When observing the international political scene today, few things appear as clear as the deeply critical tensions facing Western democracies. The current situation in the United States, one of the oldest and most established democratic systems, serves as evidence of this and should leave us far from reassured about the future of democratic political systems in the West.
To introduce this topic, it is helpful to briefly clarify the fundamental concept we will be discussing, even if we cannot be exhaustive. According to Mudde and Kaltwasser, democracy is best defined as the combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, democracy can be direct or indirect, liberal or illiberal. Indeed, the etymology of the term ‘democracy’ alludes to the idea of self-government, or a political system in which the people rule. Not coincidentally, most ‘minimal’ definitions consider democracy primarily as a method by which rulers are selected in competitive elections. Free and fair elections are therefore the defining feature of democracy. Rather than changing rulers through violent conflict, the people agree that those who govern them should be elected by majority rule. However, in most day-to-day usage, the term ‘democracy’ actually refers to ‘liberal democracy’ rather than ‘democracy’ per se. The main difference between a democracy and a liberal democracy is that the latter not only respects popular sovereignty and majority rule, but also establishes independent institutions aimed to the protection of fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and minority rights.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to protecting fundamental rights, and consequently liberal democratic regimes have adopted very different institutional designs. For example, some have a strong written constitution and supreme court (the United States), while others have neither (the United Kingdom). Despite these differences, all liberal democracies are characterized by institutions that aim to protect fundamental rights and avoid the emergence of a ‘tyranny of the majority’.
This interpretation is similar to that proposed by the American political scientist Robert Dahl, arguably one of the most important scholars on the subject. He argued that liberal democratic regimes are structured around two separate and independent dimensions: public contestation and political participation. The former refers to the freedom to express preferences and oppose the government, while the latter refers to the right and duty to participate in the political system. Moreover, he believed that a demanding set of institutional guarantees is required to ensure the optimisation of both dimensions.
In his seminal 1998 work On Democracy, Dahl identified five criteria that a governing process must meet to ensure that all members of an association are equally entitled to participate in policy decisions: (1) effective participation, whereby all members have equal and effective opportunities to express their views; (2) voting equality, whereby all members have equal and effective opportunities to vote and all votes are counted equally; (3) enlightened understanding, whereby all members have equal and effective opportunities to learn about relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences; (4) Control of the agenda (the policies must always be open to change by the members if they so choose); and (5) Inclusion of adults (all or at least most adult permanent residents should have the full rights of citizens implied by the first four criteria). Before the 20th century, this last criterion was unacceptable to most advocates of democracy (it touches on the fundamental question: why should we treat others as our political equals?).
According to Dahl, each of these criteria is necessary for members (however limited in number) to be politically equal in determining the association’s policies. But are they applicable on a large scale to the government of a state? Having clarified that no actual democracy can fully meet these criteria, the answer is yes. The political institutions of modern democratic government are as follows: (1) elected officials (modern, large-scale democratic governments are representative); (2) free, fair and frequent elections; (3) freedom of expression; (4) access to alternative sources of information that are not under the control of the government or any other single political group attempting to influence public political beliefs and attitudes. These alternative sources are effectively protected by law; (5) associational autonomy, or the right to form relatively independent associations or organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups; and (6) inclusive citizenship, whereby no adult permanently residing in the country and subject to its laws can be denied the rights available to others that are necessary for the political institutions listed above.
Bearing in mind Dahl’s five core criteria of the democratic process (ideal democracy) and the six political institutions that enable their implementation in a country’s governance (actual democracy), the pressures that threaten democratic systems stem from three phenomena: citizenship, new populism and the transformation of information and the public sphere in the digital age (the three sections of our anthology).
With regard to citizenship, we refer to the work of Robert Bellamy (Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008), who underlines its legal and political nature in particular. He defines citizenship as ‘a condition of civic equality’. It consists of membership of a political community where all citizens can determine the terms of social cooperation on an equal basis. This status secures equal rights to enjoy the collective goods provided by the political association, as well as equal duties to promote and sustain them, including democratic citizenship itself.
In contemporary democracies, the concept of citizenship is facing challenges from various directions. On the one hand, ‘disenchantment with democratic politics has never been more pronounced, with voter turnout and trust in politicians in a slow but steady decline within all democracies’. Political citizenship is rejected as both too demanding and of dubious worth. On the other hand, ‘citizenship involves a degree of solidarity and reciprocity between citizens. Citizens need to see each other as equal partners within a collective enterprise, sharing the costs as well as the benefits. However, the widening social and economic divide between rich and poor, which has grown significantly over the past three decades, has slowly eroded the sense of solidarity and belonging to a political community of equals. This has also made the wealthier classes more reluctant to bear the costs of a democratic system that assumes the state is responsible for providing fundamental services and goods to all citizens.
More affluent citizens, who can afford to contribute substantially to the common good by paying high taxes, go to great lengths to avoid doing so. They ‘seek a more direct correlation, akin to that enjoyed by customers in the market, between what they pay and what they receive as individuals’. Consequently, they are inclined to accept the gradual privatization of many formerly public services, such as health, education and even the police. Privatization undermines civic attitudes not so much through private suppliers providing public goods and services — in certain cases, this may produce efficiency gains compared to state provision — but when such goods are perceived as private consumables rather than a collective responsibility that ought to be supplied equitably to all citizens.
Another significant pressure on citizenship comes from growing cultural diversity within democratic countries, which risks increasing fragmentation, weakening the political community, and putting political equality under strain. There are two main causes. Firstly, the numerical growth of certain minorities, such as black people, women, homosexuals, linguistic minorities, and ethnic groups settled in certain territories, and their demand for recognition within democratic countries. These minorities tend to demand recognition and protection of their distinct identities, which does not easily foster cohesion within a single political community of equals. Secondly, the global phenomenon of migration, involving people searching for a better future for themselves and their families or fleeing war, persecution and hunger, increases cultural, ethnic and religious differences within our democracies. This raises questions about the enforcement of human rights and citizenship, with many migrants ending up in refugee camps under extreme conditions for long periods of time.
Regarding the phenomenon of new populism, we refer to the brief introduction by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser (Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2017). They note that, in recent decades, the phenomenon has become widespread across the globe, affecting not only the political life of numerous Latin American countries, but also that of the United States and Europe (e.g. France, Slovakia, Poland, Italy and Germany). Although not new, the phenomenon is re-emerging today with some new elements. Rather than presenting itself as a systematic doctrine, it presents itself as a political and mental attitude that changes over time and in different territorial realities. This attitude has two important poles: the ‘people’, who are not well defined but are in a state of distress and lack political representation, and the leader, who presents themselves as the only person capable of interpreting and expressing the ‘general will’ of the ‘pure’ people politically. The other pole consists of the ‘elites’, the holders of cultural, economic, political and media power, who, in the populist narrative, hold the people hostage and exploit them for their own benefit.
The ambivalence of the phenomenon is also highlighted. ‘Populism exploits the tensions inherent in liberal democracy, which attempts to strike a balance between majority rule and minority rights’. By giving voice to constituencies that do not feel represented by the elite, populism acts as a democratic corrective. Populists often achieve this by politicizing issues that the elites do not discuss but which the ‘silent majority’ considers relevant. However, populism can also have a negative impact on liberal democracy. For example, by claiming that no institution has the right to constrain majority rule, populist forces may attack minorities and erode the institutions that protect fundamental rights. Indeed, this is the main threat posed by radical right-wing populist parties to liberal democracy in Europe. ‘As it tends to distrust any unelected institution that limits the power of the people, populism can develop into a form of democratic extremism, or more accurately, illiberal democracy’.
In summary, Mudde and Kaltwasser argue that, while populism is essentially linked to democracy, it is in contrast with the liberal democratic system. In fact, populism ‘holds that nothing should constrain “the will of the (pure) people” and fundamentally rejects the notions of pluralism and, therefore, minority rights, as well as the “institutional guarantees” that should protect them’. In practice, populists often invoke the principle of popular sovereignty to criticize independent institutions that seek to protect the fundamental rights inherent in the liberal democratic model. Among the most targeted institutions are the judiciary and the media. Moreover, populist leaders, who oversimplify complex issues and present themselves as capable of solving everything immediately, tend to use exaggerated, exacerbating and polarizing forms of communication, especially on social media.
This brings us to the third potential crisis in the democratic system: the transformation of information and public spaces in the digital age. We address this issue by referring to philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s short essay Infocracy. Digitalisation and the Crisis of Democracy (Polity Press, 2022). Han’s arguments touch on one of the pillars of the democratic process: the right of citizens to be properly informed. In Western democracies, the relentless digitalisation of all aspects of life transforms public spaces into fragmented ‘private spaces’, each personalized by the profiling systems of large digital platforms. In this ‘information regime’, where individuals are surveilled based on the extensive information they generate and share (for example, through the use of smartphones), politics shifts towards ‘psychopolitics’ as voters’ actions can be unconsciously influenced by targeted disinformation campaigns, such as fake news and conspiracy theories.
In this regime, political competition becomes a war based on false and misleading information. Han refers to this as the ‘infocratic distortion of democracy’, carried out using all the technical and psychological means available to the new technocratic power. ‘In an infocracy, information is used as a weapon’ to manipulate voters psychologically. Furthermore, the timing of information and the democratic process are no longer aligned. ‘Democracy is a slow and drawn-out process. It takes time’. The speed and virality of information seriously damages the democratic process, as it no longer passes through the public sphere for verification or debate. The arguments and justifications required for democratic debate cannot be conveyed in tweets or viral memes.
However, according to Han, the crisis of democracy is not solely related to issues arising from the digital transformation of the public sphere. He argues that a major cause of the crisis is the progressive disappearance of the ‘other’ in Western societies, resulting in the end of democracy as a discursive practice, where the presence of the ‘other’ is essential for forming one’s own opinion. ‘Without the presence of the other, my opinion is neither discursive nor representative, but autistic, doctrinaire and dogmatic’. The disappearance of the other implies the end of discourse because ‘it deprives opinion of communicative rationality and […] reinforces the self-propagandistic compulsion to indoctrinate oneself with one’s own ideas’.
