What Kind of Democracy is This? Politics in a Changing World
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905817726905 |
| Author | Matthew Flinders |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
34 POLITICAL INSIGHT • SEPTEMBER 2017
There are two types of questions
in life: the ‘Big’ questions and the
‘small’ ones. That might sound
like a gross simplification of a
complex reality. Life rarely respects such
crude binaries, and yet the distinction
still holds to the extent that the ‘small’
questions generally exist within the shadow
of those ‘Big’ questions like the physical
symptoms of an underlying malaise.
Moreover, it is arguably the role of the
scholar, and specifically the social scientist,
to make ‘the link between private troubles
and public issues, between individual
experience and larger social forces’ that C.
Wright Mills’
The Sociological Imagination
(1959) focused upon with such verve.
With both Mills’ instructive guidance in
mind it is only a very short step to suggest
that one of the ‘Big’ questions shaping
contemporary society revolves around the
notion of a ‘democratic malaise’. Intellectually,
What Kind of Democracy
is This? Politics in a
Changing World
There is much talk of the ‘malaise of democracy’. But to understand
how our political world is changing, politicians – and political
scientists – need to pay far more attention to the role of emotion,
argues Matthew Flinders.
this is reected in a welter of scholarship on
the ‘problems’, ‘crises’, ‘suicide’, ‘end’ or ‘death’
of democracy (or more precisely on the
existence of challenges to the dominant
Western liberal model of democracy that
supposedly triumphed at the end of the
20th century, only to apparently falter at the
beginning of the 21st). Empirically, we have
seen the emergence of nationalist populism,
the apparent rejection of progressive values,
the emergence of what is termed ‘post-truth’
politics, rising levels of public disenchantment
with political institutions and – taken together
– processes that might be indicative of some
form of ‘post-democratic’ evolutionary phase.
The ‘Big’ question this leaves us with is
simple: What kind of democracy is this?
Political Insight Sept2017.indd 34 21/07/2017 11:58
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