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112 | Anna Unger
is only one of them. Liberal democracy also has to deal with its endogenous
problems, which are related to representation and technocracy, and also
with challenges from the outside (exogenous problems). In this regard,
distrust and disillusionment, the two key phenomena that characterise our
era and politics, are not the causes but the results of the problem. As Pierre
Rosanvallon puts it:
The democratic ideal now reigns unchallenged, but regimes claiming to be democratic
come in for vigorous criticism almost everywhere. In this paradox resides the major
political problem of our time. Indeed, the erosion of citizens’ confidence in political
leaders and institutions is among the phenomena that political scientists have studied
most intently over the past twenty years. (Rosanvallon 2008, 1)
a. Endogenous problems of liberal democracy:
the reasons for distrust and disillusionment
Though it was supposed to be a perfect system, liberal democracy has its
own in-built internal endogenous controversies, which have been widely
studied over the past decade, but hardly any solution has been proposed or
practically implemented so far. These endogenous problems are distrust,
technocracy, and consumerism in politics. They are not independent but
interrelated phenomena in contemporary liberal democracies.
According to Rosanvallon, distrust is not necessarily a symptom of the malaise
of democracy, but it is inherently part of democracy, in three different forms.
The first, the “liberal distrust of power’, is the distrust of strong state and strong
government, which resulted in the separation of powers, constitutional checks
and balances, and further controls and limits of state power, in order to avoid
authoritarian politics and repression. The second is democratic distrust, which
arises from the representative system itself, and “its purpose is to make sure that
elected officials keep their promises and to find ways of maintaining pressure
on the government to serve the common good” (Rosanvallon 2008, 8). The
third is the distrust of society itself, which is embedded in the growing role of
science and the feeling that “citizens have no alternative but to oblige scientists
to explain their thinking and justify their actions” (Rosanvallon 2008, 9).
The first and second forms of distrust do not seem to be harmful to
democracy, but the third leads to technocracy and depoliticisation.
Depoliticisation is the core of technocracy: the complexity of governance
requires expertise and knowledge, which does not necessarily respect or
reflect people’s will (Mounk 2018, 101-105). Both come from the modern
idea of state, which is responsible for effective governance but should also
be based on popular legitimacy.
These two requirements can be in contradiction. There must be a balance
therefore: this is the Schumpeterian or Madisonian understanding of