THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE POLITICAL OR THE SHIFTING IMAGINARY OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

Contemporary democracy is often perceived as in crisis or even in decline. The triumph of liberal democracy, announced at the beginning of the 1990s, seems replaced by a potential defeat. The symptoms of a democracy in trouble are various: the political prominence of forces critical of liberal democracy (often defined as populist), the increase in protests from below, sometimes violent, the poor functioning of electoral systems, evident in increasing abstentionism, lack of youth participation, and the difficulties of producing government coalitions. This chapter will seek to understand whether the imagination of (European) democracy is changing through such major challenges. The focus is less on formal norms and institutions (the rich debate on populism already provides a wide range of observations and research, as well as institutional aspects) and more on cultural changes in the perceptions and imagination in relation to liberal democracy (see also Browne and Diehl 2019). I will try to indicate a potential transformation or re-alignment of the democratic imaginary and shift in the democratic imagination, that is, a shift regarding some of the central principles in the imagination of democracy (such as, e.g., regarding (electoral) representation, equality and hierarchy, the role of norms and law, the distinction between governors and the governed, the definition of the people, the perception of politics itself).