ABSTRACT

A key premise of this chapter is that all political ideologies (especially party ideologies) tend to use the term ‘democracy’ for legitimation of positions rather than illumination. The Greens are no exception to the rule, just different in the way they do it. Democracy is a word whose meaning is unfixed, perhaps ‘essentially contestable’ (Connolly 1983). We can, and should, get behind the rhetoric and explore the substance of ideological invocations of ‘democracy’.3