Participation and the Quality of

Democracy
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Merkel

Robert Dahl (1971) once defined democracy, which he preferred to call polyarchy, as contestation
open to participation. This definition as brilliant as it is leaves many questions open. Two such
questions are: How much contestation is needed, and how much participation is in fact beneficial
to polyarchy or democracy? The more participation, the better, right? But if this is true, which kind
of participation is particularly relevant to the quality of democracy? Which additional norms and
institutions does democracy need in order to secure pluralistic contestation and open participation?
Are all established democracies of the OECD world equal with regard to the quality of democracy?
Is there any difference between the quality of democracy in Finland, Denmark or New Zealand on
the one hand and Berlusconis Italy or G.W. Bushs United States on the other?

Please note that Freedom House and Polity the two indices of democracy which enjoy worldwide
reputation and are used by politicians, the media and political scientists alike do not make any
differentiation of quality among the established democracies. Despite the passage of the Patriot Act
(2001), human rights violations in Guantanamo and the fact that the Bush administration lied to U.S.
citizens (and the world public) in order to fabricate a just and legal cause for the war against Iraq,
the United States continued to earn optimal scores (1:1) for political rights and civil liberties
(freedomhouse.org). Italy was given a 1.5 grade only twice (2009 and 2010 in political rights and civil
liberties), when Berlusconi used his parliamentary majority in order to stop judiciary scrutiny of
corruption.

Much older than this debate over the quality of various political regimes democracies (Merkel
2004; Morlino 2004; Bhlmann, Merkel et al. 2010) is the debate over the crisis of democracy as a
system. If one reads Plato, Aristotle or Polybios, it becomes evident that talk about the crisis of
democracy is as old as democracy itself. During the economic turbulence of the 1970s, the debate
was restarted when the Trilateral Commission released a report on the overload of democratic
government, authored by Samuel Huntington and several colleagues. But it was not only the
conservative wing of political theory that warned against democracys crisis, but also leftist thinkers
such as Jrgen Habermas (1973) and Claus Offe (1975), who diagnosed a structural or motivational
crisis in late capitalist democracies. Since then, the crisis chorus has never ceased to be heard. The
crisis of democracy has become a recurring truism in the scientific and political discourse. Depending
on the normative ideological position or the epistemological orientation of the authors, different
symptoms and causes of the crisis have been found: The overburdening of big government,
growing popular demands for economic and social goods, growing mistrust of government by the
governed, overly critical citizens, the emergence of a political class, the thinning of social capital,
and the fact that, as German constitutionalist Ernst-Wolfgang Bckenfrde once put it, democracy
is not able to recreate the preconditions on which it relies.