Title:	Democracy and Crisis
Authors:	Wolfgang Merkel Sascha Kneip
Keywords:	Democracy
Issue Date:	2018
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	In political and social science, hardly any other term has been carried to market as often as crisis: crisis of the welfare state, of political parties, and of parliament; performance crisis; governance, structural, rationality, legitimation, integration, and motivation crises; the Euro crisis; crisis in the Middle East; crisis of dictatorships; and, over and over again, crisis of democracy. As far as this last instance is concerned, there are three major lines of debate: the public debate, the theoretical discourse on democracy, and empirical democracy research. First is the public debate. At least in Europe, it has been dominated by the opinion that many sub-crises, such as the crises of trust in political elites, parties, parliaments, and governments, have condensed into a general crisis of democracy. There is clearly a marked North-South gap in democratic self-description: Denmark is not Greece, the United Kingdom is not Spain, and Switzerland is not Italy. Although far from endorsing the vulgarized discourse of the public media, political theory has from the outset maintained that democracy is inconceivable without crisis. This view goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and Polybios in antiquity (Held 1996, 13ff.; Meier 2004; Keane 2009); it was shared in early modern times by Thomas Hobbes and later by Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Max Weber (see Schmidt 2008). Talk about a crisis of democracy is hence as old as democracy itself. The discussion gained momentum in the early 1970s. Both left and right conducted the debate with vehemence and to some extent with quasi-structural arguments (see Offe 1984). Claus Offe’s Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (1972), James O‘Connor’s neo-Marxist theory of the Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973), and Jürgen Habermas’ influential Legitimation Crisis (1975) determined the crisis discourse on democracy and the (late) capitalist state far beyond that decade. The conservative camp did not counter: it backed this analysis. The report to the Trilateral Commission by Crozier et al. (1975) also painted a gloomy picture of an overburdened democracy.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55219
ISBN:	978-3-319-72559-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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