in the settled democracies of the world we are confronting important challenges to constitutional order and a resurgence of xenophobia, almost all coming from the far right. Although these challenges are not as extreme as the fascist and Nazi movements of the interwar years, they are part of the same political family, and raise concerns for everyone from the centre right to the left – except that part of the far left that is beginning to share some of the far right’s rhetoric. If this is where post-democracy has now brought us, ‘coping’ is too complacent. Confrontation is necessary.
Post scriptum
The text of this book was completed before Boris Johnson formed a minority Conservative government in the UK in the late summer of 2019. This alone explains the absence of examples drawn from that government’s experience to illustrate some central themes in Chapter 4, including relations between xenophobic populist movements and the judiciary, their creation of ‘alternative facts’, and the implicit encouragement of intolerance towards opponents.
1What Is Post-Democracy?
Recent general election campaigns in the United Kingdom have presented a visual image of what I mean by post-democracy that is more expressive than many words – and I expect the same images are prominent in other mature democracies too. A politician appears on the television news making a speech, surrounded by enthusiastic supporters, carefully balanced for all ages and races and both genders, waving placards bearing slogans of the party in question. It has all the marks of a politician embedded in the people, who are demonstrating their spontaneous excitement. But the placards have all been produced by a central source, not autonomously by those holding them. Sometimes the mischievous camera pans back to reveal that the politician and the little group of supporters are actually standing alone, together with a few media representatives, in a corner of a large, empty warehouse. There is no larger audience; this is not a public meeting. These gatherings are held in different cities, politicians being required to travel vast distances in order to show that they cover the country in their determination to meet the people. But the warehouses are nearly always on the edge of a city, around ring roads and motorway approaches where virtually nobody ever goes. For reasons of security, traffic congestion and fears of encountering hostile citizens, these election rallies rarely approach a population. All the trappings of democratic encounters are there: all parts of the country are visited; the politicians stand among highly diverse groups of persons, not isolated on a platform; they make strong and emotional appeals. But the event is as empty of serious encounter as are the warehouses in which they are staged.
The idea of ‘post-’ is very frequently used today: post-industrial, post-modern, post-liberal, post-ironic. This suggests a society that knows where it has been and what it is ceasing to be, but not where it is going. However, it can also mean something very precise. Essential to ‘post-’ is the idea of a parabola through which the phenomenon in question passes over time. The general idea is depicted in Figure 1.1. After its initial appearance, it grows in significance, eventually reaching a peak, after which it subsides in importance. Its importance ‘score’ eventually seems no higher than in its early years, but accumulations over time do not easily disappear. Their mark is left in memories and, more importantly, in institutions that were created by the phenomenon during its dominant period and that, at least for a time, are not abolished. For this reason, the situation after, say, 70 years is not the same as at year 0. Let us take the case of ‘post-industrialism’, a phenomenon that can be measured fairly clearly as either the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) or the proportion of employment accounted for by manufacturing industry. This first rose from low levels during early industrialization, reached a peak (in most western economies during the 1970s), and then declined. Today its level resembles that of industrialism’s earlier years. But this does not mean that we are reverting to being ‘pre-industrial’ or ‘non-industrial’. The accumulations of industrialism and their impact on our lives are still with us; we have become ‘post-industrial’.
Figure 1.1The parabola: from pre- to post- in the life of a phenomenon
A similar point applies to democracy. The fact that, as I argue below, democracy has lost strength in recent decades does not mean that we are living in pre- or non-democratic societies. The achievements of the democratic period have left a major legacy of practices, attitudes, values and institutions. These are still active. This gives ground for optimism, but it also explains something important about post-democracy: we do not notice that democracy has weakened, because its institutions and habits remain; but the real energy of the political system has passed into the hands of small elites of politicians and the corporate rich, who increasingly ensure that politics responds to their wishes.
In a criticism of my concept, Stephen Welch argued in Hyperdemocracy (2013) that rather than a decline of democracy, we are today trying to have too much of it, politicizing issues that are inappropriate for such treatment. But he and I are talking about two sides of the same coin. I would reconcile our positions by pointing out that when political debate is about nothing, it tries to be about everything. When there is very little real debate over major policy directions (a fundamental characteristic of post-democracy), politicians start exploring every little avenue they can in order to claim that they have found a difference from their opponents – anything from each other’s personal morality to the desirability of particular medical treatments or ways of teaching children to read. This leads to an intrusion of politics – whether democratic or not – into areas with which it is not well equipped to deal.
To sustain my argument that changes in our political life can be described as steps on a road towards post-democracy, I need to demonstrate two things: first, that there was a period in the recent past when democracy could be said to have been strong; and second, that there has been a falling away since. The first requires identification of a ‘democratic moment’.
Democratic Moments
Democracy thrives when there are major opportunities for the mass of ordinary people to participate, through discussion and autonomous organizations, in shaping the agenda of public life, and when they are actively using these opportunities. This is ambitious, an ideal model, which can almost never be fully achieved; but, like all impossible ideals, it sets a marker. It is intensely practical to consider where our conduct stands in relation to an ideal, since in that way we can try to improve. It is essential to take this approach to democracy rather than the more common one, which is to scale down definitions of the ideal so that they conform to what we actually achieve. That way lies complacency, self-congratulation and an absence of concern to identify ways in which democracy is being weakened.
Societies probably come closest to democracy in my maximal sense in the early years of achieving it or after great regime crises, when enthusiasm for democracy is widespread and concern for political developments intense, as people feel their lives are being touched by them; when many diverse groups and organizations of ordinary people share in the task of trying to frame a political agenda that will at last respond to their concerns; when the powerful interests that dominate undemocratic societies are wrong-footed and thrown on the defensive; and when the political system has not quite discovered how to manage and manipulate the new demands. These are democratic moments.
In most of western Europe and North America, we had major democratic moments at some point between the 1930s (in the United States and Scandinavia) and the years immediately following the Second World War (the rest of us). Until those points, few countries had had extensive periods of full male adult suffrage – in even fewer did women enjoy political citizenship. Masses of ordinary people then discovered they had a political voice, and formed parties and other organizations to express their concerns. There had been earlier rumblings of democratic moments, especially around the turn of the century and the time of the First World War, but in several European societies the elites who had been accustomed to having political life serve their interests alone were simply not prepared to accept this invasion of their privileged space. Many of them threw their weight behind fascist and Nazi parties, which, despite speaking a populist rhetoric and making use of mass mobilizations, were deeply hostile to democracy and, once in power, suppressed it with ruthless violence. The defeat of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other fascist leaders in the Second World War and the devastation of their countries led these elites to accept not only the election of governments, but also the pursuit of political agendas promoted by groups from outside their own ranks.
We see this most clearly in the themes that the social democratic and socialist left had been trying to bring to the table since the late nineteenth century: workers’ rights, a welfare state, free or heavily subsidized education and health services, redistributive taxation. But it was not only the left that now adopted these policies. One can, for example, see the impact of democracy on the politics of Roman Catholicism. The church had set its face against all dilutions of aristocratic and other forms of elite rule ever since the French Revolution, and in the twentieth century had supported the fascist suppression of infant democracies in Italy, Portugal and Spain. There was however a Christian democratic wing to Catholic politics, struggling against the prevailing authoritarianism. After the Second World War, this moved from being marginalized by Catholic elites to become the dominant form of Christian politics, for several decades being the most successful group of parties in western Europe. This was all part of the democratic moment.
The Weakening of Democracy
Some entropy of maximal democracy has to be expected, but two primary factors, in turn producing a third, have accelerated the process. These are:
economic globalization and the associated rise of the giant firm;
changes in class structure and (in western Europe but not the US) a decline in the power of religion, which have more or less inevitably weakened the main forces that linked ordinary people to political life;
and, in consequence of these two forces, a growing tendency for politicians to reduce their links with their mass supporters and prefer the company of global business elites.
Globalization has weakened democracy in two ways. First, it has reduced the reach of national governments. If the most important decisions that shape the economic world take place at global levels, while democracy remains rooted in nation-states, inevitably much democratic activity can come to seem pointless. Second, the institutions that have been most advanced by globalization are transnational corporations, which have outgrown the governance capacity of individual nation-states. If they do not like the regulatory or fiscal regime in one country, they threaten to move to another, and increasingly states compete in their willingness to offer them favourable conditions and tax regimes, as they need the investment. Democracy has simply not kept pace with capitalism’s rush to the global. The best it can manage are certain international groupings of states, but even the most important by far of these, the European Union (EU), is a clumsy pygmy in relation to the agile corporate giants, and its own democratic quality, while far stronger than anything similar in the world, is weak.
Today’s dominant politico-economic ideology, neoliberalism, has turned this weakening of the nation-state into a virtue. If it is believed that governments are almost by definition incompetent and that large firms are necessarily efficient, then the less power the former have and the more freedom from them that firms gain, the better. Large numbers of politicians and politically active persons, from all points of the political spectrum, came to believe this during the latter years of the twentieth century. A decline in the importance of political democracy was almost bound to follow.
The second factor has been quite different. Class and religion were the main forces that enabled ordinary, non-political people to acquire political identities. As will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6, this happened because class and often religious identity put people on different sides in struggles for entry into political citizenship. These class and religious identities were attributes that people well understood. When they acquired political meaning through these struggles, people could understand which parties were working for or against ‘people like them’, and could vote accordingly. Once universal adult suffrage had been achieved, these struggles gradually passed from being remembered experience to being something learned from parents and grandparents about the past. Meanwhile, the new classes being created by the growth of post-industrial occupations did not face struggles for admission to citizenship, and therefore have not carried clues to political identity. Similarly, as European societies became secularized and religious leaders departed from their traditional conservative political positions, adherence to a particular faith – or none – also ceased to convey political identity.
Most adults have continued to vote, though turnout has slowly declined almost everywhere, and voting has become an act rather detached from life’s deeply felt activities. Figure 1.2 shows changes in the proportion of persons qualified to vote in national parliamentary elections who actually did so across the main west European countries between the mid-1980s and the most recent election (as of mid-2019). Such a comparison between two periods of time conceals fluctuations that might have taken place between them, and cannot cope with special factors affecting individual countries at those two periods themselves. However, it is clear that everywhere except Switzerland (where turnout has in any case always been low) and (marginally) Spain, there has been decline. In some cases this has been minor, but in others it has been strong. Two countries (Belgium and Italy) moved from compulsory voting during the period, but that seemed to have little impact on the general trend in voting.
NB: ‘Germany’ in the mid-1980s was the German Federal Republic; today it is united Germany
Figure 1.2 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, mid-1980s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), west European countries
Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data
With the exception of Slovenia, the populations of central and eastern Europe did not respond with exceptional enthusiasm to being able to vote in free elections after the fall of communism, turnout in their first elections during the 1990s being typically lower than those found even now in most of western Europe. Since then, there have been varying patterns (Figure 1.3), but decline has predominated.
The mass memberships of parties themselves also often declined, leaving their smaller number of activists representing the traditional symbolic identities of the classes and faiths that had built the party but not extending into new parts of the population. Party leaderships observed this, which meant that the mass parties were declining in their value to leaders as ways of connecting them to voters at large. As core constituencies shrank, party leaders came increasingly to believe that they did not really need core constituencies. Rather, they wanted to be able to take them for granted as voters who had no other home to which they could go, leaving leaders free to find votes across as wide a range of opinion as possible. This necessarily meant a decline in the clarity of parties’ profiles, weakening further any strong bonds they might have with citizens.
Figure 1.3 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, early 1990s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), central European EU member states
Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data
Parties increasingly sought to relate to voters through the techniques of market research and advertising. Policies and party images became like goods being sold in a market to mass consumers, where firms have no direct knowledge of potential customers as people, but only as purchasing units identified in surveys, focus groups and trial marketing campaigns. Politicians ceased to be people who represented various social categories because of their close contacts with them as fellow citizens, but a separate political class, the recipients of professional marketing data about customer-electors. Socially, they would increasingly prefer to mix with the leaders of global corporations, whose investments they wanted to lure to their economies, and whose funds they wanted to finance their increasingly expensive election campaigns.
Taken together, these processes generated a spiral of increasing remoteness of political leaders from electorates. The apotheosis of this change was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. The main parties of the Italian centre right and centre left had collapsed in the early 1990s in a wave of corruption scandals that provoked a brief democratic moment of anger. The communist party, by now a moderate one, was left as the only major organized political force in the country. Berlusconi was the country’s richest entrepreneur, owning businesses across the post-industrial spectrum from football to financial services, television stations to supermarkets (Mancini 2011). He had been politically associated with the now defunct socialist party, and had a range of legal cases for corruption hanging over his head. Despite these strong links to the old regime, he appeared on the political scene as an outsider who would clean up the system and, most important, provide an alternative to the communist party, which many Italians still feared.
Berlusconi rapidly created a major, winning national political party, called Forza Italia (a politically meaningless phrase, derived from a football slogan), using, not a membership base, but the financial and personnel resources of his enterprises and his ownership of major television and print media networks. The phenomenon became known as a partito impresa, a corporation party. Over subsequent years, Forza Italia developed a membership base and began to resemble a normal party, collapsing along with other established parties during the 2010s under a new wave of populism. However, its initial circumstances followed a post-democratic model of having few connections to voters and no historical social roots.
In 2003, I did not argue that in the western world we had already arrived at a state of post-democracy. That would happen if we were in societies in which no spontaneous movements could arise from the general population to give a shock to the political system. Our societies were clearly still able to do this. Three movements in particular had been doing so, bringing to the political agenda issues that established elites would sooner have done without: feminism, environmentalism and xenophobia. The developments I had identified had set us on the road to post-democracy, but we were not yet there.
Liberal Democracy and Other Forms
My argument took for granted that democracy was representative, liberal democracy. This is not the only form. Democracy can be direct, with all citizens participating
