ABSTRACT
Many studies point to a democratic deficit not only in the EU but in political systems in general. This is linked to limitations in citizen participation as a core element of democracy (Dahl 1994). In addition, the current constellation of political systems in the ‘Western World’ has been shown to be a ‘post-democracy’ emerging from the complexity of modern society (Zolo 1992) and has been characterized as a ‘crisis of egalitarian politics and the trivialization of democracy’ (Crouch 2004: 6). But is the ‘golden age’ of democracy really over due to the pressures of globalization and the erosion of the nation state? In this book it will be argued that the way we have learnt to think about democracy has to be changed and the notion of democracy has to be re-conceptualized. The aim of the book is to make a contribution to what has been called by Dahl (1994) a ‘third transformation of democracy’. According to Dahl a ‘first transformation of democracy’ took place in
the first half of the fifth century bc in Greece [in the] transformation of nondemocratic city-states – typically aristocracies, oligarchies, monarchies, or mixtures of all three – into democracies. For the next two thousand years, the idea and practice of democracy were associated almost exclusively with small city-states. [. . .] In the small compass of the city-states, the central institution was the assembly in which all citizens were entitled to participate. [In] a second democratic transformation the idea of democracy was transferred from the city-state to the much larger scale of the national state. [. . .] What made the second transformation possible was an idea and a set of practice we now tend to regard as essential to democracy – representation. [. . .] As a consequence of that transformation in scale and form, a set of political institutions and practices, which taken as a whole were unknown to the theory and practice of democracy up to that time, came into existence.
