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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
