OPINION - Is there a crisis of representative politics in Europe?

By Gerard Delanty

- The author is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).

ISTANBUL (AA) — The basis of democracy is political representation, as citizens do not directly rule. Liberal democracy is essentially representative democracy, whereby political rule is effectively conducted by political parties through the electoral process. Direct rule by "the people" has a limited role to play and, as in the Brexit referendum in 2016, it can have a detrimental outcome. The other major dimension of democratic government is the rule of law, as in constitutionalism. Now, in recent years, there has been much talk of the crisis of democracy, even its end. For democracy to be in jeopardy, there would need to be either a major crisis of representation or of the rule of law, or some combination of both. Is this likely?

- A shift towards authoritarianism?

In much of the world, there has been a clear, if variable, drift towards authoritarianism, as reflected most notably in the Russian Federation, recently in Israel, India, and the US since former President Donald Trump. But in Europe, aside from some outliers such as Hungary, this trend is less evident — though it may now be emerging with the extreme right gaining electoral ground. In 2023, the extreme right emerged as the largest party in the Netherlands and in 2024 in Austria. The rise of illiberalism and the specter of authoritarianism need to be carefully assessed and their causes identified. I suggest that such trends, which are not irreversible, are expressions of a crisis of representation rather than a product of widespread approval of fascism or due to the appeal of the extreme right.

It does appear to be the case that there is an increase in public distrust of politicians, lower electoral turnout, and declining membership of political parties. Young people especially appear to be withdrawing, and there is widespread complacency and cynicism about democracy. There is even the belief that democracy does not work or is unable to fix a broken world. Yet, disaffection with democracy does not stop grievances from being expressed. Instead, disaffection takes the form of anti-establishment attitudes, which are almost always at the expense of the mainstream parties of the right and especially the left. The extreme right are the main benefactors of this crisis of legitimacy of representative politics, but not the main cause. As these parties enter into government, they also lose their character as anti-establishment.

I suggest that the problems are largely structural in that they derive from the limitations of representative politics, which is systemically unable to resolve the conflict between individual and collective interests. For democracy to work, it must, at some level, satisfy both. In the period since 1945, it was arguably the case that capitalism tempered by democracy struck a balance between the collective interest and individual interests. The former has been progressively eroded and the era of neoliberalism gave legitimacy to the politics of individual interest (which is easier to satisfy through short-term quick fixes than is the collective interest, which requires long-term goals). I think what we are seeing today is that many people are now realizing that their own individual interests are also not being served by their electoral representatives. The result, as political theorists such as Ben Ansell in Why Politics Fails (2023) and David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (2018) have argued, is a failure of politics, which can be understood more as an internal crisis of democracy than an external one (for example, from war or organized political violence) and deriving from its weaknesses.

- Crisis of representation in Europe

While constitutionalism does not appear to be in crisis in Europe in the way that it is in the US, one major weakness is that the demands and expectations of citizens cannot any longer be met by political representation. It is not that there is no desire for collective interests or an absence of solidarity in favor of a turn to individual interests — on the contrary, there is an ever-greater desire for the collective interest to be served. The problem is rather that the institutional form of democratic representation is unable to deal with the expectations of citizens, partly because of the nature of new expectations, which go beyond the older demands that were easier to realize, challenges such as climate politics, a more complicated situation of human rights and gender politics, and greater societal complexity. Representation, rooted in the old ideologies, also no longer works well in the context of digital media, the tyranny of algorithms, and the perpetual reporting of corruption and scandal. Increased knowledge by citizens leads to greater skepticism and distrust. These trends are all occurring at a time when political parties and political leaders are losing their role as the gatekeepers of the state. In an era of technocracy, experts are playing an increasingly important role in governance, which consequently gradually loses its representative nature, and, as Jonathan White has shown in The Long Run (2024), democracy ends up caught in the trap of short-termism. It is also caught in the trap of often being too slow, in contrast to fast capitalism.

In this situation, it is hardly surprising that there is increased polarization, atomization, and a transformation of politics by fear or by the cult of personality. This makes it harder to achieve the kind of rational consensus that Habermas, in his theory of the public sphere, saw as the core of democracy. The resulting instability has not yet led to a crisis of governance, as coalitions are, at least for now, still able to prevent the extreme right from gaining an absolute governing majority.

It is also not the case that progressive politics is at an end. As Simon Tormey has shown very well in The End of Representative Politics (2015), it is just that it does not express itself entirely through the organs of representative democracy, but through other forms of mobilization and collective action. The fundamental fact is that democracy has reached the critical juncture at which representation and citizen expectations are not identical. This has created an inchoate void that is filled by many voices.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu