Introduction: When Democracy ‘Goes Wrong’

Abstract

This essay sets out a new theoretical model for understanding why citizens might turn away from democracy. We argue that democracy is best understood as a mode of sociality, a dynamic matrix of relations in which ethically imaginative human subjects are embedded. As such, when people come to reject or abandon the democratic ideal, they do so because it can no longer capture their ethical imagination. This is a process that is best understood by investigating subjectivity in its broadest sense, including an attention to fantasy, affect, and the body alongside a study of processes of ethical reflection and rational deliberation. We show how this model of political subjectivity adds new layers of understanding to three lines of explanation commonly advanced to explain why citizens might lose faith in democracy: that democratic statecraft contains inherent contradictions; that citizens are becoming dissatisfied with the poor quality of democratic governance; and that representative democracy has been slowly eviscerated by a post-democratic turn to managerialism.