The field of contemporary democratic theory is divided in two camps. On one side are pessimistic accounts which observe a decline of the quality as well as the quantity of democratic government in western societies. Colin Crouchs (2004) book on “post-democracy” most prominently stands for this gloomy judgment about the current state and the future of democracy. On the other hand there are accounts which indeed share the diagnosis of a decline of traditional forms of democratic participation (most notably the decrease of voting turnouts and the decline of party politics). However, they do not equalize these developments with a loss of democratic quality. They rather notice a change of the forms of democratic legitimacy. In such a way Pierre Rosanvallon (2008, 2011) argues that in recent years new forms of negative, deliberative and reflexive forms of popular control have arisen and that a critical civil society is still and even more alive. In my paper I will scrutinize these more optimistic accounts. My main argument is that the discovery of new forms of democratic legitimacy goes hand in hand with a redescription of the concept of democracy. Though, this new understanding of democracy has only little in common with the idea of political equality.
