Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

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Conclusion: Populism and
Twenty-First Century Western
European Democracy
Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell
Whose democracy is it anyway?
Gerry Stoker concludes his recent book Why Politics Matters by affirming:
‘Achieving mass democracy was the great triumph of the twentieth century.
Learning to live with it will be the great achievement of the twenty-first’
(Stoker, 2006: 206). Like Stoker, a whole series of scholars at the beginning
of the new millennium have argued that the pillars of representative liberal
democracy − in particular, parties and popular participation − are creaking
(Pharr and Putnam, 2000; Diamond and Gunther, 2001; Dalton and
Wattenberg, 2002; Crouch, 2004). In fact, apart from the euphoric period
surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and the seemingly inexorable move
towards a united, peaceful, harmonious and liberal democratic Europe,
there has long been a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of how
Western European democracies function. Indeed, as we can see from even a
brief glance at The Crisis of Democracy (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki,
1975), in the past the portents have been worse and the prophecies far
gloomier. For example, in the opening paragraphs of that landmark volume,
under the heading ‘The Current Pessimism about Democracy’, we find the
comment by the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt before leaving
office that ‘Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy
left in it’ (ibid.: 2).
With the end of the Cold War, the broad acceptance by all parties of the
basic merits of democracy and the decline of political terrorism in Western
Europe, such apocalyptic scenarios are no longer being put forward.
Nonetheless, as Robert Putnam, Susan Pharr and Russell Dalton (2000: 6)
write in their introduction to Disaffected Democracies, while support for
democracy per se appears to be greater then ever, faith in its agents (i.e.
politicians and parties) and its institutions has declined. As they point out,
the percentage of the public ‘expressing a partisan attachment has declined
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