3. Three Concepts of Politicisation: Republican, Deliberative, and Agonistic

Palonen (2003, 1986); Hay (2007); Zürn (2013, 2016); Wiesner et al. (2019, with further references). For an integrative approach of linking national, European, and global levels of politicisation, see Zürn (2019).

Even political theorists who elaborate extensively on the phenomenon do not spend much ink on the concept itself. Niklas Luhmann, for instance, argued that the evolution of the modern welfare state in combination with the structure of democracy as an institutionalised interplay of government and opposition leads to an ongoing dynamic of politicisation in which nearly all societal matters can be construed as political problems governments need to take care of (Luhmann 2002, 215; 1990). Notwithstanding this apt observation, he hardly reflected on the concept of politicisation (cf. Luhmann 1972).

Of course, as ideal types in the Weberian sense (Weber 1988b, 202), these concepts neither spell out what existing political theories actually do say about politicisation nor do they represent the “true essence” of the respective paradigms.

See, with further references, Wiesner’s “Rethinking politicisation as a multi-stage and multilevel concept” in Wiesner et al. (2019).

Or, more commonly used in the US, “the personal is political”.

As this happens “below” the governmental sphere and without initial initiative by the political class, Beck posed the question of whether this process could lead to the emergence of “subpolitics”, “subpolicies”, and “subpolities” (Beck 1996, 94–109).

Ironically, Habermas devoted large parts of his early treatise “On the Concept of Political Participation” to the phenomenon I refer to as social politicisation (Habermas 1961).

Especially the increasing complexity of politics, which is of course not solely the result of social politicisation, has momentous consequences. The number of involved political actors grows, and the arenas of problem emergence, will formation, and decision-making, and their respective fields of implementation and impact, increasingly become incongruent and operate on different levels (cf. Zürn 1998; Benz 2010). As a result, an issue can still become politicised on a level that is not capable of solving it, or attempts to politicise a specific subject matter can take place on one level and go unnoticed on the other. More crucially, the informalisation of politics undermines the artificial construction of political equality in formal democratic procedures. Hence, if the “politicisation of everyday life” (Chandler 2014) takes place in an informal manner, it does not “bring democracy down to the societal level of plural and individuated everyday life” (ibid., 43) but increases political inequality.