Challenges to Representative Democracy: Technocracy and Populism

Claudia Landwehr

Challenges to representative democracy: technocracy and populism

Representation is an essential element of what makes mass democracy possible in a pluralist society. However, societal conditions for democratic representation and relationships between representatives and constituents are changing, as are citizens’ understanding and expectations of democracy and representation. The chapter discusses how societal conditions for political representation have changed and assesses the technocratic and populist challenges to representative democracy. I explore to what extent pluralism prevails not only on the substantial, but also on the procedural level, i.e. in citizens understandings and evaluations of democratic decision-making and argue that the plurality of different conceptions of democracy and representation among citizens constitutes both a threat to the procedural consensus democracy rests upon and a resource to renew this consensus through democratic meta-deliberation.

1. Introduction

Bernard Manin has argued that every transformation of democracy is accompanied by diagnoses of crisis (Manin, 1997: 193/4). The contemporary diagnoses of a crisis of liberal democracy are also, and perhaps primarily, diagnoses of a crisis of representation. Those concerned about political alienation and non-participation tend to blame misfunctions of representative institutions and their removed, secluded and increasingly technocratic character for citizens’ loss of interest in politics (e.g. Crouch, 2002, Hay, 2007, Mair, 2013). The literature on responsiveness contents that citizens’ unequal influence on political decisions and the frequent divergence of decisions from majority positions constitutes a failure of representatives to adequately represent all societal interests and preferences (e.g. Gilens, 2005, Bartels, 2009, Elsässer, Hense et al., 2018). The rise of populist parties and candidates, which is commonly regarded as the biggest threat to liberalism and democracy, is often explained as a response to the failures of representation: mainstream parties are said to have betrayed the interests of low-income and low-education citizens and to have left a representational gap where preferences for a combination of redistributive with culturally conservative or even authoritarian policies are concerned. Accordingly, it is not surprising that many populist movements and parties challenge not only the policies produced by mainstream parties, but also the representative polity in which these are produced, and demand different, and in particular, more direct forms of democracy.

This chapter will, in the next section, reflect on requirements and challenges for political representation under conditions of mass democracies in pluralist societies. Against this background, the third section will discuss two contemporary challenges to representative democracy: First, the tendency towards increasingly technocratic institutions and decision-making processes that are removed from ordinary citizens’ concerns, and secondly, the populist attack on mainstream parties 1 and representative institutions. While representative democracy seems to have come under attack from two sides, I argue that both technocratic and populist forces ultimately share the rejection of institutions and practices of mediation, interest reconciliation and deliberation, which are central to representative democracy. Where established institutions and practices are challenged and the procedural consensus on where, how and by whom political decisions are to be taken is questioned, however, a polity’s capacity to address salient problems adequately as well as its support base in the population are likely to suffer. Section 4 seeks to explore the scope and content of procedural consensus: which competing conceptions of democracy coexist in consolidated democracies and in how far do they overlap? While the existing evidence is far from conclusive, there is certainly reason fear that the procedural consensus may become frail and that the stability of at least some liberal democracies is at risk. I conclude that democracies require ongoing processes of re- constitutionalization that ensure a political systems’ adaptability to societal change and new challenges. Understanding democracy, in Habermasian terms, as a self-correcting learning process, entails the hope that inclusive deliberation can address not only substantial decisions, but also the procedural ‘rules of the game’ and can help to adjust institutions to changed conditions and to renew the procedural consensus.

2. Democracy and representation

In modern mass democracies, representation seems to constitute a functional requirement for collective decision-making. While directly democratic decisions, initiated by ordinary citizens or organised interests and taken in referenda, can complement representative decision-making, the sheer number of decisions required in highly complex societies seems to make a division of labour between citizens and professional politicians indispensable. More importantly, however, and although representative democracy often continues to be regarded as an inferior substitute for more direct forms of democracy “we need to understand representation as an intrinsic part of what makes democracy possible.” (Urbinati and Warren, 2008: 395) By dividing popular sovereignty from government, representation ensures the self-limitation of majority rule and enables moderation and mediation (Urbinati, 2019: 90-93). The indirect relationship between public opinion and decision- making that is established by representative institutions ensures that majority is understood as a method of decision-making rather than reified as the popular will: “[I]f the people can (and probably will) change, then any appeal to its will is also fallible, temporary, and incomplete.” (Urbinati, 2019: 92) Under conditions of interest and value pluralism, identitarian conceptions of democracy like Rousseau’s must lose appeal: The idea of a pre-political volonté générale that is tracked where every citizen independently and without prior deliberation votes for the option they view as maximising a

‘common good’ becomes problematic where the scope of political decisions reaches far beyond the guarantee of internal and external security, where standards for the evaluation of decisions are contested and where unquestioned norms and values have become few.

Among the four principles of representative government identified by Bernard Manin is the principle that in representative democracy, decisions are made after “trial by discussion” (Manin, 1997: 183 pp.). While the principle as such survives transformations of democracy, Manin concedes that the notion of discussion is elusive and highlights the ways in which the institutionalization and dynamics of the ‘trial’ process have changed (ibid. 197/8). Manin’s definition of discussion comes close to the type of political interaction that is now commonly referred to as “deliberation”. Since the 1990ies, democratic theory has put a strong focus on the importance of deliberative processes of opinion and will formation as well as on the uptake of these by representative institutions. The deliberative and representative turns in democratic theory are thus closely related: J.M. Bessettes’ book on deliberative representative government in the United States (Bessette, 1997) highlights deliberation as a desideratum for legitimate representation. Bessette was also the first author use the concept of deliberation, which has since become central in the normative assessment of democratic government, in a political context, locating it within representative institutions (Bessette, 1980). Emphasizing the need to overcome the juxtaposition between direct and representative democracy and rejecting the view of the latter as only an inferior substitute for stronger forms of democracy, Jane Mansbridge points out that “only an elected political elite has both deliberative and decision-making power.” (Mansbridge, 2003: 395) Jon Elster and Jürgen Habermas have presented the deliberative conception of democratic politics as a kind of middle way, or synthesis, between the more extreme liberal- technocratic and direct-participatory positions (Elster, 1997 [1986], Habermas, 1999).

While the different accounts of deliberative democracy are now numerous, Jürgen Habermas’ in Between Facts and Norms perhaps remains the one that most explicitly discusses representative democracy as deliberative democracy (Habermas, 1996). As Daniel Gaus points out, Habermas does not only, or not even in the first place, offer a normative theory of democracy that prescribes specific institutions and practices. Instead, he conducts a ‘rational reconstruction’ of a historical learning process that explains the development of a moral and epistemic consciousness on the basis of which the institutions of representative constitutional democracy could be established and maintained (Gaus, 2013). Habermas views representative institutions in their relationship with civil society and the public sphere. Representatives deliberate and decide under a ‘state of siege’ from civil society, which manages the pool of reasons they can draw on to justify decisions. At the same time, representative institutions ensure that arguments are transmitted and translated from citizens to decision-makers and act as a filter for reasons that decisions can be based upon. 3

Although Habermas thus reconstructs democracy as deliberative and representative democracy under conditions of late modernity and secular, heterogeneous and pluralistic societies, the specific challenges these conditions pose and the possible implications they have for established institutions become clearer elsewhere. A standard view on democratic representation focuses first, on the electoral authorization of representatives to act for their constituents and secondly, on their accountability for their actions in subsequent elections (Urbinati and Warren, 2008: 396). In her early and seminal book on representation, Hannah Pitkin criticized both the authorization and the accountability definition of representation as formalistic:

Where the one [definition by a group of theorists] sees representation as initiated in a certain way, the other sees it as terminated in a certain way. Neither can tell us anything about what goes on during representation, how a representative ought to act or what he is expected to do, how to tell whether he has represented well or badly. (Pitkin, 1967: 58, emphasis added)

To normatively evaluate the performance of representatives, we thus require more substantial criteria. These will have to address how and with what consequences constituents’ interests and preferences are represented (i.e. made present) in deliberation and promoted by political decisions. Jane Mansbridge identifies three forms of representation that go beyond the traditional ‘promissory’ understanding with its focus on authorization and accountability (Mansbridge, 2003). Each of these can be viewed as having potential to enable not only decision-making as such, but to also ensure decisions that are deemed ‘good’ by some standard, e.g. in that they further constituents’ substantial interests: In ‘anticipatory representation’, representatives act not on promises and a mandate given in the context of a previous election, but take decisions which they hope voters to approve of in the next election. ‘Gyroscopic representation’ means that voters select a representative for his or her principles, beliefs and qualifications and expect them to act in their interest without being held directly accountable. ‘Surrogate representation’, finally, occurs where representatives promote interests and preferences of persons or groups that they have no electoral relationship with. These could be groups that are dispersed over territorial constituencies (such as the LGBT community, ethnic and racial minority or religious groups) or groups that have no electoral rights (such as affected groups in other countries or future generations).

Some degree of anticipatory and gyroscopic representation seems to be required by the complexity of problems and decision-making in modern democracies. Both are more compatible with a ‘trustee’ than with a ‘mandate’ view of representation and representatives (McLean, 1991). Manin has argued that in the transition from parliamentary to party democracy, the delegate view of representation replaced the trustee view. The decline of party democracy and the rise of what Manin labels ‘audience democracy’ (Manin, 1997, ch. 6), however, is associated with an increasing demand for discretionary power: Where “it is increasingly difficult to foresee all the events to which governments have to 4 respond […] the personal trust that the candidate inspires is a more adequate basis of election than the evaluation of plans for future actions.” (ibid. 221) In an extreme version, this renewed trustee perspective on democracy and representation seems not only compatible with, but even conducive to technocratic practices among elites and attitudes of ‘stealth democracy’ (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002) among citizens.

Surrogate representation, too, seems to become more important and is also at odds with the narrow delegate view of representation entailed in party democracy. Empirically, surrogate representation will be especially difficult to realize in systems with single-member geographically defined constituencies, such as the first-past-the-post plurality voting systems in the United States and Great Britain. As Urbinati and Warren argue, “when represented geographically, the people are only a ‘demos’ insofar as their primary interests and identities are geographical in nature.” (Urbinati and Warren, 2008: 396). In highly differentiated, pluralistic societies with numerous cross-cutting cleavages, this is quite obviously no longer the case. Proportional electoral systems, by contrast, seem to enable a better descriptive representation of the plurality of citizen interests and preferences.

Descriptive representation is a central rationale for electoral systems of proportional representation, behind which is the idea that “a representative body is distinguished by an accurate correspondence or resemblance to what it represents, by reflecting without distortion.” (Pitkin, 1967: 60) As Pitkin notes, however, proponents of descriptive/proportional representation often fail to answer the question whether it is essentially about making present ideas and arguments or about making present societal groups and their interests. The former would amount to what Dryzek and Niemeyer have termed ‘discursive representation’ (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2008), while the latter suggests some kind of corporatist or council representation. If defined in terms of socio-economic characteristics of constituents and representatives, descriptive representation assumes pre-political interests and constituencies. If understood in terms of opinions and preferences, by contrast, it does not make sense to regard these as pre-political: arguments are exchanged and assessed in a reciprocal process between the public and civil society on the one hand side and representative institutions and decision- makers on the other hand side. Political opinions and preferences are formed in Manin’s ‘trial by discussion’ processes in which representatives play a central role not only as recipients, but also as producers of arguments. Under conditions of audience democracy, such arguments will be employed to activate specific cleavages and address specific groups that political actors claim to represent.

‘Representative claims’, i.e. claims to represent a group or constituency, are themselves validity claims that can be discursively accepted, challenged or rejected (Saward, 2010). The ‘constructivist turn’ in theorising about representation that is marked by Michael Saward’s work explains how these

5 representative claims “constitute representative and constituency alike.” (Disch, 2015: 487, with reference to Saward, 2010). It rejects the idea of territorially defined constituencies, the focus on parliamentary representation alone and the reconstruction of the relationship between represented and representative as a uni-directional principal-agent relationship, viewing representation instead as a reciprocal symbolic activity (Disch, 2015: 489). However, the constructivist turn, which marks a new academic perspective on representation, also has to be viewed in light of a changing understanding of representation among democratic citizens, from which different expectations and patterns of participation are likely to result.

On the one hand side, the number of different constituencies, cleavages and representative claim- makers result in multiple potential veto points and growing transactions costs in decision-making. Given the complexity and urgency of many problems, this trend makes more functional representation and technocratic decision-making appealing. On the other hand side, the very idea that it is not territorially defined constituencies, but peoples’ opinions and preferences are to be represented constitutes a resonance base for populists’ claims to represent unheard ‘silent majorities’. From the constructivist perspective on representation, populism can accordingly be viewed as a representative process “through which a collective subject is constructed so that it can achieve power.” (Urbinati, 2019: 5) Importantly, both technocratic and populist forces must thus be understood as the product of dynamics within the very system of representative democracy that they challenge. The next section will consider the nature of the challenge technocracy and populism pose to the idea of democratic representation, before section 4 turns to the question of how citizens themselves understand democracy and representation.

3. Challenges to representative democracy: technocracy and populism

With the trend towards functional representation and technocratic governance on the one hand side and the rise of populist parties and candidates on the other hand side, representative party democracy seems to have come under attack from two sides. In fact, populism is often viewed as a reaction to overly rationalistic and technocratic decision-making (Canovan, 1999). In so far as anti-elitism is an important component of populist ideology, there seems to be some truth in this diagnosis. In the Brexit campaign in the UK, for example, the EU and its institutions, but also its defendants in British politics were attacked for being elitist. As Michael Gove claimed: “People are sick and tired of experts.” However, the hot vs. cold or passions vs. reason juxtaposition that is common in the discussion about technocracy and populism masks important commonalities between technocratic and populist thinking that are particularly important when it comes to questions of democratic representation.

Both technocracy and populism seem incompatible with the ‘standard account’ that combines the idea of territorial representation with an authorization-accountability relationship between representatives and represented (Urbinati and Warren, 2008). Where and in so far as constituencies are defined geographically, representatives are authorized and held accountable by a number of different groups whose interests they will practically have to reconciliate to some degree. As noted before, this task becomes increasingly difficult to master under conditions of growing complexity and pluralism. Only as representation comes to be understood in relation to interests and preferences rather than geographically defined groups and constituencies, existing institutions and representatives can be challenged for not being responsive specific preferences or for failing to maximise a common good.

At the same time, and even more importantly, however, both technocracy and populism are concerned with interests and preferences conceived of as pre-political. Even if material interests are of course to some extent prior to political processes, a representative perspective would view citizens’ preferences over alternative options for political action as formed and transformed in discourses or ‘trial by discussion’ (Manin). Urbinati identifies the two currents of technocracy and populism as ‘disfigurements’ of democracy that break down the diarchy of will and opinion which procedural democracy depends upon (Urbinati, 2014). Technocracy ultimately reduces democracy to the search for truth (assessment of opinions), while populism subjects the pluralism of opinions to a putative ‘popular will’. In both cases, the justification of democracy is ultimately an instrumental one. In epistemic theories of democracy and technocratic institutions, democracy is an instrument in the quest for truth about a ‘common good’. In populist thinking, democracy serves to enable the rule of a homogenous ‘will of the people’. Bickerton and Accetti assess the works of Pierre Rosanvallon and Ernesto Laclau to show similarities between elitist/technocratic and populist thinking, pointing out that their central commonality consists in the negation of interest pluralism and mediation through political parties. Populist and technocratic discourses accordingly center on the criticism of a specific form of democracy: that of representative party democracy. This form rests on the assumption that political legitimacy is provided by democratic procedures and the reconciliation of conflicting interests and not by the substance of political decisions alone (Bickerton and Accetti, 2017: 188). Focusing on motivations and inclinations behind practical politics rather than political theory, Danielle Caramani similarly describes how populists and technocrats wield the axe against pluralism and mediation:

Both [populism and technocracy] are examples of “unmediated politics” dispensing with intermediate structures such as parties and representative institutions between a supposedly unitary and common interest of society on the one hand and elites on the other.[...] populism stressing the centrality of a putative will of the people in guiding political action and technocracy stressing the centrality of rational speculation in identifying both the goals of a society and the means to implement them. (Caramani, 2017: 54, emphasis added) 7

What unites populism and technocracy is the fiction of a procedure-independent standard of ‘good’ or ‘correct’ decisions. This fiction leads to the devaluation of democratic institutions and procedures, in particular of those that promote mediation, representation and interest reconciliation. In their essence, both populist and technocratic thinking are driven by an anti-political aspiration to a post- partisan form of democracy.

In the case of technocracy, the idea that the point of democracy ultimately lies in the search for truth and in taking the ‘correct’ decisions leads theorists to embrace to what Cristina Lafont calls ‘expertocratic shortcuts’ (Lafont 2019, ch. 3): the delegation of deliberation and decision-making to expert bodies to replace broader and more inclusive forms of deliberation and representative decision making. In the case of populism, a putative unitary will of the people represents the standard for legitimate decisions. Accordingly, populist parties tend to advocate more direct forms of democracy and in particular referenda as the most legitimate form of decision-making. They reject the idea that representation is essential to modern democracy and instead subscribe to an identitarian understanding of democracy in which government is unmediated. The institutional implication of this is what Lafont calls a majoritarian ‘procedural shortcut’: the idea that a majority decision alone can produce legitimacy (Lafont, 2019, ch. 2). In the populist understanding, the majority ultimately determines what is right (because it constitutes the ‘will of the people’), leaving disagreeing members of the electorate to either understand that they were wrong or that they are not part of the ‘real people’. Both technocracy and populism thus ask at least some part of the citizenry to blindly defer to decisions of either experts or the majority – a deferral that Lafont points out to be fundamentally at odds with the democratic ideal of self-government. In the respective understandings of democracy, the decisions that result from expertocratic or majoritarian-procedural shortcuts are to be implemented against any opposition or conflicting interests, which are rendered illegitimate. There is thus not only an anti-political, but also an anti-pluralist momentum behind both technocracy and populism, which makes it clear that the juxtaposition of the two is at least partly inappropriate.

Ultimately, technocracy and populism thus envision political orders that deviate from the normative ideals of liberal representative democracy because they do not share them. Technocratic conceptions of democracy dispense with the authorization and accountability relationship between representatives and their constituencies and offer a justification for replacing descriptive (or substantial) representation with merely functional representation. Populist conceptions of democracy, by contrast, depreciate representation and mediation altogether. At the same time, populist parties and politicians successfully exploit ‘representational gaps’ and make representative claims that are accepted by respective constituencies. In seeking support for respective institutions, both technocracy and populism address an instrumentalist understandings of democracy, where democratic procedures

8 and institutions are not so much an end in itself, but a means to achieve other ends (truth, a common good, or the unadulterated will of the people).

The apparent crisis of representative institutions that accompanies the decline of party democracy thus seems to be capitalized on by technocratic forces and successfully exploited by populist actors. Assuming, with Habermas, that the institutions of representative democracy are an expression of a procedural consensus in the citizenry, the technocratic and populist attacks on these institutions also constitute attacks on this procedural consensus. In how far their attacks can be successful, however, depends whether and with what scope procedural consensus still prevails within the citizenry: To what extent and in what respects do citizens’ conceptions of democracy and democratic representation overlap and support its institutions, and where do they diverge and result in calls different forms of government? And under what conditions can challenges to established institutions undermine the stability and resilience of democracy?

4. Citizens’ conceptions of democracy and representation

Studying the attitudes and political behavior of citizens, political culture and public opinion research has long addressed the way citizens relate to democratic institutions by highlighting the role of political support and trust (e.g. Warren, 1999, Newton, 2001, Inglehart, 2003). A dominant debate in this tradition focuses on the question whether support for democratic institutions is essentially instrumental and driven by the systems’ performance (in particular, economic growth) or intrinsically motivated by a democratic ethos (e.g. Dalton, 1999, Bratton and Mattes, 2001). The fact that support for democracy as a system of rule is typically higher than satisfaction with the working of democracy in practice (Dahlberg, Linde et al., 2014) indicates that many citizens do attach an intrinsic value to democracy. Given the fact that democracy constitutes a contested concept and given that the forces that challenge the procedural consensus for liberal representative democracy mostly think of themselves as defendants of democracy, the literature on support for democracy is less relevant here, though. The majority of researchers in this tradition are interested in support for democratic decision- making and institutions in general, and not in support for different specific conceptions of democracy. What matters here, however, is not so much whether and to what degree citizens support any abstract idea of democracy, but what they specifically mean by and expect from democracy.

Research on social values and their transformation also considers attitudes towards democracy, with Inglehart’s post-materialism index including items on political participation (Inglehart, 1990) and Dalton et al. stating a ‘new politics’ hypothesis according to which a post-materialistic, politically interested and knowledgeable avant-garde demands new options for political participation (Dalton,

Bürklin et al., 2001). Pippa Norris has labelled this group ‘critical citizens’ and studied the ‘democratic deficit’, which she understands to consist in the gap between democratic aspirations and democratic satisfaction (Norris, 1999, Norris, 2011). In a much-noted book, John Hibbing and Elisabeth Theiss- Morse have rejected the ‘new politics’ and ‘critical citizens’ interpretations and argued that a majority of citizens would instead prefer a ‘stealth democracy’ that offers even fewer options for participation and that replaces democratic with expert decision making: Most people are not interested in politics, they argue, and want nothing to do with it as long as professional politicians get things done (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002).

The stealth democracy diagnosis is interesting in that it seeks to tap into citizens’ intuitive ‘folk’ theories about democracy and explores attitudinal patterns that are likely to resonate with both technocratic and populist ideas. Consider the four items Hibbing and Theiss-Morse use to measure stealth attitudes:

(1) “Elected ofﬁcials would help the country more if they would stop talking and just take action on important problems.” (2) “What people call “compromise” in politics is really just selling out one’s principles.” (3) “Our government would run better if decisions were left up to successful business people.” (4) “Our government would run better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts rather than politicians or the people.”

The preference for expert decision-making captured by (4) is clearly consistent with technocratic ideas, as is the rejection of compromise in (2): if there exists an objective, pre-political standard for good or ‘correct’ decisions, bargaining and compromising can only result in a deviation from these. Although (3) leaves open whether the successful business people who should be taking decisions should be elected, it is clearly critical of established political elites. (1) expresses a critical stance towards processes of mediation, interest reconciliation and deliberation as well as a preference for determined leadership. In sum, all four statements express attitudes critical of liberal representative democracy. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse assume that a large proportion of citizens demand only a kind of ‘latent’ representation as long as the government’s performance meets their expectations. Only if and because government is perceived as corrupt are citizens willing to take political action and demand options for participation, particularly referenda. Yet, Neblo et al. show that stealth democracy-attitudes are in fact far less common than Hibbing and Theiss-Morse claimed: only a small percentage (8 percent) of respondents in a survey they fielded in the US are less willing to participate if government performance is good and more willing where it is poor. For the large majority of respondents, willingness to

10 participate is either unaffected by government performance or increased by good performance (Neblo, Esterling et al., 2010).

In addition, Neblo et al. test a positive rewording of the stealth items which they label ‘sunshine democracy’:

(1) “It is important for elected ofﬁcials to discuss and debate things thoroughly before making major policy changes.” (2) “Openness to other people’s views and a willingness to compromise are important for politics in a country as diverse as ours.” (3) “In a democracy like ours, there are some important differences between how government should be run and how a business should be managed.” (4) “It is important for the people and their elected representatives to have the ﬁnal say in running government, rather than leaving it up to unelected experts.” (Neblo, Esterling et al., 2010: 572)

In contrast to the stealth democracy items, these statements express attitudes that are not only compatible with liberal representative democracy, but explicitly affirmative of its institutions and practices. Interestingly, Neblo et al. find that the two scales are not correlated and items load on two separate factors. Their explanation for this finding is that “the sunshine items tap how [citizens] think that representative democracy should work in principle, whereas the stealth items tap what they would settle for as a step away from the corrupt status quo.” (Neblo, Esterling et al., 2010: 573) This interpretation has some edifying implications where the stability of the procedural consensus for representative democracy is concerned: If the citizens’ ideals are compatible with existing institutions, but shortcomings in practice and performance lead them to embrace problematic attitudes, the challenge consists in bringing existing institutions and practices closer to the ideal.

For the majority of European countries, the 2012 European Social Survey 6 Module on “Understandings and Evaluation of Democracy” offered a mostly positive outlook on democracy, too (ESS_Round_6, 2012, Kriesi, Morlino et al., 2010, Ferrin and Kriesi, 2016). The study was based on the assumption that convergence between democratic aspirations and evaluations of the way democracy works is constitutive for the legitimacy of the political system, and accordingly measures both. Ferrín and Kriesi find broad support for a liberal conception of democracy in most European countries and more variation where the more aspirational conceptions of social and direct democracy are concerned, as well as in the evaluation of the realization of democratic ideals, which is also more negative in many countries (Ferrín, 2012, Ferrin and Kriesi, 2016).

However, data collection for both studies cited above took place over ten years ago. In the last decade, events like the election of Donald Trump as US president, the unexpected ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, the rise of populist parties in most European countries and democratic backsliding in several post- communist countries have shaken confidence in the resilience of democracy. While it is not clear whether populist or even authoritarian attitudes are indeed on the rise, respective political entrepreneurs have apparently been more successful in activating these. Hawkins et al. argue that only few people who hold populist attitudes actually vote for populist parties. Instead, respective attitudes are dispositions that can successfully be activated under conditions where “widespread failures of democratic governance […] can be attributed to intentional elite behaviour .“ (Hawkins, Kaltwasser et al., 2018: 4).

Assuming that their conceptions of democracy are not fully theorized, ordinary citizens are likely to have at least partly contradictory assumptions and expectations about democratic government and representation. Landwehr and Steiner present evidence for four distinct, but not mutually exclusive attitudinal patterns concerning democratic decision-making in the German population: a ‘trustee model of democracy’, as well as attitudes of ‘anti-pluralist skepticism’, ‘deliberative proceduralism’ and ‘populist majoritarianism’ (Landwehr and Steiner, 2017). While the trustee and deliberative proceduralism patterns are coherent with the norms behind existing representative institutions and potentially conducive to their functioning and support, anti-pluralist skepticism and populist majoritarianism may reflect exactly the kind of latent dispositions that can successfully be activated by anti-establishment or anti-system parties and candidates. However, the co-existence of different understandings of democracy among citizens does not rule out consensus on a kind of ‘core’ of democracy that may be said to consist in free and fair elections, liberal rights and rule of law (ibid.).

As long as such a core consensus prevails, competing aspirations and expectations for democratic government and representation can be articulated and justified in reference to it and can be negotiated. For inclusive democratic deliberation about institutional design and necessary reforms, a plurality of different conceptions of democracy cannot only constitute a problem, but also a resource, when conflicting validity claims are derived from equally relevant norms, values and interests. A multitude of different perspectives and experiences allows for a more comprehensive assessment of existing institutions and is required to detect shortcomings and biases in decision-making processes. In the next section, I will point out why such meta-deliberation about institutions and practices of representative democratic decision-making is required to renew the procedural consensus and make democracy resilient to the challenges of technocracy and populism.

Procedural consensus, meta-deliberation and institutional reform1

Niklas Luhmann argued that in a secular, individualized and highly pluralistic society only the political- administrative system can generate legitimacy for collectively binding decisions through respective procedures (Luhmann, 1983). These procedures enable societies to manage conflicting interests and opinions and to arrive at decisions that are accepted as legitimate even by those who disagree with them on a substantial level. Modern democracy thus rests upon a consensus on the procedures and practices by which collectively binding decisions are taken, which becomes ever more important as the heterogeneity of interests, values and opinions increases. The object of procedural consensus may be seen to consist in a set of rules and institutions, including the majority principle and its implementation in representative institutions. In a more fundamental sense, however, it also concerns a set of norms of respectful and non-violent interaction that Levitsky and Ziblatt describe as the ‘guardrails of democracy’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018).

While the more specific implementation of these rules and norms in the electoral system or the competences of different bodies can be more or less controversial and subject to contestation, consensus on core principles of democracy and the rule of law seems to be an essential condition for democratic procedures to manage substantial conflict through decisions that are deemed legitimate by those who are bound by them. Only trust in one another’s reciprocity and an at least permissive procedural consensus allow mass democracies to take decisions without explicit consent from all those affected by them. While support for majoritarian and not fully inclusive procedures is anything but self-evident, mutual trust in reciprocity and the procedural consensus that builds on it can guarantee that those whose preferences are not reflected in decisions remain loyal to the democratic regime. Political losers’ loyalty to democracy ultimately depends on the hope to win support for the own positions in the future, trusting that the winners will hear and understand their arguments and respect their interests – or on the confidence that “no majority is the last one” (Urbinati, 2019: 91).

However, any specific implementation of democratic decision-making and representation will have distributive implications. Institutional design can never be fully neutral or impartial, but will always benefit some interests, groups and values more than others. What is more, democratic majorities do not exist in a pre-political stage, but are the result of discursive processes, voting and aggregation rules. Even in a referendum, i.e. non-representative decision-making, the resulting majority vote will depend upon prior decisions about franchise, about options on the ballot paper and about the quorum. Where a procedural decision is directly coupled with a substantial one, the outcome effects of alternative

1 I have made some of the arguments presented in this section and the next before: see Landwehr, 2015. 13 procedures may be quite evident, such that the substantial conﬂict is simply transferred to the procedural level. In other cases, where procedures affecting a number of different substantial issues are chosen with a long-term perspective, the outcome effects of procedural choices may be more obscure, but they will still exist (Landwehr 2015: 9). As procedural decisions not only have distributive, but also norm-entrenching and norm-reinforcing effects, decisions on how to decide will often have more far-reaching consequences than substantial decisions and can result in a permanent disadvantage to the losers in the procedural decision.

Decisions about democratic decision-making procedures and institutional design have both epistemic and normative aspects. David Wiens draws a distinction between the ‘engineering’ and the ‘architectural’ aspect of institutional design, assigning the architect’s normative task in designing political institutions to applied ethics, leaving the epistemic engineering task to be fulﬁlled by empirical social scientists, who assess practical implications and consequences of alternative rules and institutions (Wiens, 2012, p. 63). In the design of democratic political institutions, however, it should be the democratic demos rather than the philosopher who assumes the task of the architect, and it should also be the demos who commissions and controls the engineer. With regard to the contestation and reform of representative institutions, the relevant question is thus how procedural decisions and institutional design choices themselves can be rationalized and democratized.

As I have argued elsewhere (Landwehr, 2015) democratising the institutional design of representative institutions requires inclusive deliberative processes that go beyond representatives themselves and in part take place outside established forums of legislatures and administrations. As beneficiaries of the existing set of rules and institutions, elected representatives can hardly be expected to undertake an unbiased assessment of these and to fully appreciate their shortcomings and the discontents they result in. John Dryzek was the first to refer to discourses about democratic institutions as ‘meta- deliberation’, defining it as “reﬂexive capacity of those in the deliberative system to contemplate the way that the system is itself organised, and if necessary change its structure” (Dryzek, 2010: 12; see also Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011: 1867). However, democratising institutional design must go beyond the contemplation and justification of existing institutions. Instead, we should follow Dryzek’s earlier argument that “the design of social and political practices can be itself a discursive process in which all the relevant subjects can participate.” (Dryzek, 1987: 665)

The democratic public thus has the critical task of challenging existing decision-rules and institutions. The importance of this critical task derives to a signiﬁcant degree from the above-mentioned entrenchment problems. If groups and interests that ended up in a minority position under existing rules are to maintain the chance of winning majorities in the future, existing institutions and procedures as well as the norms and interest entrenched by them into them must be subject to critical 14 scrutiny. Resolute challenges to institutional structures and decision-making practices can spark the kind of debates that are necessary to question, revise and legitimise institutions of representative democracy in accordance with changes in societal conditions and popular expectations.

While a critical public is essential for the assessment of institutions and their performance, meta- deliberation will also have to be institutionalized in order to ensure that reforms are implemented and provided with a democratic mandate. Theoretically, the institutionalization of meta-deliberation may be viewed as a regress problem: Where can the rules that we use to decide upon rules come from, and should not they be subject to deliberation and democratic decision-making as well? Moreover, it is difficult to see what incentives representatives and governments that have come into office under existing rules and whose careers and identities are defined by them could have in reform processes. In practice, however, representatives already see their role challenged by technocratic and populist forces that might open their minds to the need for a critical assessment and innovations of existing institutions. Moreover, examples like the Irish constitutional reform process, in which citizen deliberation was coupled with constitutional referenda (see Farrell, Suiter et al., 2019) or New Zealand’s reform of its electoral system, replacing FPTP-plurality voting with mixed-member proportional representation (Vowles, 1995), show that under favourable conditions, democracies may well be capable of learning and self-correction. If they are exploited, these capacities can make representative democracy resilient in the face of challenges like technocracy and populism and ensure its adjustment to societal transformations and changes in citizens’ conceptions and expectations of democracy.

Conclusions

This chapter has addressed challenges to representative democratic institutions as well as democracy’s capacity to respond to them. Starting off from the observation that representation constitutes not only a functional requirement in mass democracy, but also ensures the self-limitation of majority rule by separating popular sovereignty and government (Urbinati, 2019), I have argued that the institutions and practices of representative democracy can, with Habermas, be seen as the result of a collective historical learning process. Under conditions of interest and value pluralism, the decline of party democracy and increasing multi-dimensionality of the political sphere and ever more complex political problems, democracy seems to require forms of representation that go beyond ‘promissory representation’ (Mansbridge) or the standard model of authorization plus accountability. More descriptive and substantial, but also surrogate and discursive forms of representation seem to be called for. However, the very idea that opinions and preferences are to be represented and responded to in order to enable decisions deemed to be ‘correct’ by whatever standard resonates with technocratic and populist ideas about democracy and representation. 15

Both technocratic and populist thinking about democracy are incompatible with the standard authorization-accountability understanding of representation. Yet at the same time, they adopt an ultimately instrumentalist understanding of democracy and reject the insight that political preferences and constituencies are the product of political processes. Instead, their assumption of a pre-political standard for good decisions (respectively truth/efficiency or the volonté générale) makes both technocratic and populist thinking anti-pluralist and results in their depreciation of practices and institutions of mediation, interest reconciliation and democratic representation itself. How serious the challenge that technocracy and populism pose to liberal representative democracy is, however, depends on whether these ideas are compatible with democratic citizens’ expectations of democracy.

Some evidence from survey data presented in section 4 suggests that in consolidated democracies, both relatively broad support for a core of liberal electoral democracy and a pluralism of different more specific conceptions of democracy among citizens obtain. Some of these conceptions are less compatible with existing representative institutions and practices and may resonate with technocratic and populist ideas. As long as a core procedural consensus on liberal rights and democratic decision- making prevails, however, the pluralism of different conceptions of democracy is not only a problem, but also a resource in the collective learning process that democracy constitutes. This learning process is never to be completed, but has to be an ongoing endeavour: The alienation and frustration in some parts of the citizenry are the result of shortcomings of political elites and democratic institutions that can make citizens more susceptible to technocratic and populist thinking. Protests and challenges must thus be viewed in light of the fact that any specific institutionalization of democratic decision-making has distributive implications, entrenches specific values and benefits some societal groups and interests more than others. Losers in procedural decisions will often suffer permanent disadvantages bound to lead to frustration.

The rigorous contestation of representative institutions and practices is therefore required to detect their shortcomings and to enable meta-deliberative processes about their reform. Democratic institutional design should in this sense be viewed as an ongoing process in which the procedural consensus is persistently renewed and regained in the face of multiple challenges and contestations. As much as technocratic short-cuts, like the delegation of decisions to unelected experts, and populist ones, like plebiscites, do not offer a solution to the challenges of substantial policy-making, there are no shortcuts available for meta-deliberative re-constitutionalization either. Meta-deliberation has to be inclusive in order to be democratic and it needs to institutionalized in order to ensure the implementation of necessary reforms and adjustments and to provide them with a democratic mandate. Where democratic meta-deliberation thus enables a renewal of the procedural consensus in the face of technocratic and populist contestation, democracy may still be resilient and capable live 16 up to its ideal of self-government. The challenge in the face of technocracy and populism is thus to defend the norms of pluralism and mediation inscribed into existing institutions without ignoring their shortcomings and while enabling reforms that narrow the gap between aspirations and reality.

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