Introduction
Democracy is in crisis today, as many authoritative scholars remark. I, too, believe that democracy is now going through serious difficulties. However, I also believe that we can hardly hope to understand the nature of the crisis or come up with appropriate solutions unless we recognize that this form of government has, by its very nature, always been subject to crisis.
It was in the direct democracy of the ancients, and it is in the representative democracy of modern times, both in the parliamentary democracy of notables with restricted suffrage in the nineteenth century and in the democracy of the great mass parties with universal suffrage in the twentieth century. And, again, it remains the case in our contemporary democracy dominated by the media and populist leaders. A couple of words of warning before getting down to the matter at hand. First, I use the term “crisis” inexactly, as it is widely used in journalism and even in academia—as a synonym for difficulties, frictions and the risk that democracy may turn into a political system that is no longer democratic. Secondly, my reference is to the present state of the democracies of the advanced capitalistic countries. Analysis of the state of democracy worldwide over the long period should be quite a different and more complex matter. [7] modern. Until the mid-eighteenth century, in fact, the leading political thinkers were actually convinced that the ideal was unattainable given the irresponsible, demagogic forces democracy is subject to, preferring moderate forms of monarchy or oligarchy.And yet the progress of democracy proved inexorable and, after the American and French revolutions, as parliamentary democracy evolved in the nineteenth century, the more affluent and influential classes came to the realization that the most extreme consequences democracy might have—expropriation of the few by the many—could be avoided.
This might be achieved, for example, by restricting suffrage in the first place, and subsequently applying more refined instruments clashing less violently with the democratic ideal, such as abandoning the principle of pure proportional representation for the sake of governability. As for the output (the ideal of good government), the historical experience of the best democracies—the liberal democracies—showed that democratic government, if not exactly “good,” was in any case possible and better than the nondem- ocratic forms. And so it was that democracy proceeded to become the most widespread political system globally, “the worst form of government, except for all the others,” as Winston Churchill famously put it. But it is also a form of government whose quality can be maintained at an acceptable level only with a continuous, painstaking process of reformist maintenance.2I began with the ABCs of the democratic crisis—the basic reasons why democracy has never succeeded, and never will, in fully standing by its promises of equality and good government—since otherwise the ongoing debate may give the impression that democracy is in crisis above all today. That today it is a “lost cause” (Mastropaolo, 2011), since democracy is “disfigured” (Urbinati, 2014) and harbors a “totalitarian vocation” (Wolin, 2008). That, unlike in the recent past, the system we know today is not even worthy of the name and should be termed differently, as “post-democracy” (Crouch, 2003) or something of the sort—as might be gleaned from the titles of some interesting books published recently. A vein of nostalgia runs through many of these texts: there is a widespread conviction that yesterday democracy was in rather better condition than it is today, and that, in particular, the old, ideological mass party— prevalent in Europe after World War II—was a far better tool for democracy than the media-dependent parties that succeeded it, ever subject to populistic or plebiscitary drifts.3
I, too, believe that the democratic systems of the advanced capitalistic countries have been going through a difficult phase as from the last two decades of the last century, but no more difficult than others faced in the more distant past.
It is a state of affairs generated by deep-reaching structural changes, and we are hardly likely to find remedial indications by looking back to a happier recent past. Of the two major structural changes, the first—the international situation in which the individual national democracies are entangled—is, as we shall see, mainly operative on the output side. The second is a matter of the transformations (social, economic, cultural and technological) that all the national democracies have gone through in the last few decades. These affect the way the citizens are represented (the parties, in particular), the nature of the electoral processes and the principal features of the governments. Thus, the interest here is mainly on the input side.Representative democracy, as historical experience shows, can function acceptably only within a “sovereign” and “national” state, where the government is able to decide on the main issues regarding the collective well-being of the citizens (conditions of sovereignty). It also requires that citizens are united by sufficiently strong bonds of “fraternity”—the third and all too often neglected term in the slogan of the French Revolution—for them to accept the majority decisions, even though they may have negative effects on relatively large segments of the population (conditions of fraternity). In the last two centuries the nation has been, and indeed remains, the most powerful means of bonding identities, able to produce conditions of “fraternity”—conditions that at least suffice for acceptance of the sovereign decisions taken by a democratic government. Having established so much, we must make do with a weak but realistic and widely accepted working definition of representative democracy, as proposed by Joseph Schumpeter (1943): faced with a range of candidates competing to govern (individual leaders, parties or coalitions), the citizens choose one with a majority vote. The performance of the chosen candidate will be judged in subsequent elections, in which the choice may be confirmed if the government has satisfied the citizens, or overturned it in the contrary case. And yet (objective) well-being and (subjective) satisfaction do not depend solely, and often not even mainly, on the actions of the government or the quality of the institutions of the single nationstate. They also—and increasingly—depend upon the conditions of the world economy and the economic and political relations the state has with the group of countries forming the international community. This community is certainly not democratic and is rife with relations of hegemony and dependence, and international institutions and rules, which the single states must bow to.
3.