Post-Democracy After the Crises. Colin Crouch

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