MANCEPT Research Seminar Semester 2 - Dr Phil Parvin (Loughborough) - ‘Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era’.
| Dates: | 9 February 2017 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Dr Phil Parvin |
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Dr Phil Parvin (Loughborough) will give a paper on, ‘Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era’.
Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era
Liberal democratic states throughout the world are experiencing declining rates of political participation among their citizens. Furthermore, declines in aggregate rates of participation are largely attributable to a disproportionately steep decline in participation among citizens at the lower end of the wealth and income distribution: political participation is declining and becoming more unequal. The paper argues that empirical trends in patterns of political participation observed by political scientists over the past half-century pose significant challenges for democratic theory and practice and also for arguments for deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy presupposes and requires a strong civil society, populated by organisations and associations which are capable of providing citizens’ democratic capacity, communicating citizens’ concerns to decision makers, and encouraging citizen participation. While there is some evidence to suggest that such a civil society existed in past decades in the UK and the USA, there is also compelling evidence to suggest that it no longer exists. The past five decades or so have seen a withering of the conditions necessary for deliberative democracy to function and this fact undermines the persuasiveness of deliberative democracy as a strategy for democratic reform. The paper suggests that deliberative democrats make a common mistake that unites many different normative responses to democratic decline: they ground their vision of renewed democracy in widespread citizen participation. They, like many other non-deliberative democrats, require citizens to participate more often, and in more demanding ways, than they currently do. The paper takes seriously the failure of previous strategies aimed at encouraging wider political participation among citizens, and suggests that instead of requiring more of citizens, we should instead be requiring less of them. Instead of seeking to encourage citizen participation, we should acknowledge that citizens will probably not participate in the volume, or in the ways, that many democratic theorists would like, and that therefore, we need to seek an alternative approach: a regime which can continue to produce democratic outcomes, and which meets the requirements of political equality, in the absence of widespread participation among citizens. The paper outlines what such a vision of democracy might look like.
Dr Richard Child
Lecturer in Political Theory
4.034 Arthur Lewis Building
University of Manchester
0161 275 4978
Speaker
Dr Phil Parvin
Role: Speaker
Organisation: University of Loughborough
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2.016 / .017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
