1 The Contemporary Crisis of Representative Democracy

Is there a crisis of democracy? At one level democracy is always in crisis, and as authoritative historians of representative democracy note (Manin 1997; Rosanvallon 2011), there has never been a period in the evolution of representative democracy when someone somewhere has not declared democracy to be in crisis. What is unusual in the current conjuncture is the degree of consensus underpinning the analysis. In the past those that shrieking “fire! ” tended to be in a minority – oddball figures, radicals, zealots. Today, it would be easier to assemble those who didn't think something fundamental was amiss than those who did. Political scientists, not noted for alarmist tendencies, huddle in conferences entitled “Representation and Renewal”, “Is the party over?”, and so forth.1 A minor publishing industry has sprung up to examine the contours of the crisis, and where it is heading. Texts already pick over the entrails of the “dead ” democratic body and our “post-democratic ” future (Crouch 2004; Keane 2009; Della Porta 2013). Nor is the sense of crisis confined to those with a particular political leaning. Liberals, Conservatives, Marxists agree that at some level or other representative democracy is in the doldrums. Where they disagree i