Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Substantive and formal democracy
In this light, we can ask the question: how can any society that limits
'democracy' to periodic elections ultimately call itself democratic? A
substan-
tive
- as opposed to purely formal - democracy is one in which freedom and
liberty are actively cultivated across the
totality
of domains and institutions
that individuals traverse weekly, monthly and yearly. As one commentator
puts it, 'Democracy thrives when there are major opportunities for the mass
of ordinary people to participate actively
in shaping the agenda of public
life, and when they are actively using these opportunities' (Crouch, 2004: 2).
Because (as I intimated earlier) freedom and liberty are not self-generating or
spontaneous, they depend upon a sufficiently rich offering of information,
experience and opportunity across a wide range of domains and institutions.
Somewhere between the 'free' but isolated figure of Robinson Crusoe and
the completely manipulated Orwellian individual lies the person for whom
epistemic dependence is a powerful resource, not (or not only) a root cause
of their vulnerability. It's a resource that can give individuals the capacity
to think in innovative, creative and deep ways about themselves, others and
the wider biophysical world we all inhabit.
As Nadia Urbinati puts it, in theory 'Democracy
...
makes
all
issues an
object of public evaluation and all values a matter of opinion and con-
sent' (Urbinati, 2009: 65, emphasis added). In other words, in democracies
pretty much
any
question, event, activity, incident, idea, topic or proposal
might reasonably become a matter of common concern and public debate.
17
We may flatter ourselves in countries like Britain, Canada, France and the
United States that we have a substantive democracy, at least in comparison
with autocratic states like North Korea or war-torn polities like Afghanistan;
however, for many people in these countries, many (most?) issues outside
the formal sphere of 'politics' are not seen as 'political'. The activity of
'being political' is thus unduly constrained in people's perceptions and prac-
tices. British political theorist Colin Crouch (2004) has coined the term
'post-democracy' to describe this: for him, many ostensibly democratic
polities have seen 'democracy' reduced to periodic ballots cast by citizens.
Indeed, some critics suggest that modern democracies are, in fact, studiously
'post-political' (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2007), while Urbinati prefers to apply
the seemingly paradoxical term 'unpolitical democracy' (Urbinati, 2009).
18
What's sometimes called 'the crisis of democracy' thus, for some, extends
well beyond inadequacies in the formal structure of political systems.
Put differently, while there are many patently undemocratic countries in
the world today, some critics argue that this does not mean that the ostensi-
bly democratic ones are necessarily living up to their ideals (see
Box 3.5
for
more on 'post-politics'). This contrasts with a more sanguine view, advanced
by the social theorists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, that ours is the age
of 'reflexive modernity' in which ordinary people actively question experts,
elites and authorities of all kinds.
19
...
It contrasts too with the suggestion,
