Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Eerik Lagerspetz, Oili Pulkkinen

   Abstract

   Democracy is said to be in crisis. For example, two leading journals dedicated to the principled discussion of the theory and future of democracy, Democratic Theory and The Journal of Democracy, have both published special issues on the crisis of democracy. This volume brings together conceptual historians, philosophers, political scientists, political theorists and sociologists to discuss the challenges, criticism and crises of democracy with fresh approaches to the idea of democracy, democratic theory, democratic institutions, trust and distrust, populism and advancement of technologies.

3. Trust, Distrust and Democracy

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 2. The Trust in Science Revisited: Social-Epistemic Challenges in Democratic and Digital Societies

      Michael Baurmann

      Abstract

      Democratic institutions and trust are interdependent. Well-ordered democratic institutions can create and nurture confidence, but without trust, even well-ordered democratic institutions can hardly function. In this paper, I discuss an important part of the complex fabric of overall trust in a democracy: trust in science. Science and scientific experts have enjoyed exceptional trust during the COVID-19 crisis in many democratic countries. It is not yet clear whether this development is permanent and will help strengthen this crucial institution after the end of the pandemic. Therefore, some general reflections on the conditions for sustainable trust in science in a knowledge-based and democratic society seem to be needed. Four main factors are discussed: (a) the social establishment of reliable criteria to certify scientific expertise; (b) the use of these criteria in heuristic rules that empower laymen in identifying trustworthy experts; (c) a stable ‘veritistic equilibrium’ in trust-networks that ensures a ‘truth-conserving’ distribution of knowledge; (d) the resilience of trustworthy science in the digital world, where it is endangered most. The results of this analysis can, in many aspects, be applied to general questions regarding the fragile interdependency between institutional trustworthiness and the trust of citizens in democratic societies.

   3. Chapter 3. Suspicious Minds: Towards a Typology of Political Distrust

      Paul-Erik Korvela, Isak Vento

      Abstract

      This article analyses the concept of political distrust and theorizes the sources of different types of political distrust in a liberal democracy. Political distrust, or suspicion towards politics, has not been studied as much as political trust, although political theory has emphasized the importance of distrust in democracy since ancient times. The plentiful research on political trust shows that the importance of political trust varies depending on whether it is about an idea, a system, or an actor. However, distrust understood as the counterpart of trust in these studies has mostly been viewed in an unstructured way as a privatization of trust. Based on liberal political theory, we argue that the typologization of political distrust could bring new dimensions to understanding liberal democracy. An asymmetric approach to the political distrust concept enables the discovery of its potential sources and causal mechanisms, which can offer an improved explanation for the effects of political distrust on liberal democracy. We structure the theory as four ideal types of a politically suspicious citizen, which offers guidelines for the empirical study of distrust in democracies with the potential for new knowledge that can offer practical advice for strengthening both established and young democracies.

   4. Chapter 4. Distrust and Democracy

      Sari Roman-Lagerspetz

      Abstract

      In modern democracy, opposition and dissent are not only tolerated, but they are recognized as necessary aspects of the system. The task of the opposition in a democratic system is to express distrust. This chapter discusses several classical theories of democracy and argues that they do not conceptualize the role of institutionalized distrust in a satisfactory way. Hegel’s theory of recognition, as formulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit, provides some conceptual tools for the conceptualization of the role of opposition as the institutionalized form of distrust.

4. Authoritarianism and Democracy

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 5. Whose Populism? What Democracy? On the Conceptual and Normative Connections of Populism and Democracy

      Onni Hirvonen

      Abstract

      This chapter discusses how different conceptions of democracy relate to populism. The aim is to reveal how background theoretical commitments regarding both democracy and populism reveal the normative standing of populism and its potential contradictions with democracy. Populism is often described either as a corrective to democracy or its pathology. On the one hand, populism can be seen as politics par excellence, reviving democracies in crisis. On the other hand, its exclusionary and authoritarian tendencies can be considered dangerous to democracy. Despite the apparent contradictory nature of these descriptions, the accounts often agree about the core features of populism itself. This chapter analyses how these core ideas relate to various accounts of democracy, from less to more normative. The claim is that the more normatively demanding the account of democracy is, the more likely it becomes that populism cannot be accommodated within it. In short, the theory of democracy has a key role in the differing normative conclusions that various authors draw from their accounts of populism. The central contribution of this chapter is to make explicit the breadth of the theoretical commitments that are built into the normative evaluation of the role of populism.

   3. Chapter 6. Carl Schmitt and the Political Theology of Populism

      Lars Vinx

      Abstract

      This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s theory of democracy in light of Max Weber’s concept of charismatic rule. It is argued that Schmitt’s crypto-theological understanding of democracy, which assimilates political leadership into prophetic authority, implies an expressive or identitarian conception of democratic community. The latter is at odds with a genuinely democratic understanding of popular consent and liable to provide ideological cover for authoritarian corruptions of democracy. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that a political theology that resembles Schmitt’s forms the ideological basis of contemporary populist interpretations of the democratic ideal. It is therefore wrong to regard populism as only being directed against liberal democracy. Populist ideology and political practice, rather, are inimical to democracy per se.

   4. Chapter 7. Between Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Illiberal Challenge

      Jonatan Ropponen

      Abstract

      Authoritarian actors wish to undermine democracy by pretending to uphold its principles while covertly subverting them. This results in political systems that hold potentially competitive elections but undermine democratic norms by various authoritarian means. Such political systems are often labelled ‘illiberal democracies’, but they should not even be granted the veneer of democracy, as their procedures significantly skew elections. Instead, illiberal regimes should be called authoritarian to more accurately reflect reality. That said, there meaningful distinctions that can be made between various forms of authoritarianism. Compared to systems of closed authoritarianism, so-called illiberal democracies are more democratic in many ways, so the titles of electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism are more fitting. Authoritarian strategies are varied. They can involve seizing control of the media, undermining the rule of law, or mobilizing state resources for campaigning. Authoritarian actors can also improve their chances with technical decisions: enacting voter suppression, redrawing district boundaries, or changing electoral rules, for instance. However, more blatantly authoritarian strategies such as banning political opposition outright and widespread voter fraud are more closely aligned with closed authoritarianism. Identifying authoritarian strategies is vital to opposing them sufficiently early and hopefully preventing the slide towards authoritarian government.

   5. Chapter 8. The Grey Areas of Democracy: Indifference and the Erosion of Democratic Principles from Within

      Jussi Metsälä, Heino Nyyssönen

      Abstract

      The focus of this chapter lies in the foggy area of states that are not democratic enough to be counted as best examples of full democracies, but at the same time are not authoritarian enough to be considered hybrid regimes or full dictatorships. In the article, we contrast the rule of law to the rule of man, to distinguish power and attempts to restrict or limit it. Our cases, or rather examples, come from recent developments in the United States and Hungary, countries not usually juxtaposed, but in which political actors have recently found more and more common denominators. The cases are linked to political cultures and contextualized with two notable global indices, namely Democracy Index and the Rule of Law Index. Thus, the approach is dealing with a phenomenon, which we call ‘politics of indifference’, in which one does whatever is possible to do in order to advance one’s own ambitions and obstructing the opposing groups. This phenomenon can be seen as a by-product of strong enough political power, and ultimately authoritarianism is not the only rival of liberal democracy, but democracy itself.

   6. Chapter 9. Constitutional Thought, Democracy and Crisis Government

      Eerik Lagerspetz

      Abstract

      The theory of crisis government is related to the fundamental questions of political philosophy. Crisis government is an indispensable instrument in protecting constitutional democracy, and, at the same time, it is most dangerous enemy. The historical starting point is the Roman dictatorship: a legally established office with wide powers but temporal limits. The early modern republican authors saw the Roman institution as a model. In the republican views, liberty is maximized by institutions that are likely to guarantee the greatest amount of liberty in the long run. The risks of arbitrary power have to be balanced against the costs of decision making and the ensuing risks of inactivity. Emergency powers are subject of a conceptual and normative dilemma. How can the law permit—in some cases require—that it should not be followed? The republican theorists are constitutional dualists: they believe that the exceptional can be subjected to normative regulation. For decisionists, any attempt to regulate the exceptional is doomed to fail for conceptual reasons. A third possibility is to stick to the constitutional rules and accept the consequences, for law simply cannot authorize its own suspension. This is the view of constitutional monism adopted by the liberal theorist Benjamin Constant.

5. Democracy—The Will of the People?

   1. Frontmatter

   2. Chapter 10. From the Democracy of Opinions to the Democracy of Procedures

      Kari Palonen

      Abstract

      What is represented in the democratic style of politics? There are two opposed visions to this question. One is based on the opinions of citizens, which are then transferred to political decisions in elections and parliamentary resolutions. The opposite view uses questions on the political agenda as the point of departure and regards both election campaigns and parliamentary debate as procedures to modify the given opinions towards forming political alternatives to the agenda. In the former view, the latter might appear as a disturbance of citizens’ opinions; in the latter, the former could be understood to lack political literacy in the face of the issues on the agenda. In the former view, political questions are simple and immediately decidable; in the latter, on the contrary, political questions are complex and require both time for reflection and willingness to consider opposed alternatives. In this chapter, as a continuation of my studies on parliamentary politics and Max Weber’s thinking, I present a thought experiment with historical references and take a clear stand in favour of the procedural style of democracy.

   3. Chapter 11. Agenda Problem in Referendum Democracy

      Eerik Lagerspetz

      Abstract

      Representative democracy may be criticized either because it is seen as incompatible with democratic equality in principle, or because it tends to produce undemocratic results in practice. Correspondingly, there are two influential defenses of representative institutions. According to the competence argument, we cannot expect citizens to be sufficiently virtuous, intelligent, interested, or well informed to make decisions that concern the good of the whole people. According to the practical argument, direct democracy is not practicable in large and complex polities like our modern states. Both arguments have their problems. This article presents a third argument. It is based on the crucial role of agenda (in the wide sense of the term) in all decision making. Referendum democracy, which is often considered to be a better approximation of the (unattainable) ideal of direct democracy in the modern conditions, is especially vulnerable to the agenda problem. Most referendums are organized in a dichotomous way. If voters’ preferences over some issues cannot be broken down as a series of yes-no choices, the outcomes of referendums may be manipulated by combining and separating issues.

   4. Chapter 12. On the Concept and Practice of Democracy in Late-Modern Mass Conditions: An Oakeshottian Update

      Suvi Soininen

      Abstract

      Below, I first point out that we tend to use democracy as a vague general concept that includes various types of constitutional arrangements. I suggest that it would be beneficial to differentiate between these more carefully. I discuss some points made earlier, especially by Michael Oakeshott and Bernard Crick. Due to their long careers, their work reflects long-term change in conceptions of democracy. The huge corporate power and superpower mentality are discussed together with the question of the possibility for real representative, parliamentary systems in the contemporary world. I additionally lean especially on Sheldon S. Wolin’s work. I emphasize that the early critique of behaviourism connects the three theorists profoundly. They also share a historico-philosophical style of writing without the fear of commenting on contemporary developments. I also examine some of today’s surveillance and manipulation techniques posing a threat to ‘democracy’. With help from the crucial case of Julian Assange, and his illegal imprisonment, I ask if late-modern ‘democracies’ already have crossed such boundaries that even the minimal criteria of democracy are fading. I try to bring some coherence to the named topic of the conceptual and practical mess around democracy and suggest some possible approaches for future studies.

6. Backmatter