and Nazi parties, which, despite speaking a populist rhetoric and making use of mass mobilizations, were deeply hostile to democracy and, once in power, suppressed it with ruthless violence. The defeat of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other fascist leaders in the Second World War and the devastation of their countries led these elites to accept not only the election of governments, but also the pursuit of political agendas promoted by groups from outside their own ranks.
We see this most clearly in the themes that the social democratic and socialist left had been trying to bring to the table since the late nineteenth century: workers’ rights, a welfare state, free or heavily subsidized education and health services, redistributive taxation. But it was not only the left that now adopted these policies. One can, for example, see the impact of democracy on the politics of Roman Catholicism. The church had set its face against all dilutions of aristocratic and other forms of elite rule ever since the French Revolution, and in the twentieth century had supported the fascist suppression of infant democracies in Italy, Portugal and Spain. There was however a Christian democratic wing to Catholic politics, struggling against the prevailing authoritarianism. After the Second World War, this moved from being marginalized by Catholic elites to become the dominant form of Christian politics, for several decades being the most successful group of parties in western Europe. This was all part of the democratic moment.
The Weakening of Democracy
Some entropy of maximal democracy has to be expected, but two primary factors, in turn producing a third, have accelerated the process. These are:
economic globalization and the associated rise of the giant firm;
changes in class structure and (in western Europe but not the US) a decline in the power of religion, which have more or less inevitably weakened the main forces that linked ordinary people to political life;
and, in consequence of these two forces, a growing tendency for politicians to reduce their links with their mass supporters and prefer the company of global business elites.
Globalization has weakened democracy in two ways. First, it has reduced the reach of national governments. If the most important decisions that shape the economic world take place at global levels, while democracy remains rooted in nation-states, inevitably much democratic activity can come to seem pointless. Second, the institutions that have been most advanced by globalization are transnational corporations, which have outgrown the governance capacity of individual nation-states. If they do not like the regulatory or fiscal regime in one country, they threaten to move to another, and increasingly states compete in their willingness to offer them favourable conditions and tax regimes, as they need the investment. Democracy has simply not kept pace with capitalism’s rush to the global. The best it can manage are certain international groupings of states, but even the most important by far of these, the European Union (EU), is a clumsy pygmy in relation to the agile corporate giants, and its own democratic quality, while far stronger than anything similar in the world, is weak.
Today’s dominant politico-economic ideology, neoliberalism, has turned this weakening of the nation-state into a virtue. If it is believed that governments are almost by definition incompetent and that large firms are necessarily efficient, then the less power the former have and the more freedom from them that firms gain, the better. Large numbers of politicians and politically active persons, from all points of the political spectrum, came to believe this during the latter years of the twentieth century. A decline in the importance of political democracy was almost bound to follow.
The second factor has been quite different. Class and religion were the main forces that enabled ordinary, non-political people to acquire political identities. As will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6, this happened because class and often religious identity put people on different sides in struggles for entry into political citizenship. These class and religious identities were attributes that people well understood. When they acquired political meaning through these struggles, people could understand which parties were working for or against ‘people like them’, and could vote accordingly. Once universal adult suffrage had been achieved, these struggles gradually passed from being remembered experience to being something learned from parents and grandparents about the past. Meanwhile, the new classes being created by the growth of post-industrial occupations did not face struggles for admission to citizenship, and therefore have not carried clues to political identity. Similarly, as European societies became secularized and religious leaders departed from their traditional conservative political positions, adherence to a particular faith – or none – also ceased to convey political identity.
Most adults have continued to vote, though turnout has slowly declined almost everywhere, and voting has become an act rather detached from life’s deeply felt activities. Figure 1.2 shows changes in the proportion of persons qualified to vote in national parliamentary elections who actually did so across the main west European countries between the mid-1980s and the most recent election (as of mid-2019). Such a comparison between two periods of time conceals fluctuations that might have taken place between them, and cannot cope with special factors affecting individual countries at those two periods themselves. However, it is clear that everywhere except Switzerland (where turnout has in any case always been low) and (marginally) Spain, there has been decline. In some cases this has been minor, but in others it has been strong. Two countries (Belgium and Italy) moved from compulsory voting during the period, but that seemed to have little impact on the general trend in voting.
NB: ‘Germany’ in the mid-1980s was the German Federal Republic; today it is united Germany
Figure 1.2 Turnout in national parliamentary elections, mid-1980s (dark grey) and late 2010s (light grey), west European countries
Source: Author’s calculations based on Wikipedia data
With the exception of Slovenia, the populations of central and eastern Europe did not respond with exceptional enthusiasm to being able to vote in free elections after the fall of communism, turnout in their first elections during the 1990s being typically lower than those found even now in most of western Europe. Since then, there have been varying patterns (Figure 1.3), but decline has predominated.
The mass memberships of parties themselves also often declined, leaving their smaller number of activists representing the traditional symbolic identities of the classes and faiths that had built the party but not extending into new parts of the population. Party leaderships observed this, which meant that the mass parties were declining in their value to leaders as ways of connecting them to voters at large. As core constituencies shrank, party leaders came increasingly to believe that they did not really need core constituencies. Rather, they wanted to be able to take them for granted as voters who had no other home to which they could go, leaving leaders free to find votes across as wide a range of opinion as possible. This necessarily meant a decline in the clarity of parties’ profiles, weakening further any strong bonds they might have with citizens.
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
