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Understanding the Crisis of Liberal Democracy and Rethinking Democratic Politics

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Liberal Democracy in Crisis

Part of the book series: The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy ((PSTCD))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the reader to the 1970s crisis of governability debate and shows that the current crisis has already been preceded by previous debates on the crisis of democracy in the West. The author then proposes to examine the dominant conceptions of democratic politics in the academic literature and concludes that the existing democratic theories do not provide a sufficient explanation for the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. This is because these accounts are still circumscribed by liberal rationalism and a depoliticised view of democratic politics and thus fail to grasp the growing tension between liberalism and democracy. The author argues that a structural and historical analysis of how liberalism has impacted the democratic role of the state is needed in order to better comprehend the inability of contemporary neoliberal governments to respond to the post-2011 wave of repoliticisations in the West.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The report has been referenced numerous times in the preceding years and frequently featured as a starting point for further analysis (see, e.g., Lawrence 1981; Cunningham 2002; Hay 2007; Mastropaolo 2012; Pilon 2013).

  2. 2.

    Revisions in pluralist and elite democratic theory were accompanied by a rise in rational choice theory, most closely aligned with the minimalist understanding of democracy, which is associated with Robert Dahl and Joseph Schumpeter. As Colin Hay explains, rational choice theory emerged as a challenge to the welfare state and subsequently entered political science through its attack on the role of the state and politics in shaping society. It was particularly strong across the 1980s and 1990s and played a key legitimising role in the neoliberal shift in policy-making. See Hay 2007, 95–122; Hindmoor 2010.

  3. 3.

    It also prompted criticism from another strand of scholars whose aim, however, is not to provide a better model of democracy that would more adequately correspond with democratic politics as it is, but to reject democracy outright. This strand of mostly libertarian-oriented American scholarship questions the premise of the rational voter in aggregative accounts of democracy and in some accounts argues for ‘epistocracy’ to replace democracy (see, e.g., Caplan 2007; Brenan 2016).

  4. 4.

    In their more recent work, Honig and Connolly pay more attention to hegemonic articulations in contemporary society, especially with regards to neoliberalism, however, without placing agonistic democracy at the centre of their respective analyses. See Honig (2017) and Connolly (2013).

  5. 5.

    Many scholars have grappled with and written extensively on the Miliband-Poulantzas debate. For further reference see Alford and Friedland (1985); King (1986); Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987); Jessop (1982, 1990, 2007); Carnoy (1984); Barrow (1993) and Schwarzmantel (1995).

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  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, London, UK

    Alen Toplišek

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Toplišek, A. (2019). Understanding the Crisis of Liberal Democracy and Rethinking Democratic Politics. In: Liberal Democracy in Crisis. The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97937-3_2

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