To what extent
are the liberal representative democracies of the West experiencing a
legitimacy crisis?
Barry Gilheany ©
Legitimacy is the key to political stability. It is nothing less than the source of the
survival and success of any regime (Heywood, 2013). Much has been written about the malaise of
contemporary liberal democracy in the Western world that some scholars have
suggested that the liberal representative model of democracy which became
virtually the universal model in North America and Europe throughout the 20th century is in the second decade of the 21st
century facing a fundamental crisis of legitimacy. Such talk of crisis has been generated by the
decline in voting and other forms of democratic participation; increased levels
of hostility towards politicians, the displacement of the nation-state as an
actor in international politics by the Transnational Corporation as a
consequence of economic globalisation and the accretion of multi-levels of
governance by in particular the UK. The
emergence of “anti-politics” movements such as the anti-globalisation movements
since the late 1990s and of far-right groups in Western Europe opposed to
immigration and multi-culturalism are cited as further indicators of this
crisis of legitimacy. This essay examines
the evidence around the functioning of liberal democracy. It concludes by arguing that although talk of
an existential crisis of legitimacy is exaggerated it is necessary for
democracy to be renewed in the West by better deliberative mechanisms.
Legitimacy broadly means ‘rightfulness’. The legitimacy of governments is linked to
the fundamental issue of political obligation.
Why should citizens feel obliged to accept the authority of government? In modern political debate, legitimacy does
not address the moral question of why people should obey the state but
the empirical questions of why they do
obey a particular state or system of rule and the conditions that encourage
them to do so (Heywood: p.81).
Traditionally within social science Max Weber’s ideal
type trio of authority developed in the 19th century, traditional,
charismatic and legal-rational, dominated thinking on political
legitimacy. Although still relevant,
this approach is silent about how legitimacy is actually brought about (Heywood:
pp.81-83).
In the 20th century, neo-Marxist authors
such as Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe addressed this lacuna by focusing attention
on the machinery through which legitimacy is maintained (the democratic
process, party competition, welfare and social reform etc.). In Legitimation
Crisis (1973), Habermas identified a series of ‘crisis tendencies’ within
capitalist societies that make it difficult for them to maintain stability
through consent alone. In his view
capitalist democracies cannot permanently satisfy both popular demands for
social security and welfare rights, and the requirements of a market economy
based on private profit
(Heywood:pp.83-84).
In a similar vein, writers such as Anthony King (1985)
and Richard Rose (1980) identified the problems of government overload and
incapacity to deliver due to the demands of pressure groups and the drift
towards corporatism that created growing interdependence between government
agencies and peak associations of both labour and capital. The rise of New Right ideologies from the
1980s around pro-individual and pro-free market ideas and values can be seen as
a response to this fiscal crisis of the welfare state (Heywood: pp.84-85).
To these factors can be added the influence of
technology and the media the baleful effects on politics of which (in his
opinion) are described in coruscating terms by Matthew Flinders. He writes of the ‘curious paradox’ of our
times that the’ information explosion’ in relation to politics combined with
the explosion created by the 24-hours news cycle, digital television and online
newspapers has led to a decline in journalistic standards where there is less
emphasis on evidence-based reporting and more on scandal, deceit and
sensationalism which produces a deeply distorted version of politics that
undoubtedly affects public attitudes to politics. (Flinders, 2012
.
Before examining further the supposed malaise of
Western democracy, it is necessary to define liberal representative democracy. The
model of democracy that has emerged throughout the Western world has been the
liberal representative model in which through brief popular participation in
elections every few years a framework of laws is constructed within which
individuals can conduct their own affairs and pursue their private interests.
Democratic solutions are only appropriate for matters that specifically relate
to the community (Heywood: pp.91-92).
Offe distinguishes four functions of liberal
democracies: securing international peace; guaranteeing legal as well as
political peace domestically and producing good active citizens. He identifies four structural features of
democracies: stateness, rule of law, political competition and accountability
of the rulers. (Offe, 2011). He argues
that that liberal democracies are not functioning well. In which areas are they not performing and to
what extent do these shortcomings constitute a crisis of legitimacy for liberal
democracies?
The first domain of crisis for liberal democracy is an
apparent decline in civic engagement as measured by electoral turnout and participation
in political parties and other civic organisations. On the former it has been estimated that by
the mid-1990s, voter turnout had decreased globally by about 5 percent since
the 1950s. In the UK turnouts at the
general elections of 2005 (61 per cent) and 2010 (65 percent) were more than 10
percent lower than the average in the period 1945-97. There is also evidence of a long-term decline
in party memberships in established democracies. During the 1980s and 1990s party membership
dropped by more than one million or more in Italy, France and the UK, around
half a million in Germany, and close to half a million in Austria. Fewer than 1 percent of the UK population belong to parties compared to 7 percent 50
years ago. To a large extent this can be
attributed to a growing lack of identification with political parties due to
narrowing ideological divides, over obsession with communication and spin and
widespread perceptions that parties and politicians are “all the same” and “in
it for themselves”. A wider lack of civic
engagement concerns the decline in social capital observed by Robert Puttnam in
the USA as marked by decreasing participation in church attendance, membership
of sports clubs, professional associations and parent-teacher associations and
the like (Heywood: pp.444-49).
What liberal representative democracies are
experiencing is perhaps less a legitimacy crisis in Habermasian terms leading
potentially to their rejection and potential revolution than a transformation
in the discourse and practice of democracy.
Offe writes of an ‘ongoing and vivid democratic meta-discourse on
possible improvements, extension and innovations of the democratic mode of
ongoing political rule’ (Offe: p.469).
In this discourse participants have focused on various
stages of the overall democratic political process. One focus is how ruling elites can be
prevented from violating the limitations of their office through effective
constraints that would make them act in more accountable ways. Offe commends proposals to strengthen the
political role of courts and fiduciary institutions in response to this
concern. Another focus is the pros and cons of various electoral systems (Offe:
p.469).
However Offe goes beyond these two foci to concentrate
on how people actually make use of their democratic rights and crucially on preference formation; how the
preferences that are to be expressed and aggregated come into being in the
first place, this is the formative phase of beliefs and preferences concerning
political life and it is at this stage where deliberative modes of forming and
developing preferences, which Offe sees as critical to democratic renewal, can
come into play. (Offe: p.458).
Deliberative mechanisms matter as democracy is more
than merely the struggle for power among competing representative elites and
electoral contests. It also consists of
the less visible and less easily dramatized process in which develop informed
judgments and preferences about the matters that affect them and the polity as
a whole. For there are two symmetries
between the two stages of democratic inputs – the stage of the formation and the stage of the expression of policy preferences. (Offe:
p.460).
First, before citizens can express an opinion of
preference, it must have passed through some formative stage where there is no
‘must’ in the opposite direction.
Second, at the stage of the expression of the political will the key
structures of the process – parties, elections, voting procedures – are all
precisely defined and formally prescribed.
But actual formation of preferences occurs in the largely uncharted and
informal social space of family, work and community life, lifestyles and media
consumption and so on. The differences
between these two stages thus concern their degree of legal
institutionalization. To democratize the
preference formation process thus, Offe proposes the following deliberative
measures: change electoral systems (from first-past-the-post certainly!), more
plebiscites, mandatory voting, more devolution, gender quotas in parties and
reform of political and campaign finance plus deliberative ‘mini-publics’ such
as planning cells and citizen juries to which there is open access and which
must be guaranteed to have some political impact. Such measures would, Offe argues, would
generate better information on issues at the level of the individual and widen
the social inclusion of participants, so counteracting the idea of deliberation
as another ‘chattering classes’ idea.
In conclusion, Offe’s ideas for transforming the
quality of democratic deliberation is a
good antidote to the pessimism of writers
who postulate a ‘post-democratic’ era in the UK in which elections do exist and change
governments but in which citizens are passive observers of the spectacle of the
electoral game behind which public
policies are made in private by elected governments and elites (Judge,
2014) or the movement towards ‘leader democracy’ fashioned by the political
will and determination of top politicians (Pakulski and Korosenyi, 2012). The essence of democracy – the social
appropriation of political power – depends on a tissue of relationships between
government and society. Democratic
legitimacy can only exist where citizens feel that they have a sense of
empowerment (Rosanvallon, 2011). Rather
than seeing the challenges to procedural democracy emerging from the crisis of
the Keynesian welfare state and the financial collapse in 2008 as legitimacy
crisis in its totality, it is more worthwhile to talk of a new age of democracy
characterised by detachment from particularity (e.g., decline in class-based
voting) and multiplication of the expressions of social sovereignty
(Rosanvallon: p.6).
Bibliography
Flinders, M. (2012) Defending Politics. Why
Democracy Matters in the Twenty-First Century Oxford: Oxford University
Press
Heywood, A. (2013) Politics.
Fourth Edition Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan
Judge, D, (2014) Democratic
Incongruities. Representative Democracy
in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan
Offe, C. (2011) Crisis
and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalised?
Czech Sociological Review Vol. 47, No.3: pp.447-472
Pakulski, J and Korosenyi, K. (2013) Towards Leader Democracy Key Issues in
Modern Sociology London: Anthem Press
Rosanvallon, P. (2011) Democratic Legitimacy. Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity. Translated by
Arthur Goldhammer Oxford: Princeton University Press
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