Capitalism at the roots: the crisis of representative democracy through the eyes of Belgian climate activists

ABSTRACT

Recent climate activism has played a key role in denouncing the unsustainability of representative democracy. Previous research has investigated the attitudes of climate activists towards representative institutions along the conceptual distinction between ‘environmental’ and ‘ecological’ democracy. Yet, little attention has been paid to climate activists’ critique of capitalism and how it relates to demands for democratic reform. Our paper addresses this gap by conducting a mixed-method analysis of protest survey data collected in Belgium in 2019. Our findings show that activists display low levels of trust towards representative institutions, but still abide by the ideals of environmental democracy within the boundaries of existing institutions. At the same time, we observe a widespread critique of capitalism, signaling attraction towards the ideals of ecological democracy. Overall, our findings challenge the binary distinction between environmental versus ecological democracy, and raises normative questions about the role of environmental social movements in economic and democratic reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate movements
• Fridays for Future
• representative democracy
• ecological democracy
• environmental democracy
• capitalism

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to warmly thank all participants to the survey on which this article is based, and the reviewers of this article for their highly valuable comments and recommendations. Thank you as well to all the colleagues with whom we have exchanged ideas on topics of the crisis of representative democracy; colleagues from the political science department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université Catholique de Louvain and the University of Antwerp, as well all colleagues from the EoS RepResent consortium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Trust scores lie around 2.70 out of 5 on two similar items measuring trust in politicians and political parties. We are referring to the items trstplt and trstprt in the European Social Survey (Belgian-only data, round 9; 2018): ‘Using this card, please tell me on a score of 0–10 how much you personally trust each of the institutions I read out. 0 means you do not trust an institution at all, and 10 means you have complete trust’. For our purpose of comparison, we recoded the 11-pt ESS items into 5-pt items using 0/1 = 1; 2/4 = 2; 5 = 3; 6/8 = 4; 9/10 = 5.

2. 211/349 (60.4%) responses to the blame question are coded either as blaming ‘Capitalism/economic system’ (39.2%), and/or ‘Capitalism specifically’ (14.6%), and/or ‘Economic actors’. The same combinatory logic applies in the rest of the article when we interpret two or more separate categories as one.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek–Vlaanderen (FWO), grant numbers G062917N (2017-2021), G034715N and the FNRS-FWO Excellence of Science project RepResent, grant number G0F0218N.