Walzer’s Spheres of Justice provides a heuristic tool to understand recent developments of democratic theory, from a thin theory of representative democracy to a thick theory of participatory democracy. I take five spheres of democracy – justice, citizenship, participation, representation and governing – to demonstrate the similar movement away from a minimalist theory into a complexified theory of democracy in a globalized world. But has this enriched pluralism created more opportunities for all citizens within the polity, thus deepening equality, or is pluralism confined to the winners of the knowledge global society: the educated middle classes? If those enjoying diverse forms of participation, varied kinds of representation, social networks of governance and deliberative democracy are a designated elite, it leaves out the lower classes and the underclass. Pluralism, in the context of democratic theory, may have – in practice, not necessarily in theory – worked against equality.
