working papers
No. 16. "Populist Politics, Communications Media and Large Scale Social
Integration," Craig Calhoun, 1987. Observations of public apathy in today's electoral democracies are
commonplace (Neumann, 1986). For many social scientists, low voter
turnout and similar indicators are simply reasons for believing that
liberal democracies will always be governed by elites, though these may
shift over time. Recently, a number of authors have argued against this
view, and indeed against the presumption that representative institutions
are the only form of participation workable in modern, large-scale
polities. Characterizing representation as a form of "thin democracy,"
for example, Barber (1984) has called for a move towards a "strong
democracy" based on new or revitalized forms of popular participation.
His proposals stress two dimensions of such participation: the renewal of
community level institutions of self-rule and the development of more
frequent national referenda.... My argument in this paper is that
the theoretical grounds on which most discussion of these issues takes
place are doubly deficient. In the first place, numerical size, while a
central variable, does not adequately grasp the transformation in social
organization wrought during the modern era. We need to address
contrasting forms of social integration as well as sizes of population. I
shall adopt Habermas's (1984) distinction of system world/system
integration from lifeworld/social integration for this purpose. I will
argue that the current efflorescence of populist politics (of both left
and right) simultaneously is a response to the split between system world
and lifeworld, and is limited in an often poorly recognized way by the
implications of large scale system integration. Secondly, academic
discussion of representative vs. direct democracy has tended to focus on
mechanisms of decision-making at the expense of attention to public
discourse and the educational functions of politics. Communitarian
populists (though generally not plebiscitarians) are sensitive to this,
and offer proposals for improved settings for local discourse and
political language less prejudicial to the values of community and
tradition (Barber, 1984; Bellah, et al., 1985; Evans and Boyte,
1986). Most, however, approach this predominantly in cultural rather than
social structural terms, and underestimate the limits imposed by large
scale system integration. Above all, both communitarian and
plebiscitarian visions tend to neglect the structural difficulties which
social change has put in the way of public discourse among people
significantly different from each other. Changes in cities and community
patterns on the one hand, and in communications systems on the other,
make it likely that no extension of community level discourse or
mobilization will constitute a public discourse at the level of the
state. This is a limit to communitarian politics, but not an argument
against them. At the same time, the issues presented here do argue
against most proposals for extensive reliance on referenda. Click here to order a copy from the
author.