Conceptualizing Politics

party) and conferring her or him an imperative mandate. This does ordinarily not 
happen, while her or his conformity to the mandate could also hardly be checked, 
for legal and technical reasons.
The strong reason is that, confronted with policy making, the electorate, espe-
cially the swinging wings that do and undo majorities, more often than not chooses 
to support its immediate self-interest, disregarding the likely needs of people too far 
in space (the poor of the world, say) and time (future generations) who cannot 
make their voice heard. The presently much lamented short-termism of democratic 
politics has one of its roots here. Giving immediate, daily policy-making power to 
the broad electorate would block innovation and reform, which are often advanced 
by small avantgardes without the stable support of the majority.
On account of these two reasons combined, the idea of representative bodies 
being replaced by this version of e-democracy with daily or weekly voting looks 
very much like a nightmare, a Nineteen Eighty-Four with a collective and imper-
sonal Virtual Big Brother.
13
 In addition to the previous considerations, the learning 
process taking place among active citizens, politicians and bureaucrats in the debate 
occurring in public opinion and parliament is worth being preserved and not dis-
carded in favour of the fictional competence of every isolated individual to shape 
policy. Even in mature democracies the web seems to have become primarily the 
venue used by parts of the population to vent their dominating approach to politics, 
that is anger and resentment against rulers and fellow citizens as well, all spiced with 
falsehoods, unfounded claims and inflammatory language. Traditional voting has 
been also influenced by these attitudes, as in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK.
In other words, the cook whom Lenin in 1917 wanted to make eligible for run-
ning the country – we met her already in Chapter 1 – would have led it into disaster 
much swifter than the Communist regime did, and extreme egalitarianism is, in gen-
eral, not to be taken seriously in its claims, because of its counter-intentional effects 
(the Russian Revolution rather produced a self-perpetuating bureaucratic elite) and 
because it denies the specificity and complexity of political activity. In the practise 
of democratic countries, cooks or actors or grocers or professors of both sexes have 
become eligible for public office only once they have learned the art of politics on 
the field – as politicians, not as defined by their former profession or social status.
These arguments in favour of representative democracy resonate in part with 
those against the tyranny of the majority made by classical liberalism, eminently by 

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Government and democracy  91
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) in his masterwork De la démocratie en Amérique/ 
Of Democracy in America (1835). Focusing on the downsides of democracy, we should 
rather direct our attention to recent experiences such as the deterioration of demo-
cratic processes due to the overwhelming pressure stemming from the massive spec-
tacularization of politics or to what the Columbia scholar of democracy Giovanni 
Sartori has dubbed ‘videocracy’. This all comes down to political will-formation and 
communication being subjugated under the logic of televised entertainment, far 
beyond the inevitable percentage of theatrical self-presentation that already played a 
role in the Greek agoras. Another distorting factor lies in the polarisation of political 
conflict that occurs in some countries, most notably in the USA, with electoral cam-
paigns whose core has been summarised as ‘who hates who’. This seems to weaken 
or to erode the political identity of the citizens, which is in a democracy more vital 
than elsewhere since more than others this regime must be able – as we have seen – 
to rely on a universally shared belief in certain values and principles.
* * *
We have thus examined the presently more influential downsides of democracy 
that emerge on the subjective side of politics. They converge in creating the ter-
rain for one of the two greatest dangers surrounding democracy itself: populism, the 
other danger being its low efficacy in policy making, as we shall see. By populism 
I mean the belief in the ‘people’ being the sole owner not just of sovereignty, but 
of any actual power, the touting of this entity against any limitation set by liberal-
democratic institutions and the proclamation of its morally superior rights against 
any elite.
14
 Since the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, universal suffrage 
made the masses of voters co-protagonists of political life, both a rightist and a leftist 
populism
15
 have popped up time and again in most countries, with the exception of 
countries with previous and engrained autocratic traditions such as China and, to a 
lesser extent, Russia; we cannot possibly explore here the historical phenomenol-
ogy of this attitude, nor can we discuss the epistemological problems arising from a 
notion that, while indispensable, is sometimes overstretched.
Populist movements and initiatives can be revealing signals of social pathologies, 
such as the sky-rocketing income inequality within most countries, and political 
failures in managing the ordinary citizen’s problems. Populism as a political project 
can be dangerous for the domestic democratic stability, leading not only to the de- 
legitimation of the institutions protecting fundamental rights by the rule of law, but 
also to the undoing of democratic peace as well as international peace, since right-
leaning populism in particular mostly comes paired with eruptions of nationalism. 
Not to forget is the tendency to authoritarian leadership or caesarism residing in 
the ‘people’ of populism, which can by its very nature be led only by bosses and 
demagogues adept at creating political myths and distortions and using the media 
for the mobilisation of masses.
Populism would not represent such a relevant threat to democracy if it did not 
happen to re-emerge
16
 in a time marked by what we may call the objective downsides 
of democracy, which are obviously interconnected with the subjective ones, their 

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92  How politics works
distinction only being analytical. In Western countries, but not only here, the dif-
ficulties in reacting to the effects of globalisation, in particular (youth) unemploy-
ment, job precariousness and bad jobs with low pay go hand-in-hand with the 
demise of welfare entitlements and the weakening of social safety nets – along with 
the loss of social capital highlighted by Robert Putnam (Putnam 1993, 2000) for 
the USA, but not limited to America. Islamist terrorism and its grasp on second 
generation immigrants, along with the never-ending wave of new migrants have 
grown into an additional problem, along with the constitutional questions aris-
ing from the inevitably enhanced security regimes. Also, whatever the real grasp 
of these phenomena, renewed talks of secular stagnation and of an emerging and 
job-cutting Fourth Industrial Revolution add to the subjective disorientation of 
citizens. This, along with the justified ‘indignation’
17
 caused by rising inequality, is 
the breeding ground for one or the other shape of populism, whose dangerousness 
lies in its ability to pick up existing and justified elements of protest against gov-
ernments while proposing to tear down the institutional safety nets protecting any 
politics based on rational debate and shared rules of the game.
On the whole, populism seems to make the worst out of the ambivalent notion 
of ‘the people’ that lies at the core of democracy: one more reason to abandon this 
hypostasised notion along with all the surrounding rhetoric and put instead in place 
‘the citizens’. But it is also true that the present state of affairs in democracies – not to 
mention some of the other troubles we will address later on – seems to provide fuel 
for the populist fires that erupt time and again in several countries. As long as this 
fuel is not neutralised by redesigning democracy, there is little chance that the fires 
cease to erupt. One could even ask if the type of mentality (made of manichaeis-
tic simplifications, disregard for complex arguments, rancour and self-righteousness) 
prevailing in populist electorates is not going to occupy more and more minds, 
voiding democracy of its meaning and values. On this front the only proposal so 
far is to complement or (in radical formulations) replace the voting procedures of 
representative democracy with deliberations involving all stakeholders, in which rea-
sonable arguments capable of finding solutions adequate to the common good are 
exchanged rather than relying on bargaining or mediating between positions based 
on self-interest. Participants in deliberative democracy
 – as its theorists intend by draw-
ing on Habermas’s thought – present their arguments relying on the ‘claims of valid-
ity’ that are common to any linguistic exchange among competent citizens. Those 
theorists have meanwhile set out a large literature containing models of deliberative 
democracy that seem to satisfy their normative perfectionism rather than to tackle 
the troubles of democratic regimes around the world. More helpful for the future 
of democracy among citizens who are a mix of income maximizers (be the actor a 
millionaire or a low-income pensioner) and partisan political philosophers are the 
experiments of deliberative processes in local communities, which can be in this way 
more broadly involved in consultations that prepare for the formal decision making 
of representative bodies such as city councils. In these cases the quality of democracy 
is enhanced, with regard to both the procedure and the substantive  outcomes – 
policies that are often better than those resulting from mere voting. Also, the range 
of deliberative democracy remains obviously limited, as it cannot apply to, say, the 

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Government and democracy  93
national budget or foreign policy decisions. Overblown confidence in it is not a 
good service to what it could do for the troubled democracy of the present time.
* * *
Do these very cautious and demythologizing views about democracy mean that 
this book identifies with the famous definition formulated by Joseph Schumpeter?
the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at polit-
ical decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of 
a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.
(Schumpeter 1942, 269)
This definition is not only elitist, in the sense that it views politics mainly as a 
business among smart and powerful individuals, but also peers into it with eco-
nomic notions such as competition for a sought-after scarce good – the major-
ity of votes. The  definition is a pinnacle of political realism and has, ever since its 
first  formulation in 1942, caused rejection as well as attraction. It comes closer 
to how democracy really functions than its definition as ‘government of/by/for 
the people’, which taken literally materialises nearly nowhere – also because of 
the ambiguity of the ‘people’ notion explained above. On the other hand, also in 
Schumpeter’s formula the people or the generality of citizens remains the bearer 
of sovereignty or ultimate power, which confers the (derived, secondary) power to 
make policy decisions on the individuals (or parties) that have gained more votes. 
In an ironical sense the formula has regained validity: while in the decades after the 
last World War, power was rather conferred upon parties, it is now again in many 
countries the individual leader, along with her or his staff, to play – in the so-called 
personalization of politics – the main role in the electoral game and the formula-
tion of policies. The demise of the party format as the pivot of the political process 
in democracies has degenerative effects on the latter, as it deprives political decision 
making of an orderly connection to problems and disfunctions in the society as well 
as protest or new ideas among citizens.
A concluding remark: the image of democracy resulting from this chapter 
focuses on it as a procedure, though the substantive implications of liberal democ-
racy have been also highlighted. In a procedural view on democracy we are in 
the good and large company of the likes of thinkers as different from each other 
as Joseph Schumpeter, Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), Norberto Bobbio and Jürgen 
Habermas – to mention just a few. In the political history of the nineteenth and 
twentieth century, however, to be ‘democratic’ has mostly implied not just loyalty 
to a method, but also a position left from the centre, implying wealth redistribution, 
job creation and protection, more rights for women and minorities – in a word, 
a preference for equality over liberty. The word still keeps much of its symbolical 
or label-like function, in America as well as in Europe and elsewhere. It has sur-
vived the misuse done to it in the former Communist bloc, as ‘democratic’ was the 
official standard definition of the countries that were not allowed to claim to have 

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94  How politics works
attained ‘socialism’ as the leading power, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 
did. The name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a remnant of those 
times, in which a further, now largely vanished dichotomy – substantive vs. formal