Challenges to Representative Democracy: Technocracy and Populism
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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 2 ‘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