Why parties give up on democratic representation – and why they do not

Recent research identifies conservative parties "breaking bad" as the major agents of democratic backsliding. This paper aims to investigate why conservative parties abandon the idea of democratic representation and challenge democratic norms. The focus is on party elites and the justifications they provide for their anti-democratic preferences. Notably, a close reading of ego documents from party leaders is undertaken to explore the hypothesis that an “epistemic humiliation” causes conservatives to withdraw from the idea of democratic representation. Two such humiliations, an anthropological and an anthropocentric one, are expected to undermine the conservative “rhetoric of reaction” (Albert O. Hirschman) which aims to justify inequalities by referring to “natural” orders. The more scientific evidence asserts that rather than being natural, such orders are man-made (more precisely: old white man-made), the more likely such epistemic humiliations are. The paper focuses on the (at least among the established democracies) most different cases of the USA and Germany. If conservatives breaking bad in both these cases regarded epistemic humiliations as the origin of their indifference to democratic representation, this could be regarded as strong evidence for the argument that we should not only pay attention to the cultural and economic, but also the epistemic origins of the current crisis of representation.