There are more western democracies but they are emptier

The number of people on the planet living in democratic regimes is increasing, but Western democracies are being emptied. Politics is stripped of its value. There is indifference and the spread of anti-political sentiments. The signs of this transition phase of democracies are many and range from the electorate, to political parties, to the prevalence of constitutional democracy, to Europeanisation. Citizens move away from the conventional political arena, electoral cohesion and collective identity among voters decline. Electoral turnout declines, the electorate is volatile and unpredictable.

Secondly, the number of party members and their sense of belonging are decreasing, the distance between parties and voters is increasing, and they are becoming less and less loyal due to the parties' diminishing social roots. The parties are less and less focused on integration, mobilisation, interest aggregation and end up representing the government in society rather than the other way around.

All this leads to an increase in the constitutional component of democracy (of checks and balances), the use of non-majority institutions, a neo-corporatist government, in which policies are decided through negotiations between interests and the involvement of stakeholders, rather than through popular participation. Contributing to this distancing of parties from society are the legislative regulation of parties and their public financing. Finally, there is a relationship between European integration and increasing depoliticisation because the EU operates as a structure in which interest organisations prevail and performs a regulatory rather than a redistributive function. Hence, democracies are increasingly in search of procedural legitimacy, experience a disengagement of the elite, while the division between left and right loses weight and there is a presidentialisation of political leadership.

These are the main conclusions of an extraordinarily effective, analytical, well-argued reflection, based on a careful examination of all available data, by the Irish scholar Peter Mair, who has been one of the main protagonists of contemporary political science and has taught at Leiden University and the European University Institute in Fiesole. This book makes a fundamental contribution to the ongoing transformations of democracies, certainly the most important since Alexis de Tocqueville analysed modern democracy in 1835 and 1840 and set out its main concepts. The question now arises as to whether these transformations constitute only a phase in the life cycle of democratic regimes or, instead, represent a sign of its definitive obsolescence.

Peter Mair Governing the void. The end of party democracy Rubbettino, pp. 198, € 18