Figure 1.3 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, early 1990s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), central European EU member states

       Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data

      Parties increasingly sought to relate to voters through the techniques of market research and advertising. Policies and party images became like goods being sold in a market to mass consumers, where firms have no direct knowledge of potential customers as people, but only as purchasing units identified in surveys, focus groups and trial marketing campaigns. Politicians ceased to be people who represented various social categories because of their close contacts with them as fellow citizens, but a separate political class, the recipients of professional marketing data about customer-electors. Socially, they would increasingly prefer to mix with the leaders of global corporations, whose investments they wanted to lure to their economies, and whose funds they wanted to finance their increasingly expensive election campaigns.

Taken together, these processes generated a spiral of increasing remoteness of political leaders from electorates. The apotheosis of this change was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. The main parties of the Italian centre right and centre left had collapsed in the early 1990s in a wave of corruption scandals that provoked a brief democratic moment of anger. The communist party, by now a moderate one, was left as the only major organized political force in the country. Berlusconi was the country’s richest entrepreneur, owning businesses across the post-industrial spectrum from football to financial services, television stations to supermarkets (Mancini 2011). He had been politically associated with the now defunct socialist party, and had a range of legal cases for corruption hanging over his head. Despite these strong links to the old regime, he appeared on the political scene as an outsider who would clean up the system and, most important, provide an alternative to the communist party, which many Italians still feared.

      Berlusconi rapidly created a major, winning national political party, called Forza Italia (a politically meaningless phrase, derived from a football slogan), using, not a membership base, but the financial and personnel resources of his enterprises and his ownership of major television and print media networks. The phenomenon became known as a partito impresa, a corporation party. Over subsequent years, Forza Italia developed a membership base and began to resemble a normal party, collapsing along with other established parties during the 2010s under a new wave of populism. However, its initial circumstances followed a post-democratic model of having few connections to voters and no historical social roots.

      In 2003, I did not argue that in the western world we had already arrived at a state of post-democracy. That would happen if we were in societies in which no spontaneous movements could arise from the general population to give a shock to the political system. Our societies were clearly still able to do this. Three movements in particular had been doing so, bringing to the political agenda issues that established elites would sooner have done without: feminism, environmentalism and xenophobia. The developments I had identified had set us on the road to post-democracy, but we were not yet there.

Liberal Democracy and Other Forms

My argument took for granted that democracy was representative, liberal democracy. This is not the only form. Democracy can be direct, with all citizens participating in making decisions rather than electing representatives. This is possible in small groups, deciding on issues that are readily understood, and there are many examples of it around the world. If direct democracy is attempted among large populations, it takes the form of referenda. Here issues, however complex in themselves, have to be simplified into a binary choice: one is either for or against a particular proposal. If the question is very precise and voters can be expected to be fully conversant with it, this can work quite effectively and gives citizens important opportunities directly to shape their environment. If these conditions are not fulfilled, there is a risk that voters will use a referendum as a chance to air their general dissatisfactions; nothing forces them to vote according to the question asked. When the then Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, called a referendum in December 2016 on a somewhat abstruse question of constitutional reform, he was surprised to find that his opponents turned the campaign into a general vote of confidence in him – which he lost, and so resigned. When in the same year the British people were invited to vote on whether they wanted their country to remain in the EU, researchers found that many voted to leave in order to express a protest vote about various things that they did not like – the EU being only partly related to them.

It has been difficult to improve on representational democracy, whereby we vote for members of a parliament or other deliberative assembly, who then in turn support or oppose a government formed from among them, processing issues, making decisions and passing laws on a daily basis. This is by no means a perfect solution. What does it mean to be able to choose an individual as a ‘representative’, especially in a mass situation where one is virtually certain not to know at all the person concerned? In practice, this problem has been resolved by candidates standing for particular parties, the general programmes of which we might be expected to know more about. This still runs into the problem mentioned above and to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6: by what means do citizens come to see particular parties as representing them? There is no satisfactory theoretical answer to that question; it depends on historical chance and various sociological conditions. In the absence of strong two-way flows of interaction between parties and citizens, there is no way to ensure that representative democracy ‘works’, and commentators should be more honest than they usually are in recognizing that.

The idea of liberal democracy is related to that of representation, but the two things are by no means the same. Liberalism as most broadly conceived means acceptance that human knowledge is fundamentally uncertain, and that even firmly held beliefs might prove to be wrong. Liberalism is therefore tolerant of diversity and of approaches with which one is not personally sympathetic, because one can never be certain that knowledge and understanding will not change. Liberals are entitled to be intolerant of intolerance and of unquestioned beliefs, but not of much else. They might hold religious or political beliefs themselves, but they will never be so convinced that theirs are correct that they have a right to suppress