Democracy and participation in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Democracy is again under attack. Only a small minority, i.e. 19 out of 167 countries can be regarded as full democracies. This themed section with its six contributions is addressing the challenges from different angles: it starts with ‘Deliberative Democracy in the Real World. The contribution of the capability approach’ by Jean-Michel Bonvin, and is followed by György Széll’s ‘The Future of Cooperatives and Trade Unions: The Relevance for the Question of Democratization of Society’. ‘Public Participation and the Politics of Humiliation’ by Dasarath Chetty is the next one. Gloria Ostos conducts a case study of the application of the first international standard ISO 18091:2014 on Quality Management Systems in Local Government. Finally, Jo Morris-Ellis and Heinz Sünker address the issue of children politics, definitely the main issue for the future of democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• participation
• twenty-first century

The crisis of democracy and participation is as old as the institution itself (Laski, 1933). The democracy, when it was invented by the Greek about 2,500 years ago, was not sustainable. Not only that, a small minority of less than 10% enjoyed the rights – excluding women, and slaves – but was ridden through its two centuries of existence by many crises (Canfora, 2006; Széll, 2008). Modern democracy developed slowly since the eighteenth century in the United States of America and France, and became for the most industrialized countries in the twentieth century a dominant form of government. But from the very beginning fundamental critique emerged, and the alternatives of Fascism and Stalinism triumphed with their descendants until today. Zakaria (1997) spoke already in 1997 about ‘the rise of illiberal democracy’. Colin Crouch (2004) is even naming it ‘post-democracy’, and Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) ‘counter-democracy’. Michael Vester (2013) asked the question ‘Participatory or Authoritarian Democracy?’.

Actually one of the main issues in regard to democracy and participation is the quality of democracy. It is now well understand that winning elections is not a reliable indicator of quality. But, how to measure it? Apparently, not easily (Alexander & Welzel, 2011; Inglehart, 2003). Since a couple of years ago, the Intelligence Unit of The Economist has published the Democracy Index. The most recent one (2018) is showing another decline of support for democracy and free speech. Within a list of 167 countries only 19 can be regarded as ‘full democracies’. By the way it is quite interesting to compare this index with The Fragile States Index (Messner, 2015). Apparently there is a strong correlation. Also a study by Foa and Mounk (2016) demonstrated in international comparative study the fading support for democracy. The crisis of democracy is apparently not restricted to Western countries, but emerges e.g. in Japan as well (Yazawa, 2015), and especially in the Philippines, a former U.S. colony, with the election of Rodrigo Duterte as president in 2016 (Werning, 2017). But other more or less recent leaders like Vladimir Putin, Nicolás Maduro, Recip Erdogan, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Victor Orbán – just to name a few – who insist that their rule is (still) democratic, however, have their own understanding of democracy. At least they allow other parties to exist besides their own. The notion of ‘People’s Democracy’, which is the notion for really existing socialist countries – until now North Korea, or Vietnam – is characterized by one party-rule. Within these one-party-rules China is definitely the most important, not only the most populated country, but also soon the number one world economy. It is for sure quite difficult to run a country with some 1.4 billion inhabitants and 55 ethnicities democratically (China ranks # 139 in the Democracy Index 2017, p. 8). The same holds true for India with their 1.3 billion citizens. India pretends to be the largest democracy in the world (number 43 in the Democracy Index 2017, p. 6), but as long as it is based on a caste system, it will never be a full democracy. Non-democratic governments are characterized by widespread fear and paranoia.

The U.S.A. is not only since the election of Donald Trump as president in November 2016 a ‘flawed democracy’ (The Economist, 2018, p. 5). Already (Bertram Gross, 1980) characterized the U.S.A. as Friendly Fascism. And still the best analysis of the U.S.A. government is by Alexis de Tocqueville (1965) in his Democracy in America originally from 1835. There he speaks of the ‘Dictatorship of the majority’. That leads me directly to the term of ‘mass dictatorship’, which was coined by an international research group more than a decade ago (Corner & Lim, 2016). This phenomenon indicates that against traditional dictatorships – often run by the military – it is not be sheer oppression but largely by consent from a majority that the system survives. André Gorz (1987) calls this passive participation.

The strongest challenge for democracy are the so-called populist movements – using democratic rights to undermine democratic principles and values (Müller, 2011). One of their demands is to express ‘peoples voice’ via e.g. referenda. Also the Green Parties in their beginning asked for ‘basic democracy’. However, quite soon they realized that most issues are so complex that they cannot be answered by a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And compromises – the heart of democracy – or coalitions are not feasible. Quite there are just what I call ‘negative’ coalitions – e.g. the extreme right and left – in refusing a proposal, e.g. the E.U.-referenda in France and The Netherlands in 2005, or more recently the Italian referendum on constitutional reforms in 2016.

It has to be noted that all mass dictatorships started as populist movements (Molyneux & Osborne, 2017). The term populism is a euphemism, covering mostly Authoritarian Nationalism (Akkerman, 2017). Right-wing populism has as essential elements xenophobia and racism. The success of the election of Donald Trump, and of BREXIT were largely based on these sentiments. For other forms of populism we have to discern between socialist-communist movements and anarchism, which is not right or left – as their black colour already indicates. Neo-liberal ideologies have strong anarchistic elements, i.e. to destroy or at least weaken the state. The Spanish Podemos-party, the Greek Syriza as well as La France Insoumise base themselves quite successfully on leftist populism (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Mouffe, 1992).

So, the debate about democracy and participation is full of paradoxes. In this vein David van Reybrouck (2016) argues in his book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. And Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) in his book pleads for a Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. And Jason Brennan (2016) is simply Against Democracy: The Case for Democracy. So the question stands about the future democracy and participation. Amartya Sen (1999), Nobel-prize winner for economics, has defended the position of democracy as a universal value for decades. And for sure all over the world we find democracy movements. Samuel P. Huntington (1991) – already nearly three decades ago – was concerned with regime change in his book The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century. There he analysed under which circumstances regimes become more or less democratic, and used the pertinent notion of democratization. In this context the study ‘Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice’ by Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) in a Danish city – i.e. in one of the most democratic societies according to the Democracy Index 2017 and with the most happy people in the world – is quite enlightening. It is far from the ideal that is generally painted. However, since many years the xenophobe Danish People’s Party is the second largest in the country and by tolerating the conservative minority government has a great influence. So, apparently it is permanent struggle between pro- and anti-democratic forces – since antiquity.

One element in regard to democratic regimes is that the list within the indexes is always led by small countries. In so far Johan Galtung (2001) is convinced that if the world is divided into about 4,000 states instead of the 200 today there would be less violence, more peace and democracy. Norway and Switzerland are cited as good examples. But in Norway and Switzerland populist parties are quite strong, and voting rights for women were only granted by men quite late. Even worse is the situation in countries like Cambodia, Rwanda, Southern Sudan etc., where incredible massacres took place. So, it seems that the solution for more peace and democracy is not simple.

For sure, democracy is the most demanding form of government, for it needs a lot of consciousness, competence and a lot of time (Széll, 1989). In so far democracy is a luxury, where only the most developed and educated societies can achieve. However, as we see in the U.S.A. or Great Britain and many other countries, it is not a guarantee. Germany in the 1920s was one of the advanced societies in the world, however, it was not immune against fascism.

Is there a risk that the world returns to a situation like between the World Wars? A new quality within society and with it politics was introduced was the invention of so-called social media. At the beginning there was a great hype that through access of everybody to the Internet and its information, the spreading of social networks, finally democracy could win everywhere. But soon it emerged that the net is controlled by a only few gigantic corporations, and their main interest is to raise profits. Leading even to a form of addiction of the users – more risky than any drug (Moorstedt, 2017). And social control increased. The praise of the role of Internet within the Arab and Iranian protest movement was largely exaggerated – by the industry? (Gayo-Avello, 2015, 2017) ‘Actually, claiming that social media is able to overthrow authoritarian regimes only makes those regimes more authoritarian and paranoid’ (Gayo-Avello, 2017, p. 98). Another element are so-called bots, to which their inventors attribute the success of Trump and BREXIT (Grassegger & Krogerus, 2016). When George Orwell forecast the future in his book 1984 on the background of Stalinism and Fascism he could not imagine the enormous progress of technologies. If today similar regimes – and China practises this kind of control already to a large degree – use all the modern technologies available, a much more terrible totalitarian regime is feasible.

But let us try an assessment in regard to the topic of this themed section. I invited five colleagues – covering many parts of the world – to contribute. The section starts with an article on ‘Deliberative Democracy in the Real World: The contribution of the capability approach’ by Jean-Michel Bonvin and Francesco Laruffa from the University of Geneva. The authors build on the capability approach by Nobel-prize winner for economics, Amartya Sen. It is about the fundamental role of the market or the state to optimize democracy. The capacity to aspire and the capability for voice are contrasted. Finally they show how Sen’s notion of democracy may open up a new field for research, namely the sociological investigation of the informational (or knowledge) basis of democracy.

Then follows my own contribution on ‘The Future of Cooperatives and Trade Unions: The Relevance for the Question of Democratization of Society’. Cooperatives and trade unions are still the largest democratic organizations in the world with a global scope. Unfortunately trade unions have been for many years in crisis, although salaried work is on the rise. Whereas cooperatives have a boom – partly due to the worldwide economic crisis, where the offer an alternative to traditional salaried work.

The next article, on ‘Public Participation and the Politics of Humiliation’ by Dasarath Chetty from Durban University of Technology, South Africa, is concerned with the introduction of public participation in his country. This approach is quite promising for the enhancement of democracy within a country, which still suffers from the heritage of centuries of colonialism and Apartheid, it is a long way to go.

Gloria Ostos from the Fundación Participa in Madrid, Spain, is conducting a case study of the application of the first international standard ISO 18091:2014 on Quality Management Systems in Local Government, based on ISO 9001:2015. The case is the city Los Cabos in Mexico, where this international norm is applied since 2015. It may be surprising to learn that an international technical standard is able to foster and develop democratic institutions. If successful, that might be a new promising way to overcome structural obstacles.

Finally, Jo Morris-Ellis from the University of Sussex, U.K. and Heinz Sünker from the University of Wuppertal, Germany, ddress the issue of children in politics. So far this aspect of democratization is largely neglected as well in politics, but also in social sciences. Although there are a number of conventions, which have been passed over the last couple of years, their implementation is insufficient. The future of humankind – and of democracy with it – depends on strong children’s politics as the two authors convincingly demonstrate.

So, what conclusion can be drawn?

In an age of distrust (Rosanvallon, 2008), of fake-news, alter(native)facts, when a U.S. president declares he is proud not to read books. When science is only used, when it fits into its own purpose, the whole notion of science-based dialogue is questioned. That does not mean that within science there is only one way, but at least the effort to come to results via a dominant-free dialogue – as Jürgen Habermas coined it – should prevail. However, this approach is seriously challenged by what Robert N. Proctor calls agnotology: ‘Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data’ (Wikipedia, 2018;see. also Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). I already asked some 20 years ago ‘Risk & Reason – or the End of the Age of Enlightenment?’ (Széll, 2001). So, the strategy for more democracy and civic participation can only be more Enlightenment (Pinker, 2018; Postman, 1999; Soros, 2000). And the means to reach it is more and better education (Sünker, 2002, 2006, 2008; Sünker, Farnen, & Széll, 2003). At the end the question remains: Are we – authors and readers of this journal – meant, when James Traub demands ‘It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses’ (2016)?

Notes on contributor

György Széll was born in 1941 in Budapest/Hungary; European citizen; professor of sociology at the University of Osnabrück/Germany, visiting professor at some 60 universities in more than 30 countries; expert to the European Commission and numerous scientific bodies. (Co-) Editor of several international book series and a dozen scientific reviews; altogether more than 300 scientific publications; studied at the universities of Frankfurt/M., Münster/W., Aix-en-Provence, Cologne, Bochum and Algiers; Diplom-Soziologe (1965); Dr.sc.pol. (1967).

ORCID

György Széll http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7318-3755