Democracy in the Age of Globalization and Mediatization

H. Kriesi, D. Bochsler, J. Matthes, S. Lavenex, M. Bühlmann, F. Esser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137299857
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299871
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the models of contemporary democracy; its social, cultural, economic and political prerequisites; its empirically existing varieties and its two major challenges - globalization and mediatization. The book also covers the global spread of democracy and its spread into supranational democracies.

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Introduction – The New Challenges to Democracy

Hanspeter Kriesi

During the last half of the 20th century, democracy became the only legitimate game in town. The world witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented expansion of the number of democracies, as a result of the third wave of democratization. Of course, not all countries have completed and consolidated their transition to democracy, and there are still a considerable number of countries that have not even begun to make their transition to democracy. Beyond the West, the process of democratization has proven to be more difficult than expected. Moreover, the world is currently changing in ways that, according to many observers, pose new threats to the already established democracies. In contrast to the optimism of the early 1990s, when some observers heralded an ‘end of history’ that would definitively seal the victory of liberal democracy across the world, a realistic assessment of the state of democracy today must admit that democratic regimes are faced with numerous challenges that threaten to undermine their very legitimacy. Contrary to the optimists’ predictions, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of democracy it symbolized have given way to a severe political malaise almost everywhere in the West. Today, citizens in Western democracies are increasingly disillusioned with their leaders and institutions. This disillusionment is, for example, expressed in declining levels of electoral, or in the increasing populist, mobilization in Western Europe and the US.

We shall concentrate in this volume on two challenges to democracy, which we consider the major ones in the 21st century – globalization and mediatization. While concentrating on these, we by no means imply that they are the only challenges to contemporary forms of democracy. Before we go on, we should just briefly mention a series of other challenges that are of considerable importance for democracy as we know it.

First, technological change tends to drive economic transformation with a vast range of implications for political-interest mobilization and the complexity of policy making. Many observers argue that most of the risks generated by modern societies are the product of technologically induced structural transformations inside national economies (e.g. Iversen and Cusack 2000).

Second, demographic change has become a major force, making it increasingly difficult for politicians to deliver rising levels of benefit and satisfy popular demands at a time of rising pressure on health and social security systems. The demographic transition may causally drive certain aspects of globalization (such as migration) rather than the other way around.

Third, the increasing socio-economic inequality and cultural heterogeneity of national political communities, which are, of course, intimately related to globalization, tend to undermine the societal preconditions for political equality. Current economic trends of increasing inequality ‘raise the question of whether democracy can flourish in the midst of great concentrated wealth’ (Bartels 2008: 284). As Bartels shows for the US example, economic inequality has ‘pervasive, corrosive effects on political representation and policy making’. Fears of cultural heterogeneity linked to global migration flows are particularly salient in Western European democracies and have given rise to defensive forms of mobilization by the indigenous populations.

Fourth, social-cultural preference formation is a partially autonomous force of democratic change that gives rise to new demands for democratic autonomy. Thus, social movement scholars suggest that our contemporary modern societies have become ‘movement societies’ (Meyer and Tarrow 1998) – that is, they suggest that political protest has become an integral part of modern life; that protest behavior is employed with greater frequency, by more diverse constituencies, and is used to represent a wider range of claims than ever before; and that professionalization and institutionalization may be changing the social movement into an instrument of conventional politics. As protest becomes a part of everyday politics, we assist in the ‘normalization of the unconventional’ (Fuchs 1991).

Finally, the continuing expansion of what Mény (2002) has called the ‘constitutionalist element of democracy’ to the detriment of its popular element is also driven by forces internal to the political system.

Globalization

‘There has been an assumption at the heart of modern democratic theory ‘concerning a “symmetrical” and “congruent” relationship between decision-makers and the recipients of political decisions’, David Held (2006: 290) explains in his Models of Democracy. This is the assumption of a political community which governs itself and determines its own future. This political community inhabits a bounded territory, and decision-makers and decision-takers are both locked into that territory.

For centuries, the development of the nation-states in Europe was a process of territorial consolidation, center formation in the newly consolidated territories, nation building and democratization. To the extent that the populations in the consolidated nation-states could no longer avoid the consequences of the decisions taken by the political centers in the consolidated nation-states, and to the extent that these centers imposed ever more demanding obligations on their populations, the members of the national populations began to identify with the others equally locked into the delimited territory and to demand a share in the control over the national centers of power. According to the ‘dialectic of control’ (Giddens 1985: 202), the increasing power of the national centers went hand in hand with an increasing democratization of national politics. As a result of this development, the ‘demos’ has come to be defined as the set of members of the political community locked into the territory of a given nation-state, or, more precisely, by the residents of that territory who enjoy citizenship rights. As a result of this long-term development, congruence or symmetry between decision-takers and decision-makers exists to the extent that the members of a nation-state are exclusively affected by the decisions taken by the authorities of their own territory. In other words, modern representative democracy is based on the ‘container’ of the modern nation-state.

Today, as Held goes on to explain, this congruence is fundamentally put into question by the challenge of globalization, which tends to invert the century-long experience of European nation-states. Today, advancing economic, cultural, and political globalization leads to an expansion, deepening, and acceleration of global interdependencies across the borders of the nation-states. These processes can be interpreted as processes of ‘denationalization’ (Zürn 1998). They imply the dissolution of boundaries between the nation-states, or, as Ruggie (1993) calls it, the ‘unbundling of territory’; that is, the dissolution of the different types of relationships which have been packed together by the national borders.

Congruence and symmetry can break down in different ways. First of all, the lives of citizens in a given state can be affected by the transborder effects of decisions taken by the authorities of neighboring or other, more remote nation-states. Neighboring states may locate nuclear power plants at their border, which poses a potential threat for the population across the border. Industrial plants pollute the water of rivers, which poses a problem for the populations living downstream in countries that did not have any say in the location of those plants. Landing approaches of airports are designed to alleviate the collateral impact on the national population, which may create considerable nuisance for the people living across the border whose well-being has not been considered in the siting decisions. In some cases, the states concerned by such decisions may retaliate, creating problems for the citizens in the countries where the original decisions were taken. The Czech nuclear power plant Temelin, located close to the Austrian border, provides an illustrative case of the resulting problems in the relationship between states when one of the state authorities takes decisions which impinge on the populations of neighboring states to whom they are not accountable. This case is particularly problematic, because neighboring Austria had not put into service its own nuclear power plant at Zwentendorf (in the same region) and had decided to get out of nuclear energy altogether.

These examples all involve neighboring states, for the simple reason that they are caused by the physical proximity of the source of the nuisance. There is another set of political decisions with transborder impacts which do not depend on physical proximity: these concern regulations that incite citizens from other states to exit from their home country, or prevent citizens from other states from doing so. This kind of problem is by no means restricted to the relationship between neighboring states. For example, tax laws may be crafted in such a way as to incite tax evasion among citizens or corporations from countries all over the world. The Irish corporate tax code illustrates this possibility. Immigration regulations provide examples of countries trying to attract citizens from other countries (the ‘brain drain’), as well as examples of countries trying to prevent citizens from other countries from entering.

Phenomena such as the ones illustrated by these examples have always been troubling the relationship between sovereign states, and one could maintain that they are nothing new. Borders have never been completely closed, and the siting decisions and regulations of one state have always had an impact on the citizens of other states. Taking issue with the view that, in this respect, there is nothing new under the sun, we would like to suggest that – as a result of technological developments, as well as of social and political change – the siting decisions and regulations introduced by nation-states are likely to have much greater potential impacts on the populations in other states than they did in the past. That is, the sovereign decisions taken by the authorities of any given state pose a potentially much greater threat for the life chances of the populations in other states. Thus, as illustrated by the nuclear power plants (e.g. Chernobyl), the pollution potential by a source in any given nation-state is today immeasurably greater than it used to be in the past. Similarly, the example of the Irish corporate tax code illustrates that the character of a policy changes with the changing technological, social, and political environment: with the deregulation and opening up of the financial markets, the implications of the Irish corporate tax code took on proportions that had been unknown before, which implies that the specificities of this code pose a much greater threat to a much larger number of countries than it did in the past.

Second, congruence and symmetry can also break down within a given nation-state. The citizens of one territorial sub-unit within a nation-state may be affected by the decisions of the authorities of another sub-unit which are not accountable to them. In other words, the incongruence and asymmetry that we encounter at the level of the nation-states may, in perfectly analogous ways, repeat itself at the sub-national (regional or local) level. The more decentralized a given nation-state, the more likely this kind of incongruence and asymmetry will be. In federalist states, one sub-unit (state, Land, canton) may take decisions which pose a threat to the population of another sub-unit. At the local level, the authorities of one city may take decisions which hurt the population of a neighboring township. Local incongruences are particularly widespread in metropolitan areas, where the core cities provide services and infrastructures for the residents of the suburban areas.

At this level, too, incongruences become more important as a result of technical developments, and of social and political change. Thus, as a result of improving transport systems, the size of the metropolitan areas increases, and formerly unconnected political units become part of the metropolitan area. In reaction to such a change, the authorities of some of these formerly unconnected units might decide to change some local or regional regulations – such as their tax laws – in order to make their unit more attractive to residents from other parts of the metropolitan area. Their decision, of course, will have consequences for the life chances of the citizens in the other parts of the metropolitan area who do not have the opportunity or the intention to move and to whom the authorities in the unit concerned are not accountable.

Both types of incongruence we have discussed so far concern relationships between decision-makers and populations at the same level – either the national or the sub-national level. This type of incongruence could be called horizontal incongruence. The authorities of one territorial unit at a given level take a decision that has serious consequences for the population of another territorial unit at the same level. This type of incongruence should be distinguished from vertical incongruences, which imply that decision-makers at a higher level take decisions which are binding for decision-makers and populations at a lower level of a multi-level governance structure, without being accountable to them. This second type of incongruence is at least as important as the two versions of horizontal incongruence which we have already introduced. It concerns the decisions of supranational decision-makers, such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the EU, which increasingly impinge on the life chances of national populations.

One could argue that, in Europe, globalization mainly means European integration. The process of European integration can be described as the process of forming a supranational state, which goes beyond the common intergovernmentalism, even if the EU has not yet reached the character of a completely autonomous state. Stefano Bartolini (2005) interprets the European integration as the last stage in a process of European political development. The preceding stages corresponded to the formation of state centers, the formation of nations, the democratization of nation-states and the creation of the national welfare states. Bartolini suggests that this last stage can be analyzed along the same lines as the preceding development of the nation-states and based on the same processes. At the European level, the new center already has considerable policy competencies, and EU law is now recognized as superordinate and directly applicable by the member-states, even if the resulting institutional structure of the EU and its borders do not (yet) correspond to the model of the nation-state. Thus, the EU institutions presently still lack the necessary means of coercion and the bureaucratic apparatus to impose EU law against the resistance of the member-states. In the EU, the hierarchy of law is not based on a corresponding hierarchy of real power. Still, the expansion of the competencies of the EU means that the supranational governance structure becomes ever more important.

The extension of existing multi-level governance structures to the supranational level is, of course, a response to increasing global interdependencies, which involve the problem we have just described, with respect to the horizontal incongruences, of externalities or spillovers of decisions taken in one sovereign state affecting all the other sovereign states. As is pointed out by Hooghe and Marks (2003: 239), the chief benefit of such structures lies in their ‘scale flexibility’. This benefit comes, however, at a double price: the ‘demos problem’ is accompanied by a ‘coordination problem’ – that is, the problem of how to coordinate the spillovers of decisions taken in some units or jurisdictions for other units or jurisdictions. Hooghe and Marks call this a ‘second-order coordination problem’ because ‘it involves coordination among institutions whose primary function is to coordinate human activity’. Second-order coordination costs increase exponentially as the number of relevant units or jurisdictions increases. There are two strategies to limit these costs – either one limits the number of autonomous actors who have to be coordinated or one limits the interactions among actors by splicing competencies into functionally distinct units.

The first solution leads to what Hooghe and Marks call type-I governance – governance by general-purpose, non-intersecting, and durable jurisdictions hierarchically structured into units of ever more encompassing scale. The units of such structures are typically territorially defined. This is the model we know from federalism. The second solution leads to type-II governance – governance by functionally specific, intersecting, and flexible jurisdictions which are not hierarchically structured into ever more encompassing units, but are more like task-specific networks often of a more informal character.

Given that the demos is defined in territorial terms, type-I governance structures are much more compatible with liberal democracy as we know it than type-II governance structures. Type-I governance structures are, however, subject to increasingly long chains of delegation, which is likely to lead to problems of accountability. Type-I structures may also give rise to new incongruences and asymmetries between decision-makers and decision-takers. Such incongruences may arise when the EU decision is taken by authorities within the EU who are not accountable to the national electorates. In addition, several territorially defined demoi may be concerned, and the question is how the multiple chains of delegation are coordinated. New incongruences may arise when the representatives of a (qualified) majority of national demoi imposes a decision on a minority of national demoi within the supranational structure. Even more serious are incongruences arising from powerful minorities of states imposing their decisions on a majority of weaker states. Thus, from the point of view of small states, governance beyond the nation-state typically seems to imply that a small group of powerful states gets the upper hand in the formulation of internationally agreed rules, through a combination of formal and informal influence, and that most nation-states become rule-takers rather than rule-makers.

Compared to type-I governance structures, type-II governance is even more problematic for democracy: the territorially structured jurisdictions and corresponding political communities do not necessarily correspond to the functionally defined jurisdictions, which means that there is no demos to whom the decision-makers could be accountable. Functionally defined ‘stakeholders’ replace territorially defined demoi, which leads, as Papadopoulos (2009: 7) notes, to a form of democracy that is quite different from what we usually mean by the term, i.e. to ‘advocacy democracy’. In such a situation, actors eligible for participation in decision-making are ‘those who can credibly claim that they express strong preferences and defend causes that are of central concern to them’. Traditional forms of advocacy democracy include the well-known forms of representation by interest groups and social movement organizations – that is, forms of representation which operate outside of the electoral channel. As a result of the emergence of multilevel governance structures, functional channels are generally said to be strengthened (for the EU, see Bartolini 2005: 382; Papadopoulos 2010).

With the increasing interdependence between nation-states, the creation of supranational governance structures becomes necessary to provide a solution for the externalities or spillover effects produced by the decisions of sovereign national decision-makers. But while the establishment of a supranational governance structure may solve some of the horizontal accountability problems for democracy which arise at the national level, it creates new, possibly more serious, vertical accountability problems, which arise from the specificities of the relationship between the authorities at the national and the supranational levels in the multi-level governance structure. Thus, it increases the number of stakeholders to whom the n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction – The New Challenges to Democracy
• Part I: Democracy, a Moving Target of Great Complexity and Variability
• Part II: The Challenges of Globalization and Mediatization
• References
• Index