Post on 24-Feb-2023
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The “Democracy-Politics Paradox”: The Dynamics of Political Alienation
Gerry Stoker
University of Canberra, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis
gerry.stoker@canberra.edu.au
Mark Evans
University of Canberra, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis
mark.evans@canberra.edu.au
A democratic paradox has been observed by contemporary political scientists crystallised around the disconnection between how citizens imagine their democracy and how politics is practiced. Citizens continue to believe in the values of liberal democracy but are increasingly disillusioned with how their political systems work and the politics that are practiced in the name of democracy. This article revisits the concept of political alienation as a way into providing a better understanding of this democratic paradox through identifying the complex layers of alienation that lie at its root cause. It provides both a conceptual understanding of political alienation and its domain of action and insights into how the concept can be operationalised and measured in empirical research. It argues that while democracy itself may not be in crisis, the evidence clearly demonstrates that the politics on which its operation rests is in peril.
Key words: citizens, democracy, empiricism, measurement, political alienation, political
engagement
Introduction
Evidence of negativity towards politics and the political system is increasing across a range
of established democracies (Pharr and Putnam 2000; Dalton 2004; Stoker 2006; Torcal and
Montero 2006; Hay 2007; Norris 2011). We can capture this complex phenomenon in a few
words; the issue in contemporary democracy for many citizens is not disappointment with
the idea of democracy but its practice. Analysts lean towards a view that a basic
commitment to democracy remains strong and that the rights and freedoms associated with
democratic politics are prized but that large swathes of citizens express negativity towards
the political system; not simply an objection to the government or leaders in power. This
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negativity is reflected in a range of concerns held by citizens. In the opening section of this
article we revisit the concept of political alienation to get to a deeper understanding of the
different layers of political negativity. The critical issue that needs to be addressed here is
to find an explanation for why alienation is being expressed by citizens in such a multi-
faceted way. In the second half of the paper we explore how to generate evidence of
alienation using examples from various contemporary democracies to focus our discussion.
A better understanding of the complex layers of alienation is central to tackling its causes.
We contend that while democracy itself may not be in crisis, the politics on which its
operation rests is in peril when judged by citizens through an expanded understanding of
the nature of contemporary political alienation.
The Five Faces of Political Alienation
A valuable wave of studies of political alienation emerged in the context of a deep crisis of
confidence in political institutions in the USA and other advanced democracies during the
1960s and 1970s stimulated by problems of urbanisation, the trauma of opposition to the
Vietnam War, the demands of the civil rights movement and the emerging forces of
feminism and environmentalism. This article proceeds from the argument that it is worth
returning to some of the insights generated in studies of that period to see if they can be
elaborated and developed to enable us to better understand the trials and tribulations of
democracy in the 21st century. We justify this approach on the following grounds. There
have been few successful attempts since the work of Melvin Seeman (1959) and Ada Finifter
(1970) to theorize the different dimensions of political alienation and then operationalize
them in empirical research. Wright argued in the 1980s (1981, p. 17) that the term
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alienation ‘continues to be among the more ambiguously used and ill-defined terms in all
the social sciences’. In the 1990s, Bas Denters and Peter Geurts (1993, p. 445) observed:
The last twenty years have witnessed an ever increasing differentiation in the concept of political alienation and its measurement…This increase in conceptual and operational sophistication is not matched by a corresponding differentiation in the ‘theory of alienation’…One might characterize the present state in this field as ‘concepts in search of a theory’.
And then in 2005, Russell J. Dalton simply ignored the concept altogether preferring to
attribute decreasing trust with changing expectations of government arising from new
socio-demographic patterns:
These groups are the forefront of the new style of politics in advanced industrial societies, represented by less deference to authority, more assertive styles of action, and higher expectations for the democratic process (see also Inglehart, 1990; and Dalton, 2004, chapter 3).
One response to this observation would be to call for a thorough revision of our present
theory of political alienation in an attempt to construct a more compelling understanding.
Denters and Geurts, for example, make such an appeal. An alternative response, and one
adopted in this article, would be to revisit the seminal research and assess how it might be
amended to stay apace with developments in the field of action.
Drawing on a seminal article by Seeman (1959) on the general concept of alienation, Finifter
(1970) argued that when applied to politics two forms of alienation stand out: political
powerlessness and perceived political normlessness. The first refers to the sense among
citizens that they cannot influence political outcomes because they lack the capacity to do
so. The second refers to the notion that the political system is full of wrong doers; politics is
being run at the behest of those who do not observe the commonsense norms of how
politics should be conducted. Citizens know what is right but their political masters appear
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either not to know how to behave or, as is more likely, are always knowingly flouting the
rules. Both of these understandings of alienation would appear to have an immediate
resonance in the 21st century so should certainly be incorporated into our framework for
analysis.
Seeman (1959) also identified three other general forms of alienation that Finifter made less
effort to incorporate into his analysis of the state of politics in the USA in the 1960s. It is
worth revisiting them in the context of our 21st century perspective. The first of the three
additional forms of alienation goes under the strange title of “meaninglessness” but it
captures an outlook on the political system which has some traction. Alienation stems not
from a sense of powerlessness or a view that many politicians are corrupt but instead is
based on a more general concern that politics and the way that politicians behave makes
little sense. The political system operates to rules and practices that appear to be
unfathomable and so offers choices where the individual has no basis for making a decision.
All parties and politicians appear to be the same and policy debates appear to be largely
irrelevant. The political world is an obscure and tenuous “other”: it is not easy to relate to,
respond to or understand.
The fourth form of alienation that emerges from the work of Seeman and Finifter is
categorised under the label of “isolation”; it is borne out of a sense that the values held by
certain individuals are systematically excluded from expression in the political system and
more particularly by the political establishment. The focus of attention here for Finifter was
on potential left-wing alienation from the capitalist norms and values dominant in American
politics but in the 21st century it can be observed that various forms of more right-wing
populism suffer from commensurable forms of alienation from the perceived “politically
correct” liberal norms of the political establishment (Philips 2006; Albertazzi and McDonnell
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2008.). This form of alienation does not have to be mobilised in support of a new populist
party or leader and it may well simply be present as part of the broader disenchantment
with politics in many contemporary democracies. At its heart its distinctive feature is that
the prevailing goals of the political system are alien to the citizen. This is a perspective not
based of feelings of powerlessness necessarily nor of an understanding that political
processes are corrupt or unfathomable but one that rests on a rejection of what the political
system does and fails to do: its neglect of ordinary working folk, its failure to defend
national interests and established communities or its kowtowing to special interests and
minorities.
The final form of alienation that might be considered to be present drawing from the
literature of the 1950s and 1960s can be described – at a stretch – as a form of self-
alienation. Its political form could be expressed by the alienation of the individual from
some understanding of an idealised citizen held by the analyst. One argument for the
emergence of this form of alienation is connected to the rise of consumerism in society and
an attendant focus for individuals on self-serving materialism and self-actualisation that, in
turn, is perceived as undermining values of citizenship expressed through solidarity,
community and collective action (Flinders 2012 comes close to this argument). For the
individual “suffering” this form of alienation mainstream politics appear to be irrelevant to
their lifestyle, circumstances and future prospects. They are doing it for themselves either in
co-operation with other like-minded individuals or simply on their own.
Measuring Alienation
Measures for alienation such as “powerlessness” and “perceived normlessness” are
relatively easily found. Starting with the former an obvious marker is the extent to which
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citizens engage with politics. How many engage in actions aimed at trying to influence the
decision-making processes of government more or less directly? The standard repertoire of
participation in this sense includes contacting public officials. In our recent study of
Australian politics in 2013 (Evans et al., 2013), we asked a representative sample of 1,377
Australians about their engagement in conventional forms of participation. We observed
that it is possible to be more actively engaged in politics through standing for office, funding
political parties, engaging in campaigns or by attending meetings. There are more consumer
based examples of participation including boycotting goods or products or through signing
paper or online petitions. In addition to asking about all these forms of political participation
we also asked about attendance at marches and demonstrations. We found that well over
half (54.7%) of our respondents could not remember conducting any political activity in the
last two or three years beyond the practice of voting. We also found that only 2% of
Australians think they have a great deal of influence over decision-making in the country as
a whole or in their local area. Only 9% suggest they have some influence at the national
level and that figure rises to 20% who think they have some influence at the local level.
About 90% of Australians think they have not very much or no influence at all over national
decisions and just over three quarters of Australian feel the same when it comes to local
decision-making.
Parallel findings emerge in the annual audit of political engagement conducted by the
Hansard Society in Britain. In surveys from 2003 asking about a range of political
engagement activities (and this study includes voting) on average still only 2 in 10 of the
population could recall engaging in any political activity over the previous two or three years
(Hansard Society 2012). In the 2013 Report (Hansard Society 2013), when voting was
excluded from the list of potential actions, only 50% of respondents were able to remember
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undertaking any actions from a long list of political engagement options. When asked about
their degree of influence over decision-making at the national level nobody responding to
the survey felt they had a great deal of influence and 12% suggested they had some
influence; that figure rose to 24% at the local level. Broadly speaking on both our measures
of powerlessness as a form of political alienation it appears that both behavioural and
attitudinal evidence of its presence can be easily found.
What about “normlessness” or the sense of alienation that stems from an understanding
that politicians are people who do not understand or indeed live by the rules that most
citizens value? Nicholas Allen and Sarah Birch (2014) offer some survey findings that appear
to offer a fairly direct measure of this form of alienation. In a series of surveys conducted in
Britain between 2009 and 2010, they asked how much concern citizens had over various
behaviours of politicians. They found a consistently high and negative response when asking
respondents about their level of concern (on a scale that ran to low 0 to high 10) about
various behaviours by politicians. The mean level of disquiet about politicians not giving
straight answers was over 8; that they would take bribes reached a mean level of concern of
6; concern over the way politicians claimed expenses achieved a mean level of 8; as did
worries about politicians making empty promises. Of course this is only evidence from one
country but it does suggest that normlessness as a form of political alienation has
considerable efficacy and that it is something that could be measured and assessed in many
other countries.
The third form of alienation – “meaninglessness” – presents some tricky issues in terms of
measurement. Part of the debate is conceptual and rests on the issue of what level of
cognitive skill a citizen needs to engage with politics. Generally people in most
contemporary democracies do pay a great amount of attention to ‘hubbub’ or fast thinking
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politics (Marcus et al, 2000). Citizens are relatively inattentive to formal politics and rely on
cognitive short cuts and cues to steer them to their political choices. Their preferences on
specific issues are rarely fixed but made up on the fly, driven by the most salient and
available information to them. Moreover, there is a commonly held view (Norris 1999) that
such civic engagement is enough to make democracy work. Time-poor citizens in the
information-rich world of politics do not require an encyclopaedic knowledge of the political
world but just sufficient information to enable them to make a judgement about proposals,
trustworthiness or competence of various political leaders. In the light of these arguments it
would appear that the meaningless form of alienation could be measured – with caution –
using tests about political knowledge which either ask about what level of knowledge is
claimed by citizens or sets a test against which their knowledge is measured. But if it the
case that to be engaged by the political system requires not an extensive but just some
passing knowledge of politics then it may be that this form of alienation needs to be
measured in a way that makes a very low level of knowledge permissible. The Hansard
Society’s Audit of Political Engagement (Hansard Society 2012) has asked British citizens in
annual surveys since 2003 about how much they feel they know about politics and has
consistently found around 1 in 10 respondents who say they know nothing at all. This form
of alienation then appears to be amenable to measurement; although a priori it may be that
it is strongly felt by only a relatively small section of citizens.
As noted above, the fourth form of alienation – “isolation” – is expressed by a sense that
politics is just not delivering what is required. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) in their
depiction of the stealth politics understanding held by many American citizens come as
close as any analysts to empirically identifying this form of alienation. They devised a set of
questions aimed at capturing this phenomenon that could be interpreted as measuring the
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sense of felt isolation from the political system held by many citizens. Their findings
indicated strong empirical support for the stealth view of democracy which in turn
expresses an isolated alienation from mainstream politics. Those suffering from isolated
alienation hold that politics is all talk and no action; that pressures to compromise among
politicians prevents good decision-making and that others, and certainly not elected
politicians, could do a better job. Table 1 presents findings from various surveys conducted
in different countries since Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conducted their original research in
the United States in 1998. On the face of it the questions get a strong response indicating
that the isolation form of alienation appears to be both measurable and observable.
Table 1: Isolated Alienation from Politics – Australia, GB, USA and Finland Compared
% Agree Australia (2013) *
GB(2011/12)** Finland (2007)***
USA (1998)****
USA (2008)*****
Politicians should stop talking and take action
95
91
83
86
86
Compromise is selling out one’s principles
74
80
46
60
64
Government better if decisions left to successful business people
43
47
18
32
35
Government better if decisions left to independent experts
34 51 33 31 35
Sources: *Evans et al (2013) ** Hansard Society (2012); ***Bengtsson and Mattila (2009) **** Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) ****Neblo et al (2010) NB this table excludes all neutral responses that is the “neither agree” nor “disagree” responses and “don’t know” responses.
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The most problematic form of alienation to measure is the fifth form – “self-alienation” – in
that although it may be possible to show that consumerist attitudes exist (i.e. citizens make
choices) or that some citizens lack the attributes of some form of ideal citizenship, these
traits do not necessarily capture a sense of political alienation on the part of the citizen. One
survey question that might do this effectively addresses not only the nature of a citizens’
engagement with politics but also their willingness to engage politically. It could be
hypothesized that certain citizens when faced with an issue they are concerned about and a
range of political actions to consider undertaking but fail to choose any are in denial about
their responsibilities as a citizen. Table 2 reports some findings from a question asked in
Britain for the 2013 Hansard Society Audit of Political Engagement Report (Hansard Society
2013). Around 8 in 10 would take action of some sort but about 2 in 10 would not even if
Table 2: Willingness to Undertake Political Actions (GB, 2013)
If you felt strongly enough about an issue which of these actions would you be prepared to undertake:
%
Contact a local councillor or MP / MSP / Welsh Assembly Member 41
Contact the media 16
Take an active part in a campaign 14
Create or sign a paper petition 35
Create or sign an e-petition 25
Donate money or pay a membership fee to a charity or campaigning organisation
17
Boycott certain products for political, ethical or environmental reasons 14
Attend political meetings 10
Donate money or pay a membership fee to a political party 5
Take part in a demonstration, picket or march 10
Vote in an election 42
Contribute to a discussion or campaign online or on social media 8
Take part in a public consultation 14
Net: Any of the above 78
Net: None of the above 22
Source: Hansard Society (2013)
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the issue was one they felt strongly about. Although more work would be required this
finding does suggest that there are maybe some citizens who care about issues (and could
not therefore be seen as apathetic) but are alienated from politics and see no point in
engaging through the standard mechanisms.
In Conclusion – The Three Pillars of Political Support
We began this article by looking back at how analysts were examining political alienation in
democracies nearly 50 years ago and found some considerable inspiration in their
conceptual work. With some development and elaboration of that original work we
suggested that five forms of alienation – “powerlessness”, “normlessness”,
“meaninglessness”, “isolation” and “self-alienation” – can not only be identified but can also
be measured using a mix of survey questions and responses. To understand 21st century
democracy we need to understand better political alienation and this article provides a
starting point to a research agenda on what is becoming an increasingly salient topic for
both the study and the practice of liberal democratic politics.
Further development of the argument is required. For example, there are several
conceptual issues that require further consideration. Do some of the forms of alienation on
reflection merge into one another? Are one or more forms of alienation exhibited in a
citizen? How are structured forms of inequality – for example, class, gender, race,
education, disability – reflected through different forms of alienation? Are there any further
forms of alienation? Do the different forms of alienation all find both attitudinal and
behavioural expression and if they do not, are some forms of alienation (perhaps those that
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find a behavioural expression) more problematic for the operation of democracy than
others?
There are also some problems of measurement that require closer attention. All that we
have demonstrated so far is the possibility of developing some measures but composite and
richer survey instruments would be better. Moreover, in empirical work we need to
understand the mix of alienation both across different systems and within different systems.
It would also be helpful to know more about how citizens’ trade-off one form of alienation
against another and how constant, elastic or changeable that alienation is towards the
political system.
In short, we need more conceptual and empirical research but this article has at least
demonstrated that political alienation is a complex and politically salient topic that justifies
substantial investigation. In his discussion of political support for political systems – the
other side of the coin to the discussion of political alienation and developed in the same
time period – David Easton (1965) makes a well-known distinction between specific and
diffuse support. The former is about support for the government of the day, its leaders and
its policies. The latter refers to support for the basic political arrangements of democracy.
Our return to the issue of political alienation however leaves us with some questions about
the continuing value of Easton’s distinction. It may prove to be more of a block on analysis
than an aid. For Easton, political discontent can only come about in one of two forms which
are the converse of his understanding of political support. Political discontent could be
expressed against the government of the day and its behaviour or it could lead to a rejection
of the basic principles of the political system. Easton (1965; 1975) was aware of the 1960s
literature on alienation but refused to incorporate it into his analysis. We think he was
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wrong. What 21st century citizens are saying in the empirical studies that we have
undertaken is that their political discontent reflects their concerns about the government of
the day and not the principles of democracy yet these concerns have diffuse and system
threatening aspects.
Contemporary discontent has an additional dimension; alienation from the operation of the
political system that stretches way beyond any judgement that a different government or
leader would automatically make politics better. Political alienation matters because there
are three pillars of political support in a liberal democracy not just two. Only one pillar is
clearly supported by citizens – democracy and its inalienable political rights. The
performance of the government of the day is often judged negatively and as the evidence
presented in this article so clearly demonstrates; so too is the general operation of the
political system. As the ancient Athenians would testify, an agora with only one fully
functional pillar is prone to toppling over. The beginning of the 21st century may well prove
to be a crucible moment for liberal democracy.
Gerry Stoker is Centenary Professor of Governance at the University of Canberra and
Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Globalization and Governance at the University of
Southampton in the United Kingdom. His book Why Politics Matters won the 2006 book of
the year award from the Political Studies Association of the UK.
Mark Evans is Professor of Governance and the Executive Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. He was formerly Professor of Politics at the University of York. Mark has been the editor of the international journal Policy Studies (Routledge-Taylor and Francis) since 2005.
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