Colin Crouch

Post-Democracy After the Crises


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been low) and (marginally) Spain, there has been decline. In some cases this has been minor, but in others it has been strong. Two countries (Belgium and Italy) moved from compulsory voting during the period, but that seemed to have little impact on the general trend in voting.

      NB: ‘Germany’ in the mid-1980s was the German Federal Republic; today it is united Germany

      Figure 1.2 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, mid-1980s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), west European countries

       Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data

      With the exception of Slovenia, the populations of central and eastern Europe did not respond with exceptional enthusiasm to being able to vote in free elections after the fall of communism, turnout in their first elections during the 1990s being typically lower than those found even now in most of western Europe. Since then, there have been varying patterns (Figure 1.3), but decline has predominated.

      Figure 1.3 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, early 1990s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), central European EU member states

       Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data

      Parties increasingly sought to relate to voters through the techniques of market research and advertising. Policies and party images became like goods being sold in a market to mass consumers, where firms have no direct knowledge of potential customers as people, but only as purchasing units identified in surveys, focus groups and trial marketing campaigns. Politicians ceased to be people who represented various social categories because of their close contacts with them as fellow citizens, but a separate political class, the recipients of professional marketing data about customer-electors. Socially, they would increasingly prefer to mix with the leaders of global corporations, whose investments they wanted to lure to their economies, and whose funds they wanted to finance their increasingly expensive election campaigns.

      Berlusconi rapidly created a major, winning national political party, called Forza Italia (a politically meaningless phrase, derived from a football slogan), using, not a membership base, but the financial and personnel resources of his enterprises and his ownership of major television and print media networks. The phenomenon became known as a partito impresa, a corporation party. Over subsequent years, Forza Italia developed a membership base and began to resemble a normal party, collapsing along with other established parties during the 2010s under a new wave of populism. However, its initial circumstances followed a post-democratic model of having few connections to voters and no historical social roots.

      In 2003, I did not argue that in the western world we had already arrived at a state of post-democracy. That would happen if we were in societies in which no spontaneous movements could arise from the general population to give a shock to the political system. Our societies were clearly still able to do this. Three movements in particular had been doing so, bringing to the political agenda issues that established elites would sooner have done without: feminism, environmentalism and xenophobia. The developments I had identified had set us on the road to post-democracy, but we were not yet there.