Democracy against Itself? The Criteria, Development and Reflexivity of Democracy

This paper will discuss three phases in the academic understanding of democracy: as a stable condition measurable by a small set of fixed criteria; as a process that, once established, would experience ongoing development that improved its character and increased its benefits; and as a site of crisis and unpredictability whose causes have been very widely canvassed with as yet little analytical convergence. The paper will advance an analysis of the third phase which suggests it is endogenously sourced – a reflexive self-undermining of democracy that destabilizes the equipoise described by the first understanding while revealing the destructive potential of what the second phase saw only as positive change. Among the most notable achievements of the professional political science that emerged in the early and middle twentieth century, notably in Britain and the United States though with some precursors elsewhere, was the ‘Empirical Theory of Democracy’. It sought to examine democracy as an actually existing form of government rather than an ideal or a utopia, thus displacing both the longstanding disapproval of democracy by political commentators since Plato, and the complaints of those who found its limitations and compromises, for instance with capitalism, to fall far short of its true potential. Alongside this normative displacement came an empiricist effort to establish measurable criteria for the identification and then the correlational explanation of democracy. But since certain features of modernity were thought to make democracy possible, such as wide popular and secular education, a developmental conceptualization was latent in this static one. As democratic theory was associated with modernization and secularization theory, it might have more than ‘threshold’ properties, and as anxiety as to its fragile nature, provoked by the collapses of the 1930s, receded, an optimistic developmental view of democracy took hold in the 1970s, typified by the theories of ‘cognitive mobilization’ and ‘postmaterial values’. In the present phase, threats to democracy have been identified under such uninformative headings as ‘backsliding’, ‘deconsolidation’ and ‘populism’. Much of the analysis has emphasized exogenous sources; literally foreign threats, such as Russian bot farms, or commercial and non-political causes, such as social media, or such adventitious factors as the defective personality of Donald Trump. There is value in all these diagnoses, but they fail to recognize that such causes can only operate through the electorate; that is, via democracy. Has consolidation and deepening of democracy somehow just reversed? More likely, the paper argues, is that developmental pressures have continued, but have begun to drive imbalance, as the author’s ‘hyperdemocracy’ thesis suggests. Reflexive self-undermining, in this case by the erosion of the trust in epistemic authorities required for accurate, stable and shared cognitions, arguably marks the continuation of precisely what facilitated and consolidated democracy in the first two phases. The arguments of Ulrich Beck and Claude Lefort illuminate this new and alarming phase, even though neither writer conceived of it.