Is Liberal Democracy Doomed?
| Author | Bill Jones |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905819854316 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
34 POLITICAL INSIGHT • JUNE 2019
Few can deny that Churchill’s ‘least
bad’ system of government has
recently come under re for not
delivering the government it
promises. That so many aggrieved voters in
the UK, US and across Europe have opted to
support parties hostile to the political status
quo suggests a fundamental dissatisfaction
with liberal democracy itself. The scale of the
crisis has led to questions about whether
liberal democracy can survive.
In Britain, the first phase of questioning
the legitimacy of democracy came during
the 2001 election in which only 59.1
per cent bothered to vote. Subsequent
analysis found a ‘widely believed… crisis of
democracy’ (Bromley et al. 2004). This study
noted a decline in trust in government
but attributed it, at least in part, to the
perceptions of political ‘sleaze’ that dogged
Is Liberal
Democracy Doomed?
The sense of ‘crisis’ in Western democracy has fuelled questions about
whether our political system can survive. Bill Jones examines a series of
recent books that offer differing analyses of the problems in our politics.
John Major’s administration The second,
much more serious, stage has occurred
since the 2008 world economic meltdown
and has occasioned a spate of books
perceiving a possibly terminal decline in
liberal democracy or even a 1930s-like drift
towards fascism.
The global recession saw wages stagnate
while corporate wealth soared. What
followed was a ‘populist’ electoral backlash
across Europe. In Hungary, right-wing
premier Victor Orban won two-thirds of the
vote in 2018. The Polish Law and Justice
Party took 37.6 per cent of the vote in the
last election. Elsewhere, right-wing parties
Political Insight May 2019.indd 34 08/05/2019 10:56
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