Ruling the Void (3 page)

Which leads me to my first puzzle. This massive renewal of interest in democracy coexists with indications of an opposite kind. In the political discourse of the twenty-first century we can see clear and quite consistent evidence of popular indifference to conventional politics, and we can also see clear evidence of an unwillingness to take part in the sort of conventional politics that is usually seen as necessary to sustain democracy. How do we square these developments?

There are two possibilities. The first is that they are in fact related, and that the growing intellectual and institutional interest in democracy is in part a response to the expansion of popular indifference. In other words, we get a lot of discussion about democracy, its meanings, and its renewal, at the moment when ordinary citizens begin to pull away from conventional forms of democratic engagement. Making democracy relevant comes on to the agenda at the time when it otherwise risks becoming irrelevant. However, while the timing suggests that this may be the case, the actual content of the discussion suggests a different story, and this leads to the second possibility. For, far from seeking to encourage greater citizen participation, or trying to make democracy more meaningful for the ordinary citizen, many of the discussions of institutional reforms, on the one hand, and of the theory of democracy, on the other, seem to concur in favouring options that actually discourage mass engagement. This can be seen, for example, in the emphasis on stakeholder involvement rather than electoral participation that is to be found in discussions of both associative democracy and participatory governance, as well as in the emphasis on the sort of exclusive and reasoned debate that is a hallmark of deliberative and reflective models of democracy. In neither case is much real scope
afforded to conventional modalities of mass democracy. It can also be seen in the new emphasis that is placed on output-oriented legitimacy – with criteria such as efficiency, stability or continuity – in discussions of the European Union polity, and in the related idea that democracy in the EU requires ‘solutions that are “beyond the state” and, perhaps, also beyond the conventions of western-style representative liberal democracy’ (Shaw, 2000: 291). In other words, while there may be some concern with the problem of popular indifference to democracy, the idea of making democracy more massuser friendly does not seem to be a frequently favoured answer. For Philip Pettit (2001: §46), for example, who discusses the issue of democratic renewal in the context of deliberation and depoliticization, the issue comes on to the agenda because ‘democracy is too important to be left to the politicians, or even to the people voting in referendums.’ For Fareed Zakaria (2003: 248), in his more popular account, renewal is necessary because ‘what we need in politics today is not more democracy but less’.

Hence the second possibility: the renewal of interest in democracy and its meanings at the intellectual and institutional levels is not intended to open up or reinvigorate democracy as such; the aim is rather to redefine democracy in such a way that it can more easily cope with, and adapt to, the decline of popular interest and engagement. Far from being an answer to disengagement, the contemporary concern with renewing democracy is about coming to terms with it. In other words, what we see here is a wide-ranging attempt to define democracy in a way that does not require any substantial emphasis on popular sovereignty – at the extreme, the projection of a kind of democracy without the demos at its centre.

Part of this process of redefinition involves highlighting the distinction between what has been called ‘constitutional democracy’, on the one hand, and
‘popular democracy’, on the other, a distinction that overlaps with and echoes Robert Dahl’s (1956) earlier contrast between ‘Madisonian’ and ‘populistic’ forms of democracy.
²
On the one hand, there is democracy’s constitutional component – the component that emphasizes the need for checks and balances across institutions and entails government
for
the people. On the other hand, there is the popular component – which emphasizes the role of the ordinary citizen and popular participation, and which entails government
by
the people. These two distinct functions coexist and complement one another. However, though conceived of as two elements within a ‘unified’ sense of democracy, they are now becoming disaggregated, and then being contrasted with one another both in theory and practice. Hence, for example, the notions of ‘illiberal’ or ‘electoral’ democracy (Diamond, 1996; Zakaria, 1997) that have emerged since the collapse of the European communist bloc in 1989, and the attempt to understand those new ‘democracies’ that combined free elections – popular democracy – with restrictions on rights and freedoms, and the potentially abusive exercise of executive power. As many studies of these new democracies in particular seemed to indicate, popular and constitutional democracy were no longer necessarily bound together.

Thus, the important conceptual distinction between the popular and constitutional components of democracy has become more important in practice. And with this development comes also a relative weighting process, in which the popular element becomes downgraded with respect to the constitutional element. Once democracy is divided into its popular and constitutional elements, in other words, it is the popular that loses ground. For Zakaria, for example, who has always been one of the
clearest voices in this area, it is the presence of the constitutional rather than the popular component that is essential for the survival and well-being of democracy, and the reason democracy has proved so successful in the western hemisphere: ‘For much of modern history, what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. The “Western model” is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge’ (Zakaria, 1997: 27). In this view it is not elections – or not elections as such – that make for democracy, but rather the courts, or at least the combination of courts with other modes of non-electoral participation. Indeed, as some of the literature on good governance seems to imply with respect to the developing countries, a relatively clear formula is already available:
NGOs (non-governmental organizations) + judges = democracy
. While an emphasis on ‘civil society’ is acceptable, and reliance on legal procedures is indispensable, elections as such are not of the essence (see also Chua, 2003).

A similar logic can be seen in various approaches to constitutional reform in the advanced democracies and to reforms within the EU context in particular, in that here too democracy can be redefined in a way that downgrades the importance of its popular component. As Michelle Everson (2000: 106) has noted in her discussion of Majone’s work, for example, ‘non-majoritarian thought … forcefully claims that its isolation of market governance from political forces serves the goal of democracy by safeguarding the democratically set goals of the polity from the predatory inclinations of a transitory political elite.’ In this case the opposition is unequivocal: in one corner, the goals of the polity, objectively defined; in the other, the claims of a transitory – because elected – and hence predatory elite. The one is
sustained by the networks of good governance, the other by the crude power and ambition of electoral politics. There is clearly no contest here. In other arenas, and in the context of different processes, the story appears the same. In their review of new modes of delegation, Mark Thatcher and Alec Stone Sweet (2003: 19) underline the growing importance of ‘procedural legitimacy’, which ‘relies on a process of decision making by NMIs [non-majoritarian institutions] being better than the insular, often secret, deliberations of cabinets and executives’. In this case, the benefits of transparency, legality and stakeholder access are held up against the limits and distortions induced by partisan politics, and are seen to lead to a process offering ‘a fair and democratic substitute for electoral accountability’. The shift becomes even more pronounced with the import of the modalities of New Public Management into political organizations and the public sector. Here, the forms of accountability not only do not include the electoral channel, but also override the criteria implicit in the public sector as such, being governed instead by values of cost-efficiency, fair procedure, and performance (see, for example, Peters, 2003: 125).

This, in turn, leads to a second puzzle: If democracy is being redefined to downgrade its popular component, then why is this happening, and why now? In other words, why did this particular shift begin to appear less that one decade after the much heralded ‘victory of democracy’ (e.g., Hadenius, 1997), and at a moment when, for the first time in history, democracy was being acclaimed as ‘the only game in town’ (Linz and Stepan, 1996)? Why, just as democracy seemed to triumph, did there emerge a concern to limit its scope?

There are, of course, a number of different but related answers to this question – including the impact of the
end of the Cold War, the decline of the ‘embedded liberalism’ that moderated the spontaneous tendencies of the major capitalist economies for three decades after 1945,
³
the declining purchase of party government, and the more general fallout from processes of globalization and Europeanization. For now, however, I will focus on one answer, and suggest that the shift from popular to constitutional democracy and the concomitant downgrading of politics and of electoral processes are at least partly the consequence of the failings of political parties. As parties fail, so too fails popular democracy. Or, to put it another way, thanks to the failings of parties, popular democracy can no longer function in the way in which we have come to understand and accept it, and in the way it has always functioned up to now. In going beyond parties, democracy also passes beyond popular involvement and control.

Some twenty years before
The Semi-Sovereign People
, Schattschneider famously proposed that democracy without parties was unthinkable. The phrase itself comes from the opening paragraph of his
Party Government
(1942: 1) and is worth citing in its full context:

As always in the writings of this period, of course, democracy in this case was both popular and constitutional; it was the democracy of elections as well as of checks and balances, and the democracy of mandates, popular accountability, and representative government. It was this all-embracing sense of democracy that Schattschneider found unthinkable except in terms of parties, and the sheer conviction of his opinion has led to his proposition being cited by party specialists ever since. Thus, for example, it is argued that despite all the problems facing parties, and despite different and cumulative challenges, they will continue to survive, as Schattschneider suggests, as long as democracy survives. This is one of the key motifs in Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg’s assessment, which begins by asking readers to ‘think Schattschneider’s unthinkable’ and to consider what might happen should parties fail, and concludes on a more sanguine note by reaffirming that ‘it remains difficult to think of national governments functioning without parties playing a significant role in connecting the various elements of the political process’ (2000: 275). But if we take account of the different components of democracy, and then think Schattschneider’s proposition through to its potentially logical conclusion, we may arrive at a different answer. In other words, while Schattschneider’s proposition is usually taken to mean that the survival of democracy will guarantee the survival of parties (and since the
survival of democracy is guaranteed, this means that the survival of parties is also guaranteed), we can also read it the other way around, suggesting that the failure of parties might indeed imply the failure of democracy, or, adopting Dalton and Wattenberg’s terms, that the failure of parties might imply at least the failure of modern (representative) government. If democracy, or representative government, is unthinkable save in terms of parties, then perhaps, in the face of party failings, it does indeed become unthinkable, or unworkable.

Without parties, and still following Schattschneider, we are then left either with no real democracy and no real system of representative government, or with what is still called democracy, now redefined so as to downgrade or even exclude the popular component – since it is this component that depends so closely on party. Without parties, in other words, we are left with a stripped-down version of constitutional or Madisonian democracy; or we are left with other post-popular versions of democracy, such as Pettit’s republican polity (1998: 303), or those systems of modern governance that seek to combine ‘stakeholder participation’ with ‘problem-solving efficiency’ (Kohler-Koch, 2005). These are certainly not unthinkable forms of polity, but they are systems in which conventional popular democracy plays little or no significant role, and in which neither elections nor parties remain privileged.

When democracy in Schattschneider’s terms becomes unthinkable, in short, other modes of democracy move to the fore. Hence the contemporary intellectual interest in the theory of democratic renewal, and hence the more practical interest – represented by Amy Chua and Fareed Zakaria, among others – in proposing new forms of institutional politics. These and other similar approaches share a common concern to find or define a notion of democracy that, first of all, works; second, is
accepted as legitimate; and yet, third, no longer places at its centre the notion of popular control or electoral accountability.