an article on awareness among people about politics in 21st century
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Democracy today faces many challenges: increasing political inequality, the decline of widespread political participation, voter incompetence, the increasing power of non-majoritarian organisations and institutions on the domestic and global stages, the rise of global problems requiring multilateral collective action, the growing need for specialised expertise in an increasingly complex public policy environment, and the existence of often radical forms of social, political, and moral pluralism all combine to exert significant pressure on existing democratic regimes. They also problematise many of our core assumptions about democracy and its justification. According to one familiar story, the theoretical strength of democracy over other regimes is grounded in strong commitments to political equality and individual liberty, best realised and protected by democratic systems. Individuals enjoy an equal ability to influence the political agenda, either directly or via representatives, and to have their concerns feed into wider processes of decision making and policy formation. Functioning democracies provide meaningful opportunities for citizens to communicate their concerns to decision makers and thereby effectively track the will of the people. Democratic government is self-government: citizens are free in so far as they live as equals under institutions and laws which are accountable to them and which they could change or reject if they so wished.
But this story is a fiction, at least when compared to democracy as currently practised around the world. Of course, there have long been concerns among political philosophers about the disconnect between the lived reality of democracy and its philosophical justification. For example, in reality power is not exercised by individual citizens but by interest groups, or lobbyists who often work against the public interest rather than for it. But we are arguably reaching a point at which the lived reality of democratic politics is so out of kilter with the philosophical vision on which it is based that the practice is undermining the theory. A growing number of philosophers and political scientists have explained recent failures of democracy in terms of wider, deeper problems with the whole idea. The recent rise of populism, and events such as Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (‘Brexit’) and the election of President Trump, have shaken many people’s faith in democracy. The more we learn about these events, the more it seems that the problem is systemic and fundamental (Brennan 2016). Lack of political knowledge, declines in political participation and engagement, distrust of politicians, growing political and economic inequalities, complex and exclusionary systems of voting and registration, and rising political elitism have arguably combined to pull democratic theory and democratic practice in different directions.
What do we do about this? Do we need a new theory of democracy? Or do we need reforms capable of realising the conventional ideal? Political philosophers disagree. Those who believe that we need a new theory do not agree on what this should look like. Achen and Bartels (2016) have argued for a new theory of democracy which takes seriously real-world constraints on, for example, citizen engagement and knowledge. Ilya Somin (2016) and Jason Brennan (2016) have argued for a fundamental reappraisal of democracy in the light of political ignorance among citizens. Hélène Landemore (2017) has suggested that representative democracy is in crisis and needs to be replaced with a system that affords power to citizens directly. Various reform remedies have been proposed. For instance, among deliberative democrats, some have sought to establish mass deliberation among the whole citizen body (e.g. Habermas 1997; Young 2002; Dryzek 2012), while others have advocated limited opportunities for deliberation, perhaps constrained to mini-publics, citizens juries, or other deliberative fora (e.g. Fishkin 1991; Fung 2015; Lafont 2014). Others have eschewed the deliberative route, for other approaches more focused on ideas of radical contestation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Bevir 2010), or representation (Runciman 2014).
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