Colin Crouch

Post-Democracy After the Crises


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      My wife, Joan, has, as always, been an unfailing partner in developing arguments and ideas, and in reading successive drafts.

      From the initial writing of Post-Democracy in 2003 to this current volume, I have enjoyed invaluable encouragement and support from Giuseppe Laterza.

      I have benefited greatly from discussions and seminars with Donatella Della Porta, Mario Pianta and their colleagues and students at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, where I was a visiting professor during 2018.

      Because of these major forces of change, the worlds of politics and of normal life were drifting apart. Politicians responded to this by resorting to increasingly artificial means of communication with voters, using the techniques of advertising and market research in a very one-sided kind of interaction. Voters were becoming like puppets, dancing to tunes set by the manipulators of public opinion, rarely able to articulate their own concerns and priorities. This only intensified the growing artificiality of democracy; hence, post-democracy. I did not argue in 2003 that we had already reached a state of post-democracy. Most contemporary societies with long-established democratic institutions still had many citizens capable of making new demands and frustrating the plans of the puppet-masters; but we were on the road towards it.

      I made three important mistakes in this account. First, I concentrated too much on the importance of what I called ‘democratic moments’, points in time when political professionals lost control of the agenda, permitting groups of citizens to shape it. I did not pay attention to the institutions that sustain and protect democracy outside those moments. Second, although I recognized xenophobic populism as one of the movements in contemporary society that seemed to challenge post-democracy, I both underestimated its depth and importance, and did not see how it would mark more an intensification of post-democratic trends than an answer to them. Third, I talked of both the failure of the middle and lower social classes of post-industrial societies to develop a distinctive politics, and the important role of feminism as another challenge to post-democracy, but failed to perceive that some elements of feminism are in part the distinctive politics of those classes.

      I was also writing before the financial crisis of 2008 was to demonstrate one of my core arguments: that lobbying for the interests of global business had produced a deregulated economy that neglected all other interests in society. I had not fully appreciated the special place of the financial sector in the array of capitalist interests, and the particular challenge it presented to democracy. Two years later the European debt crisis seemed to produce perfect examples of post-democracy in action, as parliaments in Greece and Italy were presented with a choice: vote for the appointment of prime ministers designated by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and an unofficial committee of leading banks, or receive no help out of the crisis. The forms of democratic choice were preserved: the new prime ministers – both of whom had formerly been employees of Goldman Sachs, one of the banks at the heart of the crises – were not simply imposed; parliaments had to vote for them. That is how post-democracy works. But that account is itself over-simple. There are serious questions over the democratic credentials of the previous governments of both countries.