The ‘Problem’ of ‘Post-’: Post-Representative, Post-Parliamentary, Post-Democracy

Abstract

The multi-national UK state has provided the territorial focus for the analysis of representative democracy in this book. Indeed, the complex linkages between nations and state in the UK have long found reflection in the term ‘multi-level governance’, both in the practice of representative democracy and in academic discourse. Equally, however, the term points to other complex linkages, not only within the state (to interactions with non-electoral representatives beyond the electoral arena), but also to linkages beyond the state (to networks of supranational institutions, international organisations, and the trans-border interconnections of civil society organisations and social movements). These linkages and interconnections have not gone unnoticed in earlier chapters of this book: in the expanding electoral marketplace of elections for sub-national, national, and supra-national representative institutions (Chapter 2); in the intricacies of party systems in the UK, and the multi-level strategies of civil society organisations and social movements and the trans-boundary nature of many of their non-electoral representative claims (Chapter 3); in the challenges posed to the Westminster model by notions of network governance, differentiated polity, and asymmetric power, and in the confrontation of legal notions of parliamentary sovereignty by the daily practice of decision-making in the broader context of devolution and the European Union (Chapter 5); and in the expansion of spatially liberated ‘democratic innovations’ and e-democracy (Chapter 6).