When is Crisis Good for Democracy?

Posted on September 4th, 2014 by Selen A. Ercan

Mark Chou argued in Monday’s Understanding Politics blog that crises can be good for democracy. In this second reply, Selen A. Ercan and Jean-Paul Gagnon extend Mark’s proposal and argue that crisis can be good for democracy but only if it triggers long-term responses that reinforce rather than undermine democracy’s stability.

 

The so-called ‘crisis of democracy’ has long been part of our political vocabulary. As Mark Chou writes in his blog post, the notion of a ‘crisis of democracy’ has been in currency since the ancient Greeks. This diagnosis traverses time and language and gains different meanings depending on the particular context in which it is employed.

It’s important then, as Mark suggests, that we should understand crisis in a nuanced way. We need to pin down exactly what is at stake each time we identify a crisis of democracy.

For example, in 1975 a group of prominent social scientists reporting to the Trilateral Commission about the state of democracy used the term “crisis” to argue there was too much democracy. They argued that different social groups and civil society movements were endangering democracy by demanding greater and more meaningful participation.

The problem with this is that expressing a sense of democracy’s failures and limitations can lead to a specious, anti-democratic logic that better or fuller democracy simply is not possible. Like Mark, we are concerned by this trend.

We agree, then, about the need to expand our nuanced understanding of crisis. But we suggest we need to discuss the implications of a nuanced understanding of crisis and also consider possible solutions to crisis.

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Source: Getty images

Which crisis? Which democracy?

The key questions we think need answering are: “From where did this crisis come?”, “How and where exactly does the crisis manifest itself?”, and “Which democracy, or aspect of a democracy, is in crisis?”.

Further, we need to ask whether solutions for crisis exist. For example, if the crisis is about the lack of interest that citizens have for politics in representative democracy, as suggested by Hay and Stoker, might the solution entail the implementation of democratic innovations that present appealing ways for citizens to participate in decision-making (e.g. participatory budgeting, citizens’ parliaments, and certain digital democracy initiatives, etc)? Can we, for example, say that democracies where such innovations are part of the ‘politics as usual’ (e.g. Brazil) are less prone to experience democratic crisis?

We need to consider these questions when developing a nuanced understanding of crisis. The process of identifying the crisis and pinpointing a solution reveals that the concept is often over-generalized and ill-used. Rather than alerting us to the impending collapse of democracy itself, the notion of a crisis of democracy usually points to short- or long-term problems affecting identifiable aspects of particular types of democracy.

This is why we need a nuanced understanding of crisis. It dissipates the misleading spectre that suggests the idea of democracy itself is in crisis.

In this respect, Mark is accurate in his assertion that crises can generate ruptures in the status quo potentially leading to a series of democratizations within a democracy. That’s if democratic innovations are applied rather than shirked as Scott Lavery suggests has been happening.

Expecting too much?

It’s at this point that we need to confront an over-expectation in Mark’s argument. He writes that crises “force democrats to revise what they think democracy is and how it can subsequently be practiced” when they are responding to or recovering from a crisis.

This assertion raises two problems. The first has to do with the fact that democratic innovations are slow in coming in countries that are, for instance, responding to the recent global financial crisis.

The lack of democratic responses exacerbates the problem as governments and states fail to demonstrate to citizens a just resolution to the crisis. The United States, for example, has not instituted a year-long and nationally representative citizens’ parliament designed to study the country’s financial system. This would have been among a number of suitable responses to take to bring some of that country’s economic regulations in line with the desires of its citizens.

Not only would a citizens’ parliament, if initiated in the heady days of the global financial crisis, have produced a procedurally just and democratic response to the folly of elites and a hamstrung congress – the recommendation stemming from the parliament would have given a spearhead for US-American citizens to use as part of their engagements in the public sphere. The reluctance to use democratic innovations in key policy areas to respond to crisis erodes the stability of democracy because it throws the value of the system into question.

The second is that democrats reconsider democracy in times of crisis in piecemeal and uncoordinated ways. Without some framework steering the way that a country’s democracy is to be nurtured, stabilized, advanced, enriched in quality and so on, the cycle of crisis and democratic solutions can, under the best of circumstances, also destabilize or disfigure democracy.

This is because democracy is an essentially contested concept, which means that it can be used in diverse contexts for different purposes. Commentators advocating different notions of democracy come to quite diverse, if not contradictory, conclusions about the state of democracies and the conditions for democratization, depending on whether their focus is on conventional or alternative sites and mechanisms for democracy. This needs to be taken into account so that any successful reflections by democrats of their democracy doesn’t come at the expense of stability.

Crisis and stability

Mark’s expectation can be realized but this, it seems, will need to happen under the guidance of a framework devoted to ensuring the stability of democracy. It’s reasonable to propose a non-partisan council composed of citizens and experts whose task is to ensure that democratic solutions to crises do actually occur, to keep track of these democratic solutions, and to be able to publically justify how these solutions are adding to the stability of the country’s types of democracy as opposed to risking it.

Crises can be good for democracies. Yet this only holds true if crises trigger a new mindset that appreciates and promotes ‘long-term thinking’ and reflexivity among both politicians and citizens.

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selen Jean Paul Gagnon

Selen A. Ercan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA), University of Canberra. Selen’s research interests include contemporary democratic theory, deliberative democracy, and alternative forms of political participation.

Jean-Paul Gagnon is a social and political philosopher specializing in democratic theory. He joined the Australian Catholic University in late 2013 as a university postdoctoral research fellow and is based in the School of Arts (Melbourne). He co-edits the Berghahn (Oxford, New York) journal Democratic Theory and also co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan book series The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy (both with Dr Mark Chou). His research focuses on democratic theory – especially non-human democracy and innovations in democracy (like participatory taxation and economic democracy).

Note: this article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Crick Centre, or the Understanding Politics blog series. For more follow our twitter discussion #understandingpolitics.

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