Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht: Demokratietheoretische Studien [1. Aufl. 2019] 978-3-658-22264-2, 978-3-658-22265-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages I-XVI
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Strategisches Beschweigen. Institutionelle und strategische Vorentscheidungen über die Vermeidung von Entscheidungsthemen (1977) (Claus Offe)....Pages 3-24
Political Institutions and Social Power: Conceptual Explorations (2006) (Claus Offe)....Pages 25-44
The attribution of public status to interest groups: observations on the West German case (1980) (Claus Offe)....Pages 45-79
Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? Notizen über seine Voraussetzungen und demokratischen Gehalte (1984) (Claus Offe)....Pages 81-104
“Homogeneity” and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights ? (1998) (Claus Offe)....Pages 105-135
Front Matter ....Pages 137-137
Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources (1991) (Claus Offe)....Pages 139-165
Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization (1983) (Claus Offe)....Pages 167-191
Politische Legitimation durch Mehrheitsentscheidung ? (1982) (Claus Offe)....Pages 193-232
Front Matter ....Pages 233-233
Bewährungsproben. Über einige Beweislasten bei der Verteidigung der liberalen Demokratie (1995) (Claus Offe)....Pages 235-249
Political disaffection as an outcome of institutional practices ? Some post-Tocquevillean speculations (2006) (Claus Offe)....Pages 251-275
Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State: A Supply-Side Approach (2013) (Claus Offe)....Pages 277-299
Front Matter ....Pages 301-301
Micro-aspects of democratic theory: what makes for the deliberative competence of citizens ? (1997) (Claus Offe)....Pages 303-325
Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalized ? (2011) (Claus Offe)....Pages 327-354
Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision (2017) (Claus Offe)....Pages 355-371
Wille und Unwille des Volkes. Notizen zur politischen „Theorie“ des Populismus (2019) (Claus Offe)....Pages 373-380
Back Matter ....Pages 381-388

Citation preview

Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe

Claus Offe

Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht Demokratietheoretische Studien

Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe Band 4 Reihe herausgegeben von Claus Offe, Berlin, Deutschland

In den vorliegenden Bänden werden ausgewählte Schriften des Soziologen und Politikwissenschaftlers Claus Offe zusammengestellt. Es handelt sich um Studien und Essays aus nahezu fünf Jahrzehnten und zu einer Vielzahl von Forschungsthemen. Zum weitaus größten Teil befassen sie sich mit der Wechselbeziehung von kapitalistischer Wirtschaftsordnung und (demokratischer) Politik. Dabei ist der gemeinsame Ausgangspunkt die gut belegbare Überzeugung, dass die Gründung, Entwicklung, Förderung und Verteidigung jener spezifischen, auf der „Vermarktung“ von Arbeitskraft beruhenden Wirtschaftsordnung von allem Anfang an ein politisches Projekt war und geblieben ist – ein mit Gewalt und anderen Mitteln der Machtausübung realisiertes Vorhaben, das von den politischen Eliten staatlicher Herrschaftsverbände betrieben und ausgestaltet wird. Nicht nur Eigentum und Vertrag, sondern auch das Marktgeschehen insgesamt, beruhen auf politisch-rechtlich gesetzten Prämissen, Lizenzen und Gewährleistungen. Wenn das so ist und die kapitalistische Wirtschaftsdynamik letztlich nur als ein Erzeugnis politischer Macht zu verstehen ist – wie kommt es dann, dass (selbst demokrati­ sche) Politik ihren eigenen Artefakten so machtlos gegenübersteht, wenn es um die Regulierung, Bändigung, Begrenzung und Korrektur von zweifelsfrei zerstörerischen Seiten des kapitalistischen Marktgeschehens geht – oder doch (nach liberalen und universalistischen normativen Maßstäben, die zumindest in „westlichen“ Kapitalismen kaum gänzlich zu entwurzeln sind) gehen müsste? Es sind solche „großen“ Fragen, die in den vorliegenden Bänden an Gegenstandsbereichen wie dem Arbeitsmarkt, der Sozialpolitik, der politisch-kulturellen Infrastruktur kapitalistischer Demokratien, den Formen und Funktionen politischer Repräsentation, der europäischen Integration sowie dem Übergang staatssozialistischer Systeme zu Versionen des demokratischen Kapitalismus gleichsam kleingearbeitet werden.

Weitere Bände in der Reihe http://www.springer.com/series/16074

Claus Offe

Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht Demokratietheoretische Studien

Claus Offe Humboldt-Universität Berlin und Hertie School of Governance Berlin, Deutschland

Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe ISBN 978-3-658-22264-2 ISBN 978-3-658-22265-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9 Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Springer VS © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung, die nicht ausdrücklich vom Urheberrechtsgesetz zugelassen ist, bedarf der vorherigen Zustimmung des Verlags. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Bearbeitungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Die Wiedergabe von allgemein beschreibenden Bezeichnungen, Marken, Unternehmensnamen etc. in diesem Werk bedeutet nicht, dass diese frei durch jedermann benutzt werden dürfen. Die Berechtigung zur Benutzung unterliegt, auch ohne gesonderten Hinweis hierzu, den Regeln des Markenrechts. Die Rechte des jeweiligen Zeicheninhabers sind zu beachten. Der Verlag, die Autoren und die Herausgeber gehen davon aus, dass die Angaben und Informa­ tionen in diesem Werk zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung vollständig und korrekt sind. Weder der Verlag, noch die Autoren oder die Herausgeber übernehmen, ausdrücklich oder implizit, Gewähr für den Inhalt des Werkes, etwaige Fehler oder Äußerungen. Der Verlag bleibt im Hinblick auf geografische Zuordnungen und Gebietsbezeichnungen in veröffentlichten Karten und Institutionsadressen neutral. Springer VS ist ein Imprint der eingetragenen Gesellschaft Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH und ist ein Teil von Springer Nature Die Anschrift der Gesellschaft ist: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Generalvorwort

Die Idee, eine thematisch geordnete Auswahl meiner Studien, die im Zeitraum von 50 Jahren entstanden sind, in mehreren Bänden zu publizieren, stammt von Adalbert Hepp, dem langjährigen Lektor des Campus-Verlages und einem der intimsten Kenner der deutschen sozialwissenschaftlichen Szene. Seine freundschaftliche Ermutigung zu diesem Publikationsprojekt entlastet den Verfasser freilich nicht von der Pflicht, die Gesichtspunkte zu erläutern, unter denen er sich nach leichtem Zögern vom Sinn des Unternehmens hat überzeugen lassen. Zu ihnen zählt die Vermutung, dass heutige Leser an den sozialwissenschaftlichen Be­mühungen ihres Urhebers ein fach- und sogar zeitgeschichtliches Interesse nehmen könnten. Im Rückblick wird nämlich deutlich, wie stark die jeweils gewählten Gegenstände und Untersuchungsperspektiven sowohl von akademischen wie gesellschaftspolitischen Themenkonjunkturen geprägt und in Aktualitäten verwickelt waren.1

1

Fremdeinschätzungen und Selbstauskünfte zu den Entstehungskontexten der Arbeiten sowie Beurteilungen und Interpretationen derselben finden sich u. a. in folgenden Titeln der Sekundärliteratur: J. Keane, „The Legacy of Political Economy: Thinking With and Against Claus Offe“, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory Vol. 2, Number 3 (Fall 1978), 49 – ​ 92; K. Hinrichs, H. Kitschelt und H. Wiesenthal (Hg.) Kontingenz und Krise: Institutionenpolitik in kapitalistischen und postsozialistischen Gesellschaften. Claus Offe zu seinem 60. Geburtstag. Frankfurt/New York: Campus 2000; A. Geis und D. Strecker (Hg.), Blockaden staatlicher Politik. Sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen im Anschluss an Claus Offe, Frankfurt/ New York: Campus 2005; R. E. Goodin, „Being Claus Offe“, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 53 (2012), Nr. 4, 593 – ​600; „Die plötzliche Implosion eines obsoleten Gesellschaftssystems …“, Gespräch mit David Strecker, Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie, 2 (2013), 253 – ​284; R. D’Alessandro, La Disegualanza programmata. Capitale, Stato e Socièta nel pensiero di Claus Offe, Roma: carocci editore 2015; J. Borchert und S. Lessenich, Claus Offe and the Critical Theory of the Capitalist State, Milton Park: Routledge 2016; „Theorizing Crises and Charting the Realm of the Possible. A conversation with Laszlo Bruszt“, Sociologica, 2/2017, http://www. sociologica.mulino.it/journal/article/index/Article/Journal:ARTICLE:1040; sowie Vor- und

V

VI Generalvorwort

Diese Verwicklung kann man – zumal dann, wenn man sich vom irregeleiteten „Physik-Neid“ mancher sozialwissenschaftlicher Theoretiker und Empiriker nicht fernzuhalten bereit ist – als einen Makel beklagen, der die akademischen Äußerungen von Autoren unserer Fächer von bloßen Meinungsbeiträgen bisweilen kaum unterscheidbar werden lässt. Die Berechtigung entsprechender Vor­würfe lässt sich oft (wenn auch keineswegs immer) mit der Erinnerung an die spezifische Natur der Gegenstände von Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft in Zweifel ziehen: Anders als die Gegenstände von Physik und Biologie handelt es sich bei sozialwissenschaftlichen Studienobjekten, also bei sozialen Akteuren und den Folgen ihres Handelns, um solche, die mit dem Wissen (oder doch impliziten Vorstellungen und Annahmen) über die Gründe und Ursachen des eigenen Handelns und Erlebens begabt sind. Dieses Wissen kann wahr sein oder im Gegenteil auf (Selbst-)Täuschung beruhen. Dabei beziehen sich Täuschungen sowohl auf die Gesamtheit des Wirklichen und seine Triebkräfte wie auf die Sphären des (Un-)Möglichen. Ich betrachte es als den Sinn und wichtigsten, wenn auch bisweilen nicht ohne Recht als subversiv beargwöhnten Auftrag sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung, solche Täuschungen zu „enttäuschen“ und so die von ihnen verbreiteten Gewissheiten zu erschüttern. Was damit zugleich erschüttert wird, ist der faule Frieden irrigen Einverständnisses. Die Begriffssprache der Sozialwissenschaften besteht nahezu ausschließlich aus Worten, die auch im außerwissenschaftlich-alltäglichen Sprachgebrauch vorkommen. Jeder Zeitungsleser „weiß“, worum es geht, wenn von Dingen wie Gemeinschaft, Arbeit, Macht, Verantwortung, Bildung, Korruption, Solidarität, Markt, sozialer Ordnung, Staat, Interesse, Diktatur, Institution, Familie, Re­ligion, Fortschritt, Bürokratie usw. usf. die Rede ist. Umgekehrt werden sozialwissenschaftliche Fachbegriffe (Globalisierung, Anomie, Krise, Austerität, Kapitalismus, Kollektivgutprobleme, Transaktionskosten, Identität, Integration) in der Regel rasch in Alltagsdiskurse übernommen und mit lebenspraktischen Bedeutungen aufgeladen. Aus dieser Nähe der Fachsprache zur Alltagssprache ergibt sich für Wissenschaftler die laufende Herausforderung, die verwendeten Begriffe zu schärfen, d. h. die Frage zu beantworten: Woran genau erkennen wir und wie lässt sich begründen, dass ein Begriff auf eine bestimmte Kategorie sozialer Phänomene angewendet werden muss, während er auf andere, oft zum Verwechseln ähnliche Sachverhalte nicht aus ebenso guten Gründen „passt“. Bei dieser Arbeit an der Schärfung von Begriffen geht es in der Regel nicht allein um semantische Präzisierung, sondern gleichzeitig um Bewertungskontroversen und zu­grundeliegende Wertkonflikte. Nachwort des Verfassers zur veränderten Neuausgabe (hg. von J. Borchert und S. Lessenich) von Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, Frankfurt/New York 2006.

Generalvorwort VII

In den vorliegenden, in thematisch geordneten sechs Bänden zusammengestellten Studien geht es methodisch um jene Bemühung um begriff‌liche Präzisierung und Unterscheidung. Der Sache nach geht es um das in seinen Ergebnissen nachhaltig ungewisse Spannungsverhältnis zwischen den institutionellen Strukturen liberaler und zugleich wohlfahrtsstaatlicher Demokratien einerseits und der Dynamik kapitalistischer Wirtschaftssysteme und ihrer strukturbildenden, gesellschaftsverändernden Effekte andererseits. Dieses Spannungsverhältnis wird von Sozialwissenschaftlern in vielfältigen Nuancierungen als das von citoyen vs. bourgeois, Status vs. Kontrakt, Staats(volk) vs. Markt(volk), kommunikatives vs. strategisches Handeln, Dekommodifizierung vs. (Re-)Kom­modifizierung, Bürgerrecht vs. „Effizienz“, Nationalstaat vs. Weltmarkt oder einfach als das von Demokratie vs. Kapitalismus erfasst. Diese Spannung und Konfliktlage ist in Deutschland seit dem definitiven „Ende der Nachkriegszeit“ in der Mitte der 1970er Jahre und darüber hinaus in der OECD-Welt durch eine verwirrende Vielfalt von „synthetischen“ Politikansätzen bearbeitet, wenn auch niemals dauerhaft bewältigt worden – nämlich durch strategische Modelle wie die „soziale Marktwirtschaft“, den „verbändedemokratischen“ Neokorporatismus, die europäische Integration und Weltmarkt-Integration sowie die Adoption neoliberaler Lehren für die Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftspolitik oder, partiell in Reaktion auf die Verheerungen, die von der letzteren verursacht wurden, die meist national-populistische Mobilisierung zugunsten einer wirtschafts- und sozialprotektionischen Politik der ReNationalisierung. Dem heutigen Leser ist vermutlich schwer vorstellbar, dass ein großer Teil der in diesen Bänden zusammengestellten Texte auf mechanischen Schreibmaschinen erstellt worden ist. Die Leistung von Computer-Programmen, die heute gesprochene Eingaben automatisch zu verschriftlichen erlauben, lag ganz und gar außerhalb des selbst als ferne Möglichkeit Vorstellbaren. Dasselbe gilt für zeitgeschichtliche game changer wie den Zusammenbruch von Comecon und Warschauer Pakt, die Entstehung einer europäische Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion, eine nahe an die Dimensionen jener der Zwischenkriegszeit heranreichenden Finanzmarktund Wirtschaftskrise, ein globales Wirtschaftswachstum, welches den Westen für viele Beobachter als zur säkularen Stagnation verurteilt erscheint und bereits zu mehr als seiner jährlichen Hälfte allein in China und Indien stattfindet, sowie die Aussichten auf das, was die Errungenschaften der künstlichen Intelligenz auf den Märkten auch für Dienstleistungsarbeit anzurichten im Begriff stehen – von denen für herstellende Arbeit ganz zu schweigen. Hinzugekommen sind kaum antizipierte politische Mega-Themen wie Klimawandel, Migration, die Demographie alternder Gesellschaften und neuartige Sicherheitsfragen – dies alles im Kontext eines offenbar ebenfalls säkularen, qualitativen wie quantitativen Niedergangs sozialdemokratischer politischer Kräfte. Angesichts dieser Konstellation sind zu-

VIII Generalvorwort

mindest einige der hier erneut (und in annähernd chronologischer Reihenfolge und mit nicht immer vermiedenen Wiederholungen) veröffentlichen Studien dem Risiko ausgesetzt, von heutigen Lesern als altbacken und (vor)ahnungslos disqualifiziert zu werden. Dieses Risiko kann nur durch die, wie der Verfasser meint, anhaltende und ungebrochene Aktualität des Leitthemas Kapitalismus vs. Demokratie und unter laufender Bezugnahme auf dieses kompensiert werden. Die in diesen Bänden (zum größten Teil wieder-)veröffentlichten Studien sind (zusätzlich zu einer Reihe von Monographien und Aufsatzsammlungen sowie einer Überzahl hier nicht berücksichtigter Texte) als Teil meiner beruflichen Tätigkeit an der Universität Frankfurt (1965 – ​69) als research associate an den Universitäten Berkeley und Harvard (1969 – ​1971) am Starnberger Max-Planck-Institut (1971 – ​75), an der Universität Bielefeld (1975 – ​1989), am Zentrum für Sozialpolitik der Universität Bremen (1989 – ​1995), an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1995 – ​2005) und schließlich an der Hertie School of Governance, Berlin (seit 2006) entstanden, zum großen Teil auch während Forschungsaufenthalten in außeruniversitären Einrichtungen in Stanford, Princeton, Florenz, Canberra und Berlin. Die Vielzahl dieser Orte und institutionellen Kontexte erklärt, dass die nur zum kleineren Teil in deutscher Sprache verfasst wurden. Da die englische Sprache heute im akademischen Leben und weit darüber hinaus keine Barriere mehr darstellt (oder doch darstellen sollte), war der Aufwand für eine Übersetzung englischer Texte verzichtbar. Die Texte erscheinen hier in der Sprache, in der sie geschrieben wurden. Die Texte sind – abgesehen von wenigen Erstveröffentlichungen – in Zeitschriften und Sammelbänden erschienen. Ausschnitte aus eigenen und gemeinsam verfassten Monographien wurden nicht berücksichtigt. Von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen sind Änderungen gegenüber den Originalversionen rein redaktioneller Art. Thematisch folgt die Auswahl den großen thematischen Blöcken der sechs Bände. Die Stichworte sind: Arbeitsmarkt, Wohlfahrtsstaat, politische Institutionen und Normen, Liberale Demokratie und ihre Gefährdungen, Regieren in Europa und der EU, sowie der Übergang vom Staatssozialismus zum demokratischen Kapitalismus nach 1989 in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Innerhalb dieser Themenfelder ist die Auswahl an subjektiven Kriterien wie Qualität, Relevanz und wahrgenommenen Zitiererfolg orientiert. Die Texte spiegeln den hohen Anregungswert der an den genannten Institutionen angetroffenen Kollegen wider, deren gedanklichen Einflüsse beim Verfasser ein gewisses Maß an beherztem Eklektizismus nach sich gezogen haben mögen. Nach meinem Studium bei Otto Stammer an der FU Berlin hatte ich das außerordentliche Privileg, für eine volle Dekade mit Jürgen Habermas zusammenzuarbeiten. Fritz Scharpf hat mich 1973 in Konstanz habilitiert und später zu einem längeren Forschungsaufenthalt ans Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) eingela-

Generalvorwort IX

den. Ab 1975 habe ich für 14 Jahre in unmittelbarer räumlicher Nachbarschaft zu Niklas Luhmann an der Universität Bielefeld gearbeitet. Die zahlreichen Einsichten, Anregungen und Herausforderungen, die sich aus glücklichen Ortswechseln auf gleichsam osmotischem Wege ergeben haben, kann ich nur pauschal und mit Dankbarkeit registrieren, ohne sie recht spezifizieren zu können. Solche osmotisch gewonnene intellektuellen Bereicherungen verdanke ich auch Philippe Schmitter, Terry Karl und James Fishkin seit einer gemeinsamen Zeit in Stanford, Albert Hirschman aus Begegnungen in Harvard und später Princeton, Jon Elster und Steven Lukes aus vielfältiger Zusammenarbeit sowie Robert Goodin aus meinen wiederholten Forschungsaufenthalten in Canberra. Dasselbe gilt für meinen Freund und (seit mehr als 50 Jahren !) Koautor Ulrich K. Preuß, mit dem ich dank glücklicher Fügung lange Zeitstrecken am selben Arbeitsort, z. T. sogar auf derselben geteilten Planstelle (an der Hertie School of Governance, 2006 – ​2012) verbracht habe. Für beinahe ebenso lange Zeit stehe ich im produktiven Austausch mit den befreundeten Kollegen Faruk Birtek (Istanbul) und David Abraham (Princeton und Miami). Dankbar (wenn auch nur pauschal) zu erwähnen ist hier auch die große Zahl von exzellenten Mitarbeitern und Doktoranden, die Resultate meiner eigenen Bemühungen oft genug und in produktiver Weise auf die Probe gestellt haben. Der Hertie School und ihren Präsidenten Michael Zürn und Helmut An­heier verdanke ich optimale Arbeitsbedingungen für mein Dasein als Emeritus, wie sie v. a. durch die hilfreiche Assistenz von Ines André-Schulze und Marcel Hadeed realisiert worden sind. Mein Dank gilt auch Andreas Beierwaltes von Springer VS, der sich für das Projekt in äußerst entgegenkommender Weise interessiert hat, sowie meiner Lektorin Cori Mackrodt, die sich der Sache mit anhaltend geduldiger Hilfsbereitschaft angenommen hat – einer Sache, die ohne ein jahrelanges freundschaftliches Zureden von Adalbert Hepp kaum die vorliegende Gestalt angenommen hätte. Berlin, im Februar 2018

Claus Offe

Inhalt

Vorwort  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 XV

Teil I Machterwerb durch Verbände, Parteien, Identitäten 1

2

3

4

5

Strategisches Beschweigen. Institutionelle und strategische Vorentscheidungen über die Vermeidung von Entscheidungsthemen (1977)  . . . . . . . . . .



Political Institutions and Social Power: Conceptual Explorations (2006)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 25

The attribution of public status to interest groups: observations on the West German case (1980)  . . . . . . . . . . . .

 45

Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? Notizen über seine Voraussetzungen und demokratischen Gehalte (1984)  . .

 81

“Homogeneity” and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights ? (1998)  . . . . .

 105

3

Teil II Legitimationen 6

Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources (1991)  . . . . . . . . .

 139 XI

XII Inhalt

7

8

Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization (1983)  . . . . . . . . . . . .

 167

Politische Legitimation durch Mehrheitsentscheidung ? (1982)  . . . .

 193

Teil III Defekte 9

Bewährungsproben. Über einige Beweislasten bei der Verteidigung der liberalen Demokratie (1995)  . . . . . . . .

 235

10 Political disaffection as an outcome of institutional practices ? Some post-Tocquevillean speculations (2006)  . . . . . . . . . . . .

 251

11 Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State: A Supply-Side Approach (2013)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 277

Teil IV Deliberation 12 Micro-aspects of democratic theory: what makes for the deliberative competence of citizens ? (1997)  . . .

 303

13 Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalized ? (2011) 

. . . . . . . . . . . .

 327

14 Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision (2017)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 355

15 Wille und Unwille des Volkes. Notizen zur politischen „Theorie“ des Populismus“ (2019)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 373

Nachweise  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  381 Namensregister  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 383

Vorwort

Die im vorliegenden Band zusammengestellten Arbeiten befassen sich vornehmlich mit der „Input“-Seite des demokratischen politischen Prozesses. Es geht um Institutionen und Akteure, in und zwischen denen die Konflikte über Interessen, Ideen und Identitäten artikuliert und ausgetragen werden. Demokratische Politik beginnt mit den Trägern von „voice“ (Hirschman), also den vielstimmigen Äußerungen von individuellen Akteuren (z. B. Wählern) und v. a. organisierten Kollektiven (z. B. Parteien, Verbänden, Medien der Massenkommunikation, Gewerkschaften, Religionsgemeinschaften, sozialen Bewegungen). Diese Akteure stehen  –  wie staatliche Politik insgesamt – als einer zweiten Kategorie von „Inputs“ – einem Umfeld von wirtschaftlichen Ereignissen und Entwicklungen (z. B. Arbeitsmarkt- und Konjunkturdaten) gegenüber, das seinerseits nach der Marktlogik von „exit“ operiert und auf das sich politische Akteure in Parteien, Parla­ menten und Regierungen beobachtend, reagierend und antizipierend kontinuierlich beziehen, weil die Aktionsspielräume dieser Akteure sowie die Imperative und Prioritäten ihres Handelns von dieser zweiten Kategorie von „Inputs“ maßgeblich mitbestimmt werden. Politische Institutionen wie politische Parteien, gesetzgebende Körperschaften, periodische Wahlen sowie vielfältige Verhandlungssysteme entscheiden dabei über die Frage, in welchem Maße welche Stimmen Gehör und politische Durchsetzungschancen finden.1 So entscheiden z. B. verfassungsrechtliche Normen darüber, welche Themen für eine Mehrheitsentscheidung keinesfalls in Betracht kommen (wie der „Wesensgehalt“ der Grundrechte nach Art. 19, 2 GG). Aber poli-

1

Vgl. dazu C. Offe, „Klassenherrschaft und politisches System. Die Selektivität politischer Institutionen“, in: ders., Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Aufsätze zur politischen Soziologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1972, 65 – ​105.

XIII

XIV Vorwort

tische Willensbildungen können auch in einem anderen Sinne „de­platziert“ sein – nämlich dann, wenn sie sich auf Gegenstände beziehen, die ihrer Natur oder der „Lage der Dinge“ nach außerhalb der Reichweite von Politik liegen; niemand käme auf die Idee, über die Niederschlagsmenge des kommenden Winters abzustimmen zu wollen. Auch Voten gegen ökonomische „Naturtatsachen“ (wie etwa eine erfolgreiche Kampagne für den nationalen Ausstieg aus einem supranational eta­blierten monetären Regimes) wären wegen absehbarer, unkontrollierbare und prohibitiver Folgen nichts anderes als eine instrumentell leere, rein expressive Geste. Davon wiederum sind zu unterscheiden Fälle einer interessengeleiteten Nicht-Befassung politischer Eliten mit politisch durchaus bearbeitbaren Themen und Reformprojekten. Die institutionalisierten Verfahrens- und Entscheidungsregeln, nach denen Konflikte artikuliert und ausgetragen, Kompromisse und Koalitionen gebildet und gesetzgeberische, exekutive und justizielle Entscheidungen herbeigeführt werden, bringen als ihr synthetisches Artefakt das hervor, was jeweils auf Zeit als „der“ Volkswille zu gelten beansprucht oder „im Namen“ des Vokes für rechtens erkannt wird. Dieser Geltungsanspruch kann jedoch nur dann eingelöst und als Prämisse für das Handeln und Unterlassen von Bürgern verbindlich werden, wenn diese jene Verfahren, nach denen der Volkswille jeweils erzeugt wird, als legitim anerkennen. Der „Legitimitätsglaube“ (Max Weber) der von politischen Entscheidungsergebnissen betroffenen Bürger wird sich dann in robuster Weise einstellen (so die in den vorliegenden Aufsätzen vertretene axiomatische Annahme), wenn jene Verfahren und die aus ihnen resultierenden Entscheidungsergebnisse die Eigenschaft aufweisen, gegen zwei Arten von Einwänden zureichend immun zu sein: sie dürfen (a) nicht in Verdacht stehen, als relevant geachtete Interessen, Ideen und Identitäten auszugrenzen oder sie in „unfairer“ Weise systematisch zu begünstigen bzw. andere zu benachteiligen; und demokratische Entscheidungsergebnisse dürfen sich (b) nicht dem Einwand aussetzen, systematisch von der Antizipation widriger Reaktionen wirtschaftlicher Machthaber und anderer faktischer Gewalten kontrolliert zu sein. Stark vereinfacht gesagt: die Organe staatlicher Gewalt müssen das Vertrauen genießen, dass sie weder das „Falsche“ tun noch das „Richtige“ unterlassen. Dabei bleibt die Operationalisierung der Terme „zureichend“, „falsch“, „richtig“, „systematisch“, „relevant“ usw. selbst eine Angelegenheit nicht so sehr der argumentative Hilfestellung leistenden Politischen Philosophie wie die von sozialen Kämpfen und einer intakten politischen Öffentlichkeit. Deren kritische Funktion erstreckt sich sowohl auf bestimmte Entscheidungsergebnisse wie zugleich immer auch auf die institutionellen Regeln und Kompetenzverteilungen der Entscheidungsproduktion, nach denen diese Ergebnisse generiert werden. Demokratien sind nämlich immer auch mit Auseinandersetzungen über die demokratische Per-

Vorwort XV

fektionierung ihrer eigenen Regeln und Verfahren befasst, etwa mit der jeweiligen Reichweite von Mehrheitsregel und Minderheitenschutz.2 Es sind drei Argumentationsstränge in der sozialwissenschaftlich informierten Demokratietheorie, deren innovative Anregungen viele der in diesem Band zusammengestellten Studien inspiriert haben. Dabei handelt es sich zum einen um kritische Studien über systematische Thematisierungsverweigerungen, Problemverdrängungen („non-decisions“) und verborgenen „Gesichter“ politischer Macht im demokratischen politischen Prozess, wie sie seit den frühen 1960er Jahren in Arbeiten von Schattschneider, Bachrach und Baratz und später Lukes3 untersucht worden sind und v. a. in der angelsächsischen Demokratietheorie zu ebenso heftigen wie produktiven Kontroversen geführt haben. Zum zweiten handelt es sich um die heute buchstäblich weltweit geführte Debatte über „deliberative“ Verfahren demokratischer Willensbildung (als Pendant und Vorstufe „aggregativer“ Willensbekundung), wie sie durch zahlreiche, ebenfalls in den frühen 1960er Jahren einsetzende Beiträge von Jürgen Habermas angestoßen worden ist und heute von Autoren wie Robert E. Goodin, Jane Mansbridge, James Fishkin, Bruce Ackerman4 und buchstäblich Hunderten anderer Forscher und Reform-Aktivisten weitergetrieben worden ist. Drittens geht es um das Thema der zivilgesellschaftlichen Assoziationsverhältnisse und Kommunikationsstrukturen, wie es v. a. in der angelsächsischen Forschung im Anschluß an Tocqueville und seine „théorie générale des associations“5 verfolgt wird. Die politiksoziologische Forschung auf beiden Seiten des Nordatlantik hat sich auf empirischer, theoretischer und normativer Ebene zwei Haupt- und Dauerthemen gewidmet, die ebenfalls den Kontext der in diesem Band zusammengestellten Studien bilden. Dabei handelt es sich zum einen um die Untersuchung der Formen und Verfahren, durch die Interessen, Ideen und Identitäten aus der Gesellschaft heraus staatlichem Handeln gegenüber repräsentiert werden, nämlich Siehe z. B. die Beiträge in B. Guggenberger und C. Offe, An den Grenzen der Mehrheitsdemokratie, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1984. 3 Siehe E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People. A Realist’s View of Democracy in America, New York etc.: Holt; P. Bachrach and M. Baratz, Power and Poverty. Theory and Practice, New York etc.: Oxford UP 1970 (dt. Macht und Armut. Eine theoretisch-empirische Untersuchung, Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp 1977); und S. Lukes, Power. A Radical View, 2nd edition, London: Palgrave 2005. 4 Siehe als umfassendes Kompendium zum Thema A. Bächtiger, J. S. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge, and M. E. Warren (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford: Oxford UP 2018. 5 A. de Tocqueville, Über die Demokratie in Amerika, Bd. II, Kap. 7. Stuttgart: Dt. Verlagsanstalt 1959. Vgl. R. A. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP 1993 und C. Offe, Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne. Tocqueville, Weber und Adorno in den Vereinigten Staaten, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2004. 2

XVI Vorwort

vor allem durch politische Parteien, Interessenverbände und Gewerkschaften, Gebietskörperschaften und soziale Bewegungen. Diese Einflusskanäle und „Treibriemen“, die zwischen Gesellschaft und Staat vermitteln, haben z. T. dramatische Veränderungen durchgemacht, die in zahllosen komparativen und zeithistorischen Studien über die Politik in kapitalistischen Demokratien dokumentiert und erklärt worden sind. Zum anderen haben sich soziologisch orientierte Politikwissenschaftler mit der (von einigen mit Irritation und Besorgnis gestellten) Frage beschäftigt, weshalb und mit welchen Folgen viele – und keineswegs zufallsverteilte ! – Kategorien von Bürgern darauf verzichten, von dem reichhaltigen institutionellen Angebot an Gelegenheiten zur politischen Partizipation Gebrauch zu machen und deutliche und eher zunehmende Symptome von disenchantment und disaffection aufweisen. Teilweise dramatische Gefährdungen und Deformationen des demokratischen Rechtsstaates, wie sie aktuell nicht nur in den „neuen“ post-staatssozialistischen Demokratien Mittel- und Osteuropas zu beobachten sind, verlangen nach einer Erklärung, die Institutionenwandel, Motive und Verhaltensänderungen auf der Mikroebene und sozialökonomische Erfahrungen und Erwartungen (wie die der „Prekarisierung“ und der zunehmenden sozialen Ungleichheit) miteinander kombiniert. Berlin, Juni 2018

Claus Offe

Teil I Machterwerb durch Verbände, Parteien, Identitäten

1

Strategisches Beschweigen. Institutionelle und strategische Vorentscheidungen über die Vermeidung von Entscheidungsthemen (1977)

Im Dezember 1962 und im September 1963 erschienen in der führenden Zeitschrift der amerikanischen Politikwissenschaft, der American Political Science Review, zwei Aufsätze, verfasst von dem Politikwissenschaftler Peter Bachrach und dem Ökonomen Morton Baratz. Von den zusammengenommen 25 Druckseiten dieser Beiträge nahm eine Debatte ihren Ausgang, die sich zu so etwas wie einem Paradigmen-Streit innerhalb von Politikwissenschaft und politischer Soziologie ausgewachsen hat. Diese beiden Beiträge, die der argumentativen Substanz nach den Kern der deutschen Übersetzung einer 1970 in den USA erschienenen Sammlung von Arbeiten der beiden Autoren ausmachen1, haben zum Zeitpunkt ihrer Erstveröffentlichung eine Periode beendet, während der die Vertreter einer bestimmten Variante der liberalen politischen Theorie und politischen Soziologie, die „Pluralisten“, das intellektuelle Geschehen in ihren Disziplinen nahezu lückenlos kontrollierten. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage nach dem Sitz der politischen Macht in der amerikanischen Gesellschaft und die Frage nach dem geeigneten methodisch-theoretischen Werkzeug, mit dem die Sozialwissenschaften über diese Frage Auskunft zu geben vermögen. Die sozialwissenschaftliche Behandlung der Frage, ob und in welchem Ausmaß im politischen System der USA egalitäre Prinzipien der politischen Demokratie realisiert sind oder ob vielmehr gesellschaftliche Machtverhältnisse die Institutionen demokratischer Beteiligung und Kontrolle pervertieren und leerlaufen lassen, hat in den USA eine lange, in die zwanziger Jahre zurückreichende Tradition. Untersuchungsgegenstand der entsprechenden Studien ist in der Regel die Machtverteilung in kommunalen politischen Systemen gewesen; die mehreren Dutzend Studien, die zu diesem Thema vorliegen, haben die „Gemeindemacht-

1

P. Bachrach und M. S. Baratz, Macht und Armut, Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp 1977

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_1

3

4

Strategisches Beschweigen

Forschung“ zu einem hochentwickelten Spezialgebiet der amerikanischen Politikwissenschaft werden lassen. Die beträchtlichen politischen Implikationen solcher Fallstudien liegen auf der Hand: je nach ihrem Ergebnis (und je nach dem Grad, in dem das Ergebnis als verallgemeinerungsfähig hingestellt werden kann) konnten sie als Legitimationshilfen für das politische System oder aber als Anhaltspunkte einer von populistischen und sozialistischen Traditionen ausgehenden Kritik dieses Systems in Anspruch genommen werden. Das theoriepolitische Klima, das in den USA nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, insbesondere in der Periode zwischen dem Koreakrieg (1953) und den Anfängen der Bürgerrechtsbewegung (1962) herrschte, brachte eine modernisierte liberale Doktrin akademisch an die Macht, die – repräsentiert durch Autoren wie D. Truman, S. M. Lipset, den frühen R. A. Dahl, N. Polsby, B. R. Berelson, W. Kornhauser – die pluralistische Natur und Dynamik des amerikanischen politischen Systems behauptete und zugleich feierte. Die übereinstimmende Diagnose dieser pluralistischen Theoretiker lässt sich dahingehend zusammenfassen, dass politische Machtpositionen als formelle Entscheidungschancen auf dem Wege über Gruppenbildung und Koalitionsprozesse von jedem Ort der amerikanischen Sozialstruktur aus nahezu gleichermaßen leicht zugänglich seien; dass ein so gegliedertes politisches System in nahezu vollendeter Form den Kriterien der Stabilität, Flexibilität und Partizipation genüge; und dass vor allem die einzelnen im politischen System erzeugten Entscheidungen keinerlei empirisch gesicherte Rückschlüsse auf dominante „Eliten“ oder Interessengruppen zuließen, die als Ak­teure und/oder Nutznießer an solchen Entscheidungen unverhältnismäßig stark oder oft beteiligt seien. Diese Theorie über die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Machtverhältnisse der amerikanischen Demokratie fand – unter Verwendung einer stark verhaltenswissenschaftlich geprägten Methodologie – in verschiedenen empirischen Studien ihre schon vom Forschungsansatz her präjudizierte Bestätigung. Die politische Funktion dieser Studien bestand darin, dass sie kritische Verweise auf eine Macht- und Privilegienstruktur der amerikanischen Gesellschaft intellektuell desavouieren half und im Übrigen an der Stilisierung des Bildes einer gerechten und stabilen politischen Ordnung mitwirkte, die in den USA bereits verwirklicht, in den politischen Systemen Europas aber erst noch zu erwarten und nach amerikanischem Vorbild durchzusetzen sei. Der festgefügte Block der theoretischen, methodischen, empirischen und politischen Elemente der amerikanischen Pluralismustheorie erlaubte es, vereinzelte Kritiker (Hunter 1953 und vor allem Mills 1956) methodenkritisch abzukanzeln und aus dem akademischen Feld zu schlagen. Die Bedeutung der von Bachrach und Baratz vorgetragenen Gegenposition besteht darin, dass sie den Nachweis versuchen, dass diese Studien (deren bedeu-

Strategisches Beschweigen 5

tendste wohl Dahl 1961 ist) zwar nicht in ihren empirischen Ergebnissen falsch und bestreitbar, aber in ihrer methodischen und theoretischen Anlage durchaus ungeeignet sind, die gestellte Frage wissenschaftlich zu beantworten. Weder beschwert noch belehrt von europäischen Theorietraditionen bemühen sie sich im Gegenzug um die Entwicklung dessen, was man bei uns eine Theorie politischer Klassenherrschaft nennen müsste. Ihre Unbefangenheit zahlt sich allerdings in dem Vorzug aus, dass die verzweigte Problematik einer solchen Theorie im Verlauf der anschließenden Debatte in aller Deutlichkeit zutage tritt und nicht durch die voreilige Anwendung eines herkömmlichen Argumentationsrepertoires verdunkelt wird. Intellektuell verfügen weder sie selbst noch ihre Gegner über das Gerät, mit dem man das heiße Eisen sei es schmieden, sei es aus dem Feuer holen und als sozialwissenschaftliches Thema kaltstellen könnte. Eben diese Verlegenheit macht den wissenschaftshistorischen und didaktischen Reiz der „non-decisions-Debatte“ aus. Je sorgfältiger man sie verfolgt, desto deutlicher werden die Bezüge zu beinahe sämtlichen Antinomien sozialwissenschaftlichen Denkens, welche die Theorieentwicklung in Soziologie, Ökonomie und Politikwissenschaft seit Generationen bestimmt haben. Erklären und Verstehen, Macht und ökonomisches Gesetz, Struktur und Handlung, Norm und Faktum, Theorie und Empirie – alle die mit diesen Begriffspaaren gekennzeichneten Streitfragen der Gesellschaftstheorie müssten geklärt sein, ehe man davon sprechen könnte, dass die Debatte, deren auslösendes Argument das Buch von Bachrach und Baratz vorführt, abgeschlossen wäre. Die wichtigsten Thesen und Schwierigkeiten, die bisher in dieser Debatte aufgetaucht sind, sollen deshalb hier in gebotener Kürze zusammengestellt werden.2 Dabei soll deutlich gemacht werden, dass dieses Buch selbst zweifellos nicht die „Lösung“ des in ihm aufgeworfenen Problems bringt, sondern in erster Linie als Ausgangspunkt einer anhaltenden und brisanten Kontroverse gelesen zu werden verdient. Des Weiteren soll deutlich werden, dass sich das Kernargument von Bachrach und Baratz nicht eindeutig eignet, die kritische Funktion tatsächlich zu erfüllen, die sich seine Urheber von ihm versprechen. Seine Weiterentwicklung hängt von der Beseitigung einer Reihe von Unklarheiten ab, vor allem aber von der systematischen Einfügung des Arguments in eine umfassende politisch-soziologische Theorie entwickelter kapitalistischer Industriegesellschaften und ihrer demokratischen politischen Systeme.

2

Anregungen verdanke ich einer scharfsinnigen Seminararbeit von H. Wiesenthal über das Machtkonzept von S. Lukes.

6

Strategisches Beschweigen

I In der gesamten liberalen politischen Theorie und politischen Soziologie wird der Begriff Macht als kausales Entscheidungshandeln von Individuen gefasst. Machtverhältnisse liegen überall dort – und nur dort – vor, wo ein Inhaber einer Machtposition nach Maßgabe seiner Präferenzen unter mindestens zwei Handlungsalternativen eine (bewusste) Auswahl trifft, und wo diese Auswahl für das Handeln mindestens eines Machtunterworfenen in der Weise maßgeblich wird, dass Handlungsalternativen, die dieser bei Abwesenheit der Machtbeziehung realisieren würde, nicht realisiert werden. Die theoretischen und empirischen Schwierigkeiten, auf die man bei der Zugrundelegung eines solchen Machtbegriffes stößt, können kurz anhand Max Webers Definition der Macht demonstriert werden: „Macht bedeutet jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben durchzusetzen […]“ Nach dieser Definition haben wir es auf beiden Seiten der Machtbeziehung mit einem beobachtbaren (und für Weber zusätzlich: verstehbaren) Handeln zu tun, nämlich der Äußerung eines „Willens“ einerseits und der Äußerung eines „Widerstrebens“ andererseits. Nun sind bei der Beobachtung einer konkreten Interaktion zwischen zwei Akteuren zwei Fälle denkbar: Auf die Willensäußerung von A beobachten wir entweder ein „Widerstreben“ oder wir stellen fest, dass kein „Widerstreben“ stattfindet. Wenn letzteres der Fall ist, wären wir zunächst zu dem Schluss berechtigt, dass es sich nicht um eine Machtbeziehung handelt. Ließen wir uns auf diesen Schluss ein, dann würde allerdings der Machtbegriff völlig konturlos, und zwar deshalb, weil ja die Tatsache, dass B nicht widerstrebt, sehr wohl auch auf etwas anderes als die Macht von A zurückgehen kann, nämlich z. B. darauf, dass B in der Übernahme der von A gesetzten Handlungsprämissen seine eigenen autonomen Interessen befriedigt sieht. Wenn alle Beziehungen, in denen kein Widerstreben sichtbar wird, als Machtbeziehungen gelten sollen, dann geht offenkundig die begriff‌liche Differenz zwischen einem autonom erzielten Einverständnis zwischen A und B und der machtvermittelten Einschränkung der Handlungsalternativen von B durch A verloren. Wenn wir an dieser Differenz festhalten und den Machtbegriff nicht sinnlos überdehnen wollen, vermögen wir aufgrund dieser Beobachtung nicht zu entscheiden, ob eine Machtbeziehung tatsächlich vorliegt oder nicht. Nicht günstiger sieht es im zweiten Fall aus, nämlich dann, wenn wir bei B ein „Widerstreben“ gegen die Übernahme der Willensäußerung von A beobachten. Denn nicht jeder Fall von Widerstreben erlaubt ja, von einer Machtbeziehung zu sprechen. Nach der Definition liegt eine Machtbeziehung nur dann vor, wenn sich das beobachtbare Widerstreben als erfolglos herausstellt. Hier fragt sich allerdings, weshalb wir erwarten können, dass auf Seiten von B in dem Falle, dass tatsächlich

Strategisches Beschweigen 7

eine Machtbeziehung vorliegt, der Versuch des Widerstandes, der ja gemäß der Definition scheitern musste, überhaupt unternommen wird. Zumindest kann man sagen, dass diese Prozedur auf eine drastische Einschränkung des Umfanges des Machtbegriffes hinausliefe: beobachtbar wären dann nur solche Machtbeziehungen, deren der machtunterworfene B nicht gewahr ist und denen gegenüber er deshalb den (wie sich zeigen wird: aussichtslosen) Versuch des „Widerstrebens“ unternimmt. Wenn B jedoch die Aussichtslosigkeit seines Widerstrebens antizipiert und dieses deshalb unterlässt – wenn der Machthaber A also eine durchschlagende Abschreckungswirkung erzielt –, dann lässt sich das Vorhandensein einer Machtbeziehung unplausibler Weise überhaupt nicht feststellen. Eine weitere begriff‌lichempirische Schwierigkeit besteht darin, dass ja durchaus offen ist, über welchen Zeitraum hinweg das Widerstreben von B gegenüber dem Willen von A beobachtet werden muss, damit man sagen kann, dass es tatsächlich erfolglos gewesen sei. – Die Schwierigkeiten einer handlungs- und kausalwissenschaftlichen Konzeptualisierung von Macht führen also entweder in eine völlig unplausible Aufblähung oder in eine ebenso wenig einleuchtende Verengung des Machtbegriffs hinein, sobald dieser auf die Analyse empirischer Phänomene angewandt werden soll. Wenn Macht vorliegt, ist Widerstreben in der Regel nicht sichtbar (da ja angenommen werden kann, dass die Machtunterworfenen ihren Unwillen, dem Willen des Machthabers zu folgen, für sich behalten, sich der Macht fügen und diese somit der empirischen Beobachtung entziehen werden). Wenn aber Widerstreben beobachtbar ist, bleibt durchaus offen, ob Macht vorliegt oder nicht vielmehr ein Prozess ihrer Destruktion. Schließlich: wenn kein Widerstreben vorliegt, ist durchaus ungewiss, ob die Willensübereinstimmung tatsächlich machtbedingt ist oder anderweitig zustande kommt. – Wenn wir auf jede Zusatzannahme über die Disposition von Machthabern und Machtunterworfenen sowie auf andere Indikatoren für Machtverhältnisse strikt verzichten, erweist sich ein so konstruierter Machtbegriff auch in dieser Hinsicht als „soziologisch amorph“, wie Weber unter einem anderen Aspekt anmerkt; er ist für die Erfassung sozialer Machttatbestände ungeeignet. Brauchbar würde er erst, wenn wir theoretische Annahmen über Interessen und Bewusstsein der Machtunterworfenen heranzögen, die uns Aufschluss über die Frage geben könnten, welche Willensäußerungen von Machthabern erwartbar auf ein „Widerstreben“ stoßen, und auf wessen Widerstreben. „Was wir bräuchten, ist eine Theorie politischer Interessen und des rationalen Handelns, die angeben würde, unter welchen Umständen die verschiedenen Gruppen und sozialen Kategorien ‚eigentlich‘ bestimmte Ziele verfolgen würden, so dass wir die Fälle identifizieren könnten, in denen die Artikulation und Vertretung von Interessen unterdrückt wird.“ (Wolfinger 1971, 1078)3 3

Alle angeführten Zitate aus englischsprachigen Publikationen sind von mir übersetzt. C. O.

8

Strategisches Beschweigen

Genau dieser Lösung, die ja auf eine subjektive oder gar objektive Hermeneutik der Interessen von Machtunterworfenen hinausliefe, widersetzt sich der rein verhaltenswissenschaftliche Machtbegriff, den Dahl (1961) zugrunde legt. Ihm zufolge liegt Macht dann vor, wenn A veranlassen kann, dass B etwas tut, was B anderenfalls nicht getan hätte, oder etwas unterlässt, das er anderenfalls getan hätte. Soll das, was B anderenfalls getan oder nicht getan hätte, nicht bloß Sache bloßer Vermutung und Intuition bleiben, so würde man, dieser Definition zufolge, nur dann vom Vorliegen einer Machtbeziehung sprechen können, wenn sie sich in einer förmlichen Versuchsanordnung erwiesen hätte, die folgende Bedingungen erfüllen musste: Es müssten unabhängig voneinander zwei identische Gruppen, Versuchsgruppe und Kontrollgruppe, gebildet und von der Umwelt isoliert werden; in der Versuchsgruppe müsste die Willensäußerung von A erzeugt werden, und daraufhin müsste das Verhalten von B in der Versuchs- und Kontrollgruppe Differenzen aufweisen, die als Bestätigung der Hypothese gewertet werden könnten. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass ein solches experimentelles Arrangement mangels Isolierbarkeit und Vergleichbarkeit der interessierenden Phänomene – in politisch relevanten Zusammenhängen völlig unrealisierbar ist. Der Machtbegriff würde bei Verwendung so rigoroser empirischer Standards für die Kleingruppenforschung reserviert bleiben müssen. Dahl beschreitet denn auch einen anderen Weg. Er unterstellt nämlich, dass immer dort, wo Machtbeziehungen vorliegen, die objektive Chance und die subjektive Disposition bei den Machtunterworfenen besteht, ihren abweichenden Präferenzen in einer Weise Ausdruck zu verleihen, die diese (z. B. durch Meinungsbefragung) der sozialwissenschaftlichen Beobachtung zugänglich macht. Er bewältigt also die genannte Schwierigkeit, nicht zu wissen, was denn die Machtunterworfenen im Falle der Abwesenheit der Machtbeziehung tun würden, dadurch, dass er die Antwort auf diese Frage von den Machtunterworfenen selbst gewinnt. Was im strikten Experiment die Funktion der Kontrollgruppe wäre, muss von den Machtunterworfenen selbst wahrgenommen werden: die fiktive Konstruktion einer alternativen Realität, die Festlegung des Bezugspunktes, an dem Machtbeziehungen allein gemessen werden können. Dieses Verfahren präjudiziert methodisch, dass Macht nur in dem Umfang empirisch identifiziert werden kann, wie die Machtunterworfenen selbst durch ihre Worte und ihr Handeln deutlich machen, dass sie die Machtbeziehung als kontingent und reversibel betrachten. So könnte man sagen: Macht ist etwas, über dessen Vorhandensein sich die Betroffenen zumindest im sozialwissenschaftlichen Interview beschweren. Macht kann demnach nur in dem Ausmaß erkannt werden, wie sie nicht mächtig genug ist, alternative Willenskundgebung zu erdrücken, zu entmutigen und auf diese Weise von dem Bildschirm verschwinden zu lassen, auf dem der Sozialwissenschaftler sie zu identifizieren versucht. Es verwundert nicht weiter, dass ein

Strategisches Beschweigen 9

Forschungsverfahren, welches aus methodischen Gründen nur zur Messung relativ „harmloser“, instabiler, kontingenter Machtverhältnisse geeignet ist, zu dem Forschungsergebnis führt, die Machtverhältnisse seien tatsächlich offen, inkohärent und „pluralistisch“. Der ganze Methodenspuk kann die tautologische Natur der Ergebnisse, mit denen eine handlungswissenschaftlich und kausalanalytisch konzipierte Machttheorie empirisch aufzuwarten hat, nur beschönigen, nicht beheben. Instruktiv sind daran nur die Fehler, die eine alternative, strukturtheoretisch angelegte Machttheorie jedenfalls zu vermeiden hätte. Das zentrale Gegenargument von Bachrach und Baratz besteht nun in der Konstruktion eines zweistufigen Machtbegriffs. Das eine „Gesicht“ von Macht wird durchaus in der traditionellen handlungstheoretischen Begriff‌lichkeit analysiert: Die Willensbekundung von A setzt sich gegen die bekundete Opposition von B durch. Alternativen, die B vorziehen würde, werden damit ausgeschlossen und bleiben unrealisiert. Nun unterliegt aber der Bereich dieser ausgeschlossenen Alternativen selbst bestimmten Konstitutionsregeln und Restriktionen. Die Wirksamkeit dieser Konstitutionsregeln ist das, was Bachrach und Baratz als das „zweite“ Gesicht der Macht hervorheben. Der Horizont von Alternativen, die durch Entscheidungshandeln ausgeschlossen werden, ist durch Normen und Institutionen bereits präformiert, und genau diese einschränkenden Effekte – so ihre These  – müssen aus der Sichtweise eines handlungstheoretischen Machtbegriffs verborgen bleiben. An dem Punkt eines Machtprozesses, an dem diese ihre Beobachtungen aufnimmt, ist sozusagen das Wichtigste schon passiert: die Aussonderung von Alternativen, die dann auf der Ebene manifesten Entscheidungshandelns und beobachtbaren Widerstrebens keine Rolle mehr spielen. Bachrach und Baratz lassen keinen Zweifel daran, dass ihrer Auffassung zufolge die zweite Form der Machtausübung mindestens ebenso bedeutsam ist wie die erste, auf der Handlungsebene beobachtbare. In einer späteren Phase der Debatte stellen sie (1975, 900 – ​901) fest: „In einem einigermaßen stabilen politischen System wird Macht vorwiegend nicht von denen ausgeübt, die politische Entscheidungen treffen oder darüber entscheiden, welche Entscheidungsthemen auf der politischen Tagesordnung stehen, sondern sie wird von solchen Personen und Gruppen ausgeübt, die ihre Anstrengungen darauf verwenden, die vorherrschenden Normen, Entscheidungskriterien, Institutionen und Verfahrensregeln zu gestalten und zur Geltung zu bringen, welche dann ihrerseits den politischen Prozess stützen und prägen.“ Man geht wohl nicht fehl in der Annahme, dass in diesem Modell eines zweistufigen Machtverhältnisses an eine substitutive Beziehung zwischen Stufe I und Stufe II gedacht ist: Je mehr Alternativen auf der Stufe institutioneller Präjudizierungen bereits „weggefiltert“ werden, desto zuversichtlicher und unbesorgter können sich die Machthaber auf relativ offene, im Ausgang unbestimmte Machtkämpfe

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Strategisches Beschweigen

auf der Ebene des manifesten Entscheidungshandelns einlassen. Umgekehrt gilt, dass „wichtige“ politische Themen nur dann auf die Tagesordnung politischer Institutionen geraten können, wenn das politische System in dem Sinne instabil ist, dass institutionelle Filter nicht zuverlässig funktionieren. In diesem Fall müssen dann die gleichsam versäumten „Nicht-Entscheidungen“ durch manifeste „Entscheidungen“ kompensiert werden. Mit dieser Konstruktion eines zweistufigen Machtbegriffs ist, in einer traditionellen Terminologie gesprochen, das Verhältnis von Objektivität und Subjektivität, von Form und Inhalt, von Struktur und Handeln angesprochen. Aus zwei Gründen, einem theoretischen und einem methodischen, widerstehen Bachrach und Baratz der naheliegenden Lösung, Machtphänomene in vollem Umfang auf der Ebene „objektiver Verhältnisse“, institutioneller Formen und subjektloser gesellschaftlicher Strukturen anzusiedeln. Der theoretische Grund liegt darin, dass von Macht sinnvollerweise nur dann die Rede sein kann, wenn der Machthaber „im Prinzip“ auch die Möglichkeit hätte, seine Macht nicht auszuüben; Macht kann jemand nur haben, wenn er sich nicht auf naturhafte Zwangsgesetze berufen kann, die ihm keine andere Wahl lassen, als „so und nicht anders“ zu handeln. So ist es offenbar unsinnig, von der „Macht“ des Wetters oder des Fallgesetzes zu sprechen. Folglich müssen, wo immer von der Macht von Institutionen und Normen die Rede ist, diese selbst als im Handeln kontingent, d. h. als „auch anders möglich“ vorgestellt werden. Dieser Gesichtspunkt veranlasst die Autoren, das von ihnen entdeckte „zweite Gesicht der Macht“ nun wiederum an Entscheidungshandeln rückzubinden und auch für jene verborgenen Vorentscheidungen Akteure zu unterstellen, welche die strukturellen Rahmenbedingungen des Handelns ihrerseits frei wählen. Dieser Gedankengang, der dann doch wieder auf eine Subjektivierung von Machtphänomenen hinausläuft und lediglich theoretisch vorsieht, dass bei der empirischen Erforschung von Machtverhältnissen nicht nur die Bühne betrachtet wird, sondern auch die Kulissen des offiziellen Entscheidungsprozesses auf Manipulationsakte und strategische Arrangements hin abgeleuchtet werden, ist nicht schlüssig. Ein Vergleich mit der analogen Problematik im Historischen Materialismus zeigt, dass Machtverhältnisse begriff‌lich durchaus von der Kategorie des sozialen Handelns getrennt werden können, gesellschaftliche Strukturen als subjektlose Machtverhältnisse angenommen, als „sachliche Mächte, ja […] übermächtige Sachen, von den sich beziehenden Individuen selbst unabhängige Sachen“ (Marx, Grundrisse 545) vorgestellt werden können, ohne dass man durch die Implikation der „Naturhaftigkeit“ solcher Verhältnisse dem Missverständnis Vorschub leisten müsste, sie seien nicht anders möglich und insofern keine Machtverhältnisse, sondern Naturgesetze. Die Vermeidung dieses Missverständnisses kann freilich nur im Rahmen einer historischen Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung gelin-

Strategisches Beschweigen 11

gen, die den Prozess der „Versachlichung“ bzw. „Verselbständigung“ gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse nachzeichnet, andererseits aber die Ergebnisse dieses Prozesses als keineswegs irreversibel begreift. (Vgl. Vogt 1974) Der zweite Grund dafür, dass Bachrach und Baratz die dem Entscheidungshandeln zugrunde liegenden Vorentscheidungen handlungstheoretisch auffassen, ist in dem methodischen Gesichtspunkt zu sehen, dass sie sich anderenfalls dem – im Kontext der amerikanische Sozialwissenschaften vernichtenden – Vorwurf aussetzen müssten, mit Fiktionen zu operieren, die einer empirischen, an der Beobachtung von sozialem Handeln ausgerichteten Bestätigung prinzipiell nicht zugänglich seien. Diese Erwägungen führen die Verfasser in das Dilemma, dass sie sich einerseits aufgrund ihrer Einsicht in die objektiven und strukturellen Prämissen politischer Machtausübung von der Beobachtungs- und Handlungsebene so weit wie möglich entfernen möchten, andererseits aber nicht über eine klassentheoretische Fundierung ihres theoretischen Arguments verfügen und sich auch aus diesem Grund nicht leisten können, aus dem empiristischen Reglement vollends auszubrechen. Sie plädieren stattdessen für einen „weichen“ Empirismus und appellieren sozusagen an die Großzügigkeit ihrer Gegner, zugunsten wichtiger theoretischer Einsichten auf die Forderung nach rigiden empirischen Beweisprozeduren jedenfalls vorläufig zu verzichten. „Empirische Bestätigung ist gewiss höchst wünschenswert, aber sie ist nicht das Wichtigste.“ (1975, 904) Oder: „Lieber ein mangelhaftes Messverfahren für ein äußerst wichtiges Phänomen als die vorzügliche Messung von Trivialitäten.“ (Frey 1971, 1094) Nun scheint allerdings die Sache zu wichtig zu sein, um auf dem Wege mehr oder weniger entgegenkommender methodischer Konventionen beigelegt werden zu können. Das Dilemma zeigt sich nämlich nicht erst bei dem Versuch, das Vorliegen jener verborgenen institutionellen Präjudizien für Machtverhältnisse empirisch zu bestätigen, sondern bereits bei der Begriffsbildung. Durch und durch unklar und widersprüchlich bleibt nämlich die Vorstellung von dem, was die Autoren mit dem Begriff „non-decisions“ bezeichnet wissen wollen: Handelt es sich um „Entscheidungen, dass nicht […]“ oder handelt es sich um etwas anderes als Entscheidungen, also um vorab Festgelegtes, institutionell bereits Vorentschiedenes ? Auf diese Frage, die in der Debatte verschiedentlich aufgetaucht ist (z. B. Eijk und Kok 1975, 279; Debnam 1975, 891) gibt es bei Bachrach und Baratz keine klare Antwort. In der ursprünglichen Formulierung ihres Gedankens, treffen wir überwiegend auf Formulierungen, die eine absichtsvolle, bestimmten Akteuren zurechenbare Einschränkung der Entscheidungsthematik nahelegen. Hier bedeutet „non-decision making“, dass bestimmte Themen und Konfliktstoffe strategisch aus dem politischen Entscheidungsprozess von angebbaren Akteuren absichtsvoll herausgehalten werden. Es gelten also empirisch beobachtbare Handlungen, mögen sie auch als Manipulationsakte im Hintergrund ablaufen und der sozialwis-

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Strategisches Beschweigen

senschaftlichen Beobachtung deshalb schwer zugänglich sein, als Substanz dessen, was unter „non-decisions“ zu verstehen ist. Auf die Frage, ob jenes zweite Gesicht der Macht nicht auch durch strukturelle Imperative („imperatives of the structural setting“, Debnam, 891) begründet sein könnte, weichen sie zunächst der Alternative zwischen einem handlungs- und einem strukturtheoretischen Machtbegriff aus und weisen die Frage als „falsch“ zurück, finden sich dann aber im Folgenden doch bereit, auch andere Prozesse als die bewusste Unterdrückung von Themen und Einschränkung zugelassener Konfliktstoffe unter den Begriff des „non-decision-making“ zu subsumieren. Einerseits insistieren sie, dass „non-decision-making“ ein zurechenbares Handeln sei, andererseits wird jetzt auch der Fall einer „unbewussten“ Machtausübung sowie der Fall der „indirekten“ Machtausübung einbezogen; Machtphänomene liegen, anders gesagt, auch dann vor, wenn das Entscheidungshandeln von A nicht absichtsvoll, sondern „unbewusst“ darauf hinausläuft, den Thematisierungsspielraum zum Nachteil von B einzuschränken; und/oder wenn zwischen A und B keine direkte Kommunikation stattfindet, vielmehr die Einschränkung von Themen und Konfliktstoffen auf indirektem Wege geschieht (Bachrach/Baratz 1975, 904). Hier können Kritiker wiederum mit dem Argument einhaken, dass nun offenbleibe, ob der Machtbegriff an Absichten oder an Resultaten festgemacht werden solle (Eijk und Kok 1975, 279) oder etwa an der – soziologisch naiven – Annahme ihrer Koinzidenz (Wolfinger 1971, 1074). Die Dehnung eines handlungstheoretischen Begriffs von Machtausübung, die Einbeziehung sowohl von „unbewusstem“ wie von „indirektem“ Handeln, kommt der Klarheit der theoretischen Konzeption offenkundig nicht zugute. Das oben bezeichnete Dilemma wird nicht behoben, sondern mit unscharfen Formulierungen zugedeckt. Was völlig ungeklärt bleibt, ist die Frage, welche Eigenschaften von Institutionen – etwa des parlamentarischen Regierungssystems oder der Verfügung über Produktionsmittel aufgrund von Eigentumstiteln – es eigentlich sind, die es bestimmten Akteuren erlauben, den Ausgang von Interessenkonflikten zu präjudizieren und den politischen Thematisierungsprozess unter restriktive Bedingungen zu stellen. Indem sie – an freilich extensiv gehandhabten – handlungstheoretischen Kategorien festhalten, suggerieren Bachrach und Baratz, dass die institutionellen Arrangements und Spielregeln, denen die Akteure folgen, gleichsam in jedem Augenblick von ihnen strategisch kreiert oder zumindest „unbewusst“ bestätigt werden. „Bachrach und Baratz orientieren sich, ebenso wie die Pluralisten, an einer Vorstellung von Macht, die allzu sehr am methodischen Individualismus ausgerichtet ist“ (Lukes 1974, 22). Auf der Basis einer solchen Vorstellung, die das Eigengewicht und die Objektivität institutioneller Strukturen und ihrer „Selektivität“ (vgl. Offe 1972) leugnet, muss dann die unlösbare Frage übrigbleiben, welchen Umständen eigentlich die Akteure ihre Chance verdanken, durch „non-decisions“ restriktive Prämissen politischer Machtausübung zu er-

Strategisches Beschweigen 13

zeugen. In Übereinstimmung mit nahezu der gesamten kritischen Tradition der angelsächsischen politischen Soziologie und ihren elitetheoretischen Konzepten (z. B. Bachrach 1967, Miliband 1972; zur Kritik vgl. Balbus 1971, 1975 und u. a., Poulantzas 1976) figurieren auch bei Bachrach und Baratz die gesellschaftlichen Akteure nicht als „Träger“ bestimmter, von einer Produktionsweise vorgezeichne­ter Funktionen, nicht als Exekutoren struktureller Imperative und institutionalisierter Vorentscheidungen, sondern ausschließlich als die Urheber von Normen und „Spielregeln“, die den gesellschaftlichen Verkehr lenken. So wenig nun die Nebelfelder einer rein objektivistischen, auf nicht-empirische Strukturen und „Bewegungsgesetze“ abhebenden Konzeptualisierung gesellschaftlicher Macht als Gefahr unterschätzt werden dürfen, so gravierend sind andererseits die Defizite, die sich einstellen, wenn institutionelle Strukturen ohne Rest in strategisches Entscheidungshandeln aufgelöst werden; es bleibt dann nämlich unerfindlich, aufgrund welcher Gegebenheiten und „Vorentschiedenheiten“ die Akteure gesellschaftlich so positioniert sind, dass sie über die Hebel des „non-decision-making“ verfügen können. Diesen Zusammenhang zwischen objektiven Diskriminierungseffekten von Institutionen einerseits und den Chancen, diese im Entscheidungshandeln anzuwenden und interessenspezifisch auszuwerten, haben etwa Cobb und Elder (1971, 906 ff.) sowie die an sie anschließende Forschung über „agenda setting“ im Auge. Angewendet auf die in ihren Anfängen in die Zeit vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg zurückreichende nationalökonomische Diskussion über „Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz ?“ (Böhm-Bawerk 1914) lässt sich die Differenz zwischen den beiden Varianten, nach denen sich der Begriff der „non-decisions“ auslegen lässt, folgendermaßen illustrieren: in der eher handlungstheoretischen Version könnte von ökonomischen Machtphänomenen nur in solchen Fällen die Rede sein, in denen die Entscheidungsprämissen für andere strategisch manipuliert, ihre Beteiligung an bestimmten Märkten, etwa durch Strategien der Konzentration und Kartellisierung von Angebot bzw. Nachfrage, reduziert würde. In einer eher strukturtheoretischen Auslegung würde außerdem sichtbar, dass ökonomische Macht nicht erst aus (erfolgreichen) Konzentrationsstrategien resultiert, sondern dass  –  zumindest auf dem Arbeitsmarkt – die Basisinstitution privaten Produktionsmittel-Eigentums Machtpositionen erzeugt, insofern denjenigen, die über solches Produktionsmittel-Eigentum nicht verfügen, die Chance entzogen wird, über die Anwendungsbedingungen ihrer Arbeitskraft unabhängig von Art und Umfang der Nachfrage nach der „Ware“ Arbeitskraft zu entscheiden. Selbstverständlich kann in einer historisch-genetischen Perspektive auch das Zustandekommen der Basisinstitution privaten Produktionsmitteleigentums auf Handlungen zurückgeführt und als Prozess dechiffriert werden, in dem „non-decisions“ absichtsvoll zur Geltung gebracht worden sind. Das ändert indes nichts daran, dass es sich bei

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Strategisches Beschweigen

der Machtbildung durch Kartellierungsstrategien (z. B. zum Zwecke der Verhinderung des Marktzugangs Dritter) nicht nur um andere Akteure handelt, die zu anderen Zeitpunkten andere strategische Ziele verfolgen, sondern dass sie dies alles vor allem nur deshalb tun können, weil sie die inzwischen erfolgte Institutionalisierung des Privateigentums als gegeben voraussetzen und auf dieser Grundlage strategische „non-decisions“ durchsetzen können. Um einen anderen Illustrationsfall zu nehmen: in der soziologischen Gewerkschaftsforschung ist neuerdings eindrucksvoll herausgestellt worden, wie der Prozess der innerverbandlichen Machtbildung durch „non-decisions“ gesteuert wird, die sich im Einzelnen bei der personellen Besetzung von Tarifkommissionen, der zeitlichen, organisatorischen und thematischen Gestaltung von Gewerkschaftstagen usf. nachweisen lassen (vgl. Bergman et al. 1975, bes. Kap. VII; Bosch 1974). Solche Praktiken des Verschweigens, Verleugnens, Verhinderns, Hintanstellens und der förmlich beschlossenen Nichtbefassung mit bestimmten Themen (etwa auf Empfehlung einer Antragsprüfungskommission) werden aber in ihrer Hartnäckigkeit sowie im Hinblick auf die Tatsache, dass sie nach ihren politischen Implikationen ja keineswegs kontingent und zufalls-verteilt sind, erst auf dem Hintergrund der Tatsache verständlich, dass bevor die Organisationsspitze Tagesordnungen manipulieren und wichtige Kommissionen mit „zuverlässigen“ Kollegen besetzen kann etc. – die Organisation als ganze es mit dem objektiven Zwiespalt zwischen Einkommens- und Beschäftigungsinteressen der Arbeitnehmer, zwischen ihren ökonomischen und politischen Zielen zu tun hat; dieser Zwiespalt ergibt sich aus jenem – ebenso fundamentalen wie anonymen – Macht- und Erpressungsverhältnis, das durch die gesellschaftliche Form der Arbeitskraft als „Ware“ selbst etabliert wird. Erst dieser Zwiespalt erklärt, dass der Katalog von Themen und Forderungen, den sich eine gewerkschaftliche Organisation unter gegebenen Bedingungen „leisten“, d. h. konsensuell verarbeiten kann, mehr oder weniger eng beschränkt ist und insofern durch ausdrückliches „non-decision-making“ beschränkt werden muss. – Aus diesem Zusammenhang ergibt sich dann das sozialtheoretische Grundsatzproblem, welches Bachrach und Baratz nur dadurch markieren, dass sie es immer wieder zu umgehen suchen. Es besteht in dem Dilemma, dass Macht (ebenso wie eine Reihe anderer soziologischer Grundbegriffe) weder ohne Rekurs auf objektive gesellschaftliche Formalstrukturen noch allein durch einen solchen Rekurs begriffen werden kann. Es läge nahe, aus diesen Überlegungen die Schlussfolgerung zu ziehen, Bachrach und Baratz so zu interpretieren, dass sie keine zweistufigen, sondern – bei hinreichend rigoroser Weiterentwicklung ihres Arguments – einen dreistufigen Machtbegriff anpeilen. Diese Lösung ist von Lukes (1974, v. a. 21 ff.) versucht worden. Auf der obersten Ebene hätten wir es mit jenen manifesten Konflikten zu tun, in denen widerstrebende Willensäußerungen zutage treten und die eine Seite sich

Strategisches Beschweigen 15

gegen die andere durchsetzt. Auf der zweiten Ebene hätten wir es mit jenen strategisch generierten Ausschließungs- und Unterdrückungsregeln zu tun, deren Erzeugung und Befolgung dafür sorgt, dass nur relativ „harmlose“ Konfliktthemen die Chance haben, an der Oberfläche des manifesten Entscheidungsprozesses aufzutauchen. Innerhalb dieser zweiten Stufe können dann – im Anschluss an Vorschläge von Merelman (1968) und vor allem Eijk und Kok (1975) verschiedene Stufen und Mechanismen unterschieden werden, an denen bzw. durch welche „gefährliche“ Konfliktpotentiale abgefangen und ausgefiltert werden; ein besonders erfolgreicher Ansatz zur Analyse solcher Filterprozesse liegt in den Untersuchungen von Edelman (1976) vor, der eine Systematik politischer „Inszenierungs“-Strategien entwickelt. Für solche Strategien und Mechanismen wäre der Begriff „nondecision-making“ im Sinne von „Entscheidungen, dass nicht […]“ zu reservieren. Hiervon wäre wiederum – im Gegensatz zu der Argumentationspraxis, an der Bachrach und Baratz bisher festgehalten haben, aber durchaus im Interesse der Stärkung ihres Arguments – eine dritte Ebene zu unterscheiden, auf der die strukturellen Präjudizien angesiedelt sind, die als solche dadurch bestimmt sind, dass sie eines ausdrücklichen Entscheidungsaktes überhaupt nicht bedürfen, um wirksam zu sein, vielmehr kraft ihrer subjektlosen Geltung die Voraussetzungen dafür schaffen, dass von bestimmten Positionen der Sozialstruktur aus das Instrumentarium des „non-decision-making“ betätigt wird. Wollte man diesen Gedanken weiterverfolgen und ausarbeiten, so ergäbe sich freilich die Notwendigkeit, auf der dritten Stufe eine Theorie der „Produktionsweise“, d. h. der strukturbestimmenden Kernelemente einer Gesellschaft, anzubieten, die erklärt, aus welchen Gründen bestimmte Akteure, sei es zur Durchsetzung ihres Willens, sei es zur Unterdrückung für sie „riskanter“ Themen, überhaupt ermächtigt sind. Ihr Verzicht auf die Entwicklung einer solchen Theorie scheint jedenfalls der Grund dafür zu sein, dass der wichtige Kerngedanke ihrer Beiträge dann doch in einer Reihe von – als solchen instruktiven – Vagheiten hängenbleibt.

II Analoge Schwierigkeiten tauchen auf, wenn der Versuch unternommen wird, Machtphänomene der zweiten Stufe, also „non-decisions“, an empirischen Kriterien festzumachen, die sich auf die Seite der Machtunterworfenen beziehen. Ebenso wie (jedenfalls „im Prinzip“) die Unterdrückung von Entscheidungsthemen an individuell zurechenbaren Entscheidungsakten (allenfalls „unbewusster“ Art) von Machthabern festgemacht werden soll, kann von „non-decisions“ nur unter der zusätzlichen Bedingung die Rede sein, dass in relevantem Umfang bei den Machtunterworfenen das Interesse daran sichtbar wird, das ausgeschlossene

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Thema auch tatsächlich zur Entscheidung zuzulassen. Nach Ansicht der Verfasser kann begriff‌lich von „non-decisions“ nur dort die Rede sein, wo sich empirische Anhaltspunkte dafür anführen lassen, dass die präsumtiven Machtunterworfenen „anders gewollt hätten“; nur so kann der Einwand entkräftet werden, die beobachtete „Unterlassung“ sei gar keine politisch relevante „non-decision“, weil sie einem „autonomen Desinteresse“ (Frey 1971, 1092) der Betroffenen korrespondiere. Die Beweislasten, die sich die Verfasser mit einer solchen Begriffsbildung einhandeln, sind einigermaßen entmutigend. Wenn etwa die Machtunterworfenen für den Fall ihres Versuchs, bestimmte Themen aufzubringen und sich für bestimmte politische Forderungen einzusetzen, negative Sanktionen erwarten und deshalb sich von entsprechenden Versuchen abschrecken lassen, wäre die Machtausübung als solche gar nicht identifizierbar; es fehlte ja das Kriterium demonstrierten und sozialwissenschaftlich nachweisbaren Widerstrebens. Je perfekter die Machtausübung, desto schwieriger wäre sie zu identifizieren. Zu dieser in jedes handlungstheoretisch fundierte Machtkonzept eingebauten Paradoxie kann man sich wiederum in zweierlei Weise verhalten. Entweder man beschränkt sich ausdrücklich darauf, von Machtausübung nur in solchen Fällen zu sprechen, in denen zumindest rudimentäre Anzeichen für Widerstand sichtbar und die präventiven Mechanismen, die zur Unterdrückung von Alternativen führen, nachweisbar sind (vgl. Frey 1971, 1091 ff.); dann nimmt man nicht nur das Risiko in Kauf, dass „wichtige“ Machtphänomene, auf welche die verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Messinstrumente sozusagen nicht ansprechen, unerkannt bleiben. Man läuft außerdem Gefahr, dass die festgestellten Spuren von Opposition und Dissens nicht nach ihrer relativen Bedeutung beurteilt und gegebenenfalls als irrelevant vernachlässigt werden können. Jede politische Ordnung, jede Institution und jede Verfahrensregel diskriminiert eine Vielfalt von Interessengesichtspunkten, die sämtlich oder doch zum großen Teil als Oppositionsphänomene auf‌fi ndbar sein mögen; „nondecisions würde man zu jeder Zeit und in jedem Regime finden“ (Wolfinger 1971, 1069). Kann man daraus schließen, dass allen solchen Bekundungen von NichtEinverständnis das gleiche Gewicht für die Analyse politischer Machtverhältnisse zukommt ? Dann entfiele die Pointe der ganzen Konstruktion, die ja nur unter der Erwartung zu halten ist, dass das Volumen von Macht variabel, d. h. reduzierbar ist. – Bachrach und Baratz reagieren auf diese beiden Schwierigkeiten mit zwei Gegenargumenten: Sie plädieren erstens für lockere empirische Kriterien, nach denen Oppositionsphänomene registriert werden sollen; „ein Forschungsergebnis mag sehr wohl impressionistisch und nur mangelhaft durch Daten gestützt sein, aber das ist immer noch besser, als wenn man den Irrtum begeht, solche verborgenen Elemente völlig zu ignorieren“ (1975, 901). Das theoretische Argument lebt dann allerdings, ein wenig vereinfacht gesagt, nur von der forschungsmethodischen Großzügigkeit seiner Gegner.

Strategisches Beschweigen 17

Dem anderen der beiden genannten Einwände, dass nämlich Oppositionsphänomene nicht mehr gewichtet werden, z. B. sich abzeichnende revolutionäre Alternativen nicht mehr von hinterwäldlerischem Querulantentum unterschieden werden können, halten sie entgegen, dass besonders solchen Oppositionsphänomenen Gewicht beizumessen sei, die im Falle ihres Erfolges den „Status quo“ verändern und die Privilegien der Verteidiger des Status quo tangieren würden. Ähnlich formulierten Eijk und Kok (1975, 189): „Wichtige Bedürfnisse sind alle solche, die im Falle ihrer Erfüllung eine Veränderung der bestehenden Macht- und Einfluss Struktur des Systems nach sich ziehen würden.“ Um ein solches Argument haltbar zu machen, müsste man freilich zunächst einmal wissen, was denn unter dem „Status quo“ bzw. der „bestehenden Macht- und Einfluss Struktur eines Systems“ soziologisch zu verstehen ist – eine Frage, die ihrerseits offensichtlich nur im Lichte von alternativen Konstruktionen eines Gesellschaftssystems zu klären ist. Ein zweiter möglicher Ausweg aus solchen Verlegenheiten und Zirkelschlüssen bestünde in der Zugrundelegung einer Theorie „objektiver“ Interessen, deren Verletzung sich unabhängig vom Sprechen und Handeln der Machtunterworfenen feststellen und somit als Indikator für Machtverhältnisse in Anspruch nehmen ließe. Im Anschluss an die „non-decisions“-Debatte ist der hier anknüpfende Gedankengang am weitesten von Lukes (1974) vorangetrieben worden. Er basiert auf mehr oder weniger systematisierten kontrafaktischen Annahmen über die Normen und Interessen, die die Menschen in einer Gesellschaft als ihre eigenen erkennen und verfolgen würden, wenn nicht die bestehenden Machtverhältnisse sie daran hindern würden, dies zu tun. Freilich setzen sich Machttheorien, die mit solchen normativen Kontrastvorstellungen über die „objektiven“, „eigentlichen“ Interessen operieren, ebenfalls einem doppelten Einwand aus. Sie geraten nämlich erstens in den Verdacht einer perspektivischen Beliebigkeit, insofern jene Interessen, die kontrafaktisch als die wahren und authentischen unterstellt werden, von einem sozialwissenschaftlichen Beobachter zum anderen variieren. Der Vorwurf des normativen Subjektivismus ist denn auch ein Standard-Argument in den Polemiken und methodischen Analysen zum Thema. „In welcher Hinsicht man Einschränkungen an einem politischen System feststellt, hängt davon ab, wie es sich von dem unterscheidet, was man sich als ideale politische Ordnung vorstellt“ (Wolfinger 1971, 1077). Abgesehen vom Vorwurf mangelnder „Wertfreiheit“ bekommen es Machttheorien, die theoretische Annahmen normativer Natur zum Angelpunkt nehmen, mit der Schwierigkeit zu tun, dass, „wenn eine beobachtbare Gruppe anders handelt als vorausgesagt, dies entweder auf der Unterdrückung ihrer Interessen oder aber darauf beruhen könnte, dass die unterstellte (normative) Theorie falsch war; es gibt keine Möglichkeit, zwischen diesen beiden Interpretationen zu entscheiden“ (ebda., 1078). Aussagen über Machtphänomene bleiben

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dann ebenso unverbindlich wie die normativen Alternativprojektionen, an denen sie gewonnen werden. Jede Konstruktion dieser Art hat dem Einwand zu begegnen, dass „subjektive, ideologisch erzeugte Zuschreibungen eines ‚realen‘ Interesses als objektive, wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse maskiert und so zum schwankenden Boden gemacht werden, auf dem die Erforschung von Machtverhältnissen aufbaut“ (Frey 1971, 1099). Angesichts dieser Schwierigkeit werden häufig mehr suggestive als systematisch ausgearbeitete Bedürfnis- und Wohlfahrtstheorien zu Rate gezogen, in denen Minimalnormen für physische Lebensbedingungen und individuelle Entfaltung (vgl. Galtungs (1971) Begriff der „strukturellen Gewalt“) fixiert sind. Solche Lösungen entgehen dem Relativismus-Einwand nur scheinbar, weil sie – wenn nicht von vornherein „bescheiden“ und im Ergebnis trivial – blind sind für die historische Bestimmtheit und Veränderlichkeit dessen, was in einer Gesellschaft an (auch materiellen) Bedürfnissen und Interessen objektiv „in Betracht kommt“ und somit zur theoretischen Grundlage eines Begriffs von „Armut“ tauglich ist. Eine andere Scheinlösung, von der auch Bachrach und Baratz Gebrauch machen, stützt sich auf die Gleichheitsnorm; sie scheitert daran, dass es in jeder Gesellschaft relevante und unerhebliche Ungleichheiten gibt und es an konsensfähigen theoretischen Gesichtspunkten fehlt, die einen von den anderen zu unterscheiden. Theoretisch eleganter, aber in der empirischen Anwendung wohl kaum aussichtsreicher, ist das von Barry (1965) unterstellte „Meta-Interesse“ daran, überhaupt über die eigenen Interessen entscheiden und sie befriedigen zu können; hier wäre eine Theorie über die Medien zu fordern, die jeweils solche generalisierte Handlungsfähigkeit verbürgen – und darunter könnte sehr wohl wiederum „Macht“ auftauchen (vgl. unten, Abschnitt III). – Ein zweiter Einwand bezieht sich darauf, dass jene normativen Maßstäbe, die die Forschung für die Identifizierung von Machtphänomenen benötigt, nicht nur einer verbindlichen Festlegung unzugänglich, sondern darüber hinaus wie immer sie im Einzelnen formuliert werden mögen – als das „Jenseits“ der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit konzipiert werden müssen, zu dem keine Brücke führt. (Als Beispiel für diesen Einwand vgl. die Polemik von Tenbruck 1975 gegen Galtung 1971.) Wenn die Theorie der Macht solche kontrafaktischen Kriterien in Anspruch nehmen und an den genannten Einwänden gleichwohl nicht auflaufen will, dann müsste sie zunächst den Nachweis zu führen versuchen, dass die von ihr unterstellten „wirklichen“, aber latenten Interessen keineswegs bloß Bestandteil einer gedachten Welt sind, sondern unter bestimmten empirischen Bedingungen zur Manifestation drängen. Hier könnte methodisch der Gedanke weiterhelfen, den Lukes (1974, 47) im Anschluss an Gramsci entwickelt: dass nämlich in gewissen Ausnahmesituationen, in denen „der Machtapparat außer Kraft gesetzt oder ge­ lockert ist“, die unterstellten Interessen an Freiheit und Selbstbestimmung unzwei-

Strategisches Beschweigen 19

deutig manifest werden. Der Erkenntniswert solcher Ausnahmesituationen müsste, wenn man diesem Gedankengang folgen will, freilich seinerseits ausgewiesen werden. Das kann nur dadurch geschehen, dass die Regeln aufgedeckt werden, die solche Ausnahmefälle, in denen äußere Zwangsmittel wie innere restrik­tive Deutungen der eigenen Interessen außer Kraft treten, systematisch hervorbringen. Dieser Beweisgang läuft also auf die Analyse systematisch erzeugter ökonomischer, politischer und motivationaler (vgl. Habermas 1973) Krisenphänomene hinaus, die ihrerseits mit einer rekonstruierbaren Regelmäßigkeit und Zwangsläufigkeit „Ausnahmefälle“ generieren, an denen empirisch überprüfbar ist, ob es sich bei den kontrafaktisch unterstellten „objektiven Interessen“ um Hirn­ gespinste und (möglicherweise sogar aktionistisch in Umlauf gesetzte) Projektionen gehandelt hat oder nicht. Es würde aber nicht genügen, „außergewöhnliche Zeitpunkte, zu denen äußere und innere Unterwerfung“ gelockert oder aufgelöst sind (Lukes), zur wissenschaftlichen Demonstration der „wahren“ Interessen heranzuziehen, sondern es müsste zusätzlich gezeigt werden, dass und aus welchen Gründen das Eintreten solcher „anomalen“ Konstellationen etwas durchaus „Normales“ und Erwartbares ist. Wiederum scheint nur der Rekurs auf die Strukturebene hier: die Ebene struktureller Krisentendenzen – die theoretischen Voraussetzungen dafür zu bieten, dass das Argument der „non-decisions“ weder in empiristischen Aporien noch in normativistischen Unverbindlichkeiten versandet. Diese Lösung freilich würde den Nachweis erfordern, dass die ökonomischen, politischen und ideologisch-kulturellen Teilstrukturen eines Gesellschaftssystems systematische (und nicht nur akzidentelle) Bruchstellen aufweisen, die den Blick auf jene Interessen und Bedürfnisse freigeben, welche dann als objektive Bezugspunkte der Machtanalyse in Anspruch genommen werden können. Ein solcher theoretisch-empirischer Aufwand, welcher die „non-decision“Theorie in eine umfassende Theorie der Sozialstruktur und ihrer Evolution einbauen würde, ist bisher von den Protagonisten des Konzepts der „non-decisions“ auch nicht ansatzweise unternommen worden. Einen theoretisch weniger anspruchsvollen, dafür empirisch höchst einfallsreichen und originellen Beitrag zur forschungspraktischen Bewältigung des Problems hat stattdessen Crenson (1972) vorgelegt. Er verfolgt die – in der amerikanischen Sozialforschung nicht selten anzutreffende – Notlösung, theoretische Defizite behelfsweise durch Komparatistik auszugleichen. Konkret untersucht er die Frage, weshalb Konfliktstoffe, die in einigen kommunalen politischen Systemen durchaus Zugang zur Oberfläche des manifesten politischen Entscheidungsprozesses gefunden haben, trotz vergleichbarer objektiver Randbedingungen in anderen Gemeinden von der Szene verdrängt und als Thema nicht zugelassen worden sind. Ein solcher quasi-experimenteller Forschungsansatz wurde auch in einer unveröffentlichten Studie von Eijk und Kok (vgl. 1975, 297, Anm. 1) angewandt. Zwar mag dieser Ansatz eine

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Fülle von wichtigen Hypothesen über die Mechanismen erzeugen, die den Prozess der Erwartungsbildung und der Konfliktprävention steuern, doch setzt er sich immer dem Einwand aus, dass ein „strikt kontrollierter Vergleich zwischen kommunalen politischen Systemen kaum jemals möglich“ sei (vgl. Wolfinger 1971, 1075). In der Tat lässt sich nicht bestreiten, dass Crenson einen ziemlich generösen Gebrauch von ceteris paribus-Annahmen macht, von deren Plausibilität wiederum die Überzeugungskraft seiner Ergebnisse abhängt, dass nämlich große Industrieunternehmen durch ihre bloße Existenz die „Tagesordnung“ des kommunalen politischen Prozesses auf für sie ungefährliche Punkte reduzieren können. Ein alternativer empirischer Forschungsansatz wird von Parenti (1970) vorgeführt und methodisch in den Zusammenhang der „non-decisions“-Debatte gestellt. Er vertritt die These, dass restriktive Effekte, die sich aus der Funktionsweise des ökonomischen und politischen Systems ergeben, selbst dann empirisch identifizierbar sind, wenn sie im System der „offiziellen“ politischen Institutionen (Regierungen, Parteien, Organisation, Medien usw.) erfolgreich und restlos ignoriert werden. Dies ist allerdings, wie seine Fallstudien zeigen, nur dort der Fall, wo nach dem Muster engagierter „Untersuchungsarbeit“ oder „Aktionsforschung“ Forschungspraxis und politische Mobilisierungspraxis mehr oder weniger bewusst und weitgehend miteinander verschmelzen. Dabei bleibt allerdings – nicht ohne Folgen für die Frage der politisch-strategischen Legitimierbarkeit solcher Forschungsaktionen – die Frage unentscheidbar, ob die so mobilisierten Bedürfnisse und Interessen der Machtunterworfenen durch diese Forschungspraxis tatsächlich bloß „aufgedeckt“ und „bewusst gemacht“ oder vielmehr erst erzeugt worden sind.

III Die Zahl und die Hartnäckigkeit der empiristischen Angriffe (Polsby 1963, 96 ff.; Merelman 1968; Wolfinger 1971) gegen das Konzept der „non-decisions“, gegen welche sich die Verteidiger dieser Theorie bisher nur mit mehr oder weniger unschlüssigen und aporetischen Erläuterungen zur Wehr setzen konnten, erklärt sich weder allein aus methodologischen Vorurteilen noch aus „pluralistischen“ politischen Werturteilen, deren Haltbarkeit ja für den Fall, dass ein zwei- oder gar dreistufiges Machtkonzept wissenschaftlich akzeptiert würde, durchaus auf dem Spiele stünde. Vielmehr stoßen wir hier auf eine, bei den meisten der an der Debatte teilnehmenden Autoren allerdings nur hintergründig anklingende Kontroverse über die gesellschaftlichen Funktionen von Macht. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass die Arbeiten von Bachrach und Baratz sowie derjenigen, die ihren Ansatz zu verteidigen und weiterzuentwickeln suchen, in dem Sinne macht-kritisch (vgl. Mokken

Strategisches Beschweigen 21

1976, 35) sind, dass sie verborgene gesellschaftliche Machtverhältnisse methodisch identifizierbar machen und diese damit in kritisch-subversiver Absicht dem Zweifel an ihrer Legitimität aussetzen wollen. Die Unhaltbarkeit der pluralistischen Doktrin, jedenfalls insofern sie sich als eine Beschreibung der amerikanischen Gesellschaft versteht, soll aufgedeckt, das analytische Repertoire der Kritiker dieser Gesellschaft und deren politische Ideologie sollen mit neuen Argumenten ausgestattet werden. Dabei ist zweifellos ein konflikttheoretischer Machtbegriff unterstellt: Machtverhältnisse haben die Funktion, die Lebenschancen von Menschen in einer Gesellschaft zugunsten der Privilegien und Interessen einer Minorität, einer „Elite“, einzuschränken, und die Erkenntnis solcher Machtverhältnisse ist die notwendige Voraussetzung dafür, sie politisch aufzulösen. Ganz anders ist ein Machtbegriff konstruiert, der in der soziologischen Theorie insbesondere auf Parsons (1957, 1963) zurückgeht und neuerdings von Luhmann (1975) im Rahmen einer umfassenden Theorie „sozialer Medien“ aufgenommen worden ist. Mit diesem Machtbegriff verbindet sich die Vorstellung, dass Macht keine Eigenschaft von Individuen oder Gruppen, sondern eine Eigenschaft von sozialen Systemen sei; dass Macht nicht als Nullsummenverhältnis aufgefasst werden kann. An der konflikttheoretischen Auffassung wird kritisiert, dass diese „die eigentümliche Ordnungsleistung der Macht“ (Luhmann 1975, 31) verkenne. In ähnlichem Sinne und zugespitzt kritisiert Tenbruck an der Vorstellung, die Galtung von Macht bzw. „struktureller Gewalt“ entwickelt („Gewalt liegt dann vor, wenn Menschen so beeinflusst werden, dass ihre aktuelle somatische und geistige Verwirklichung geringer ist als ihre potentielle Verwirklichung“, Galtung 1972, 57), dass hier ein ganz unsinniger Nachdruck auf die von Machtverhältnissen ausgeschlossenen Chancen der Bedürfnisbefriedigung gelegt werde. Dem hält er mit Emphase entgegen: „Leben heißt immer, auf Möglichkeiten verzichten, sich festlegen, […] wer mit allen seinen Möglichkeiten spielt […], wird es mit sich zu nichts bringen […]. Der Mensch wird seiner Fülle im Ernst der Beschränkung inne […]. Die Differenz zwischen unserer Wirklichkeit und unseren Möglichkeiten kennen wir nicht“ (Tenbruck 1975, 435). Die These, dass die mit Machtverhältnissen einhergehenden Ausschließungsregeln nicht per se ein Argument gegen solche Machtverhältnisse sein können, vielmehr der Macht die positive Funktion zugeschrieben werden müsse, aus dem weiten Horizont gesellschaftlicher Handlungsmöglichkeiten den größten Teil auszuscheiden, die verbleibenden Optionen verbindlich zu machen und so „Ordnung“ herzustellen, taucht auch in verschiedenen Varianten kritisch in der „non-deci­ sions“-Debatte auf. So wird hervorgehoben, dass eben die „Verarbeitungs- und Aufmerksamkeitskapazitäten jeder menschlichen Ordnung notwendig begrenzt“ seien (Cobb und Elder, 901), dass die Zivilisation selbst gleichbedeutend sei mit

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der einseitig selektiven Lizensierung von Bedürfnissen (Debnam 1975, 894); oft und gern wird auf die klassische Formulierung von Schattschneider (1960, 71) zurückgegriffen, die besagt, dass politische Organisation eben nichts anderes sei als die Durchsetzung von Einseitigkeiten („mobilization of bias“). Für jede politische und staatliche Organisation gelte, dass manche Themen zugelassen sind und andere nicht. Aus der Sicht der Vertreter eines solchen integrationstheoretischen Machtkonzepts (vgl. a. Lukes 1974, 27 ff.) muss der Versuch, den Diskriminierungseffekt, die „Schlagseite“ jeder politischen Ordnung aufzudecken, entweder als Trivialität oder  –  im Hinblick auf die kritischen Intentionen eines solchen Versuchs – als dilettantisches Missverständnis von der Natur jeglicher sozialer Ordnung erscheinen. Das konflikttheoretische Gegenargument, dass solche Behauptungen über die unverzichtbare, weil ordnungsstiftende Funktion der Macht von konservativen und reaktionären Interessen motiviert seien, ist in den meisten Fällen sicher zutreffend. Aber es ist theoretisch nicht triftig. Denn die Praxis systemkritischer politischer Bewegungen, vor allem der sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung, zeigt, dass sie in ihren politischen Zielen und theoretischen Selbstauslegungen ohne einen „positiven“, auf die Errichtung einer alternativen gesellschaftlichen Ordnung bezogenen Machtbegriff nicht auskommt und nicht auskommen kann. Von der Parole „Alle Macht den Räten“ bis zum Konzept einer „Diktatur des Proletariats“ erweist sich, dass ein einseitig konflikttheoretischer, Machtphänomene als auflösbar diskriminierender Machtbegriff weder theoretisch noch praktisch durchgehalten werden kann und somit auf Täuschung oder Selbsttäuschung beruht. Solche Formeln bringen die Anerkennung der Tatsache zum Ausdruck, dass Macht auch benötigt wird zur Auflösung der Restriktionen, die auf Macht beruhen – ja zur Erhaltung der Lebenschancen in sozialen Systemen schlechthin. Gerade wenn, wie es den Verfechtern eines konflikttheoretischen Machtbegriffes vorschwebt, die repressiven Funktionen von Machtverhältnissen aufgelöst werden sollen, ist dieser Destruktionsprozess nicht ohne organisierte politische (und sogar staatliche) Machtverhältnisse vorstellbar. Hier haben wir es freilich schon mit einer anderen Art von „Doppelgesichtigkeit“ des Machtbegriffs zu tun, als der, auf die sich das zentrale Argument von Bachrach und Baratz bezieht. Die Heftigkeit der Debatte, die dieses Argument ausgelöst hat, ist nur zu verstehen vor dem Hintergrund der grundsätzlicheren soziologischen Kontroverse darüber, ob Macht ihrer gesellschaftlichen Funktion nach als Beeinträchtigung von Handlungschancen oder als unverzichtbare Gewähr für gesellschaftliche Ordnungsleistungen begriffen werden soll. Diese Kontroverse könnte nur durch eine Machttheorie beigelegt werden, die für konkrete Gesellschaftssysteme das Verhältnis der „repressiven“ und „ordnenden“ Funktionen von Macht klärt – d. h. aber: das Verhältnis von Macht und legitimierbarer Herrschaft.

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Bibliographie Die folgende Bibliographie enthält sowohl die im Text erwähnten Titel einige weitere im Umkreis der „non-decisions“-Debatte relevante Schriften. T. J. Anton, 1963. „Power, Pluralism and Local Politics“. ASQ 7 pp. 425 – ​457. I. Balbus, 1971. „The Concept of Interest in Pluralist and Marxian Analysis“. Politics and Society 1, 151 – ​177. I. Balbus, 1975. „Elitentheorie oder marxistische Klassenanalyse“. In: W. D. Narr, C. Offe (Hrsg.), Wohlfahrtsstaat und Massenloyalität, Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, S.  235 – ​245. P. Bachrach, 1967. The Theory of Democratic Elitism. Boston: Linie, Brown & Co (dt. Frankfurt 1970). P. Bachrach, 1975. „Interest, Participation and Democratic Theory“. In: Pennock and Chapman (Hrsg.), Participation. New York: Atherton Press. P. Bachrach, M. S. Baratz, 1970. Power and Poverty. Theory and Practise. New York: Oxford University Press. P. Bachrach, M. S. Baratz, 1975. „Power and its Two Faces Revisited: A Reply to Geoffrey Debnam“. APSR 69, 900 – ​904. B. Barry (Hrsg.), 1976. Power and Political Theory: Some European Perspectives. New York: Wiley. J. Bergman, O. Jacobi, W. Müller-Jentsch, 1975. Gewerkschaften in der BRD. Frankfurt: EVA, Kap. VII. G. Bosch, 1974. Wie demokratisch sind Gewerkschaften ? Berlin: Verlag Die Arbeitswelt. S. Clegg, 1975. Power, Rule and Domination. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. R. W. Cobb, C. D. Elder, 1971. „The Politics of Agenda Building: An Alternative Perspective for Modern Democratic Theory“. The Journal of Politics 33, pp.  892 – ​915. W. E. Conolly, 1972. „On ‚Interests‘ in Politics“. Politics and Society 2, pp. 459 – ​477. W. E. Conolly, 1974. The Terms of Political Discourse. Lexington: Heath. M. A. Crenson, 1971. The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. R. A. Dahl, 1961. Who Governs ? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale UP. G. Debnam, 1975. „Nondecisions and Power: The Two Faces of Bachrach and Baratz“. APSR, pp.  889 – ​899. M. Edelman, 1976. Politik als Ritual – Die symbolische Funktion staatlicher Institutionen und politischen Handelns. Frankfurt: Campus. C. van der Eijk, W. J. P. Kok, 1975. „Nondecisions reconsidered“. Acta Politica No. 4. F. W. Frey, 1971. „Comment: On Issues and Non-Issues in the Study of Power“. APSR 65, pp.  1081 – ​1101. J. Galtung, 1971. „Gewalt, Frieden und Friedensforschung“. In: D. Senghaas (Hrsg.), Kritische Friedensforschung. Frankfurt: Edition Suhrkamp, pp. 55 – ​104. W. A. Gamson, 1968. „Stable Unrepresentation in American Society“. American Behavioral Scientist 12, pp. 15 – ​21.

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J. Habermas, 1973. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus. Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp. F. Hunter, 1953. Community Power Structure. Chapel Hills: Univ. of North Carolina Press. N. Luhmann, 1975. Macht. Stuttgart: Enke. S. Lukes, 1974. Power. A Radical View. London: Mac Millan. S. McFarland, 1969. Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP. J. G. March, 1966. „The Power of Power“. In: D. Easton (Hrsg.), Varieties of Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. R. M. Merelman, 1968. „On the Neo-Elitist Critique of Community Power“. APSR 62, pp.  451 – ​460. R. Miliband, 1972. Der Staat in der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. R. Miliband, N. Poulantzas, 1975. Kontroverse über den kapitalistischen Staat. Berlin: Merve. R. J. Mokken, F. N. Stokman, 1976. „Power and Influence as Political Phenomena“. In: Barry (Hrsg.), Power and Political Theory: Some European Perspectives. New York: Wiley. K. Newton, 1972. „Democracy, Community Power and Non-Decisionmaking“. Political Studies 20, pp.  484 – ​547. C. Offe, 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp, S.  65 – ​105. M. Parenti, 1970. „Power and Pluralism“. The Journal of Politics 32, pp. 501 – ​530. T. Parsons, 1957. „The Distribution of Power in American Society“. World Politics 10, pp.  123 – ​143. T. Parsons, 1973. „On the Concept of Political Power“. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107, pp. 232 – ​262. N. Polsby, 1963. Community Power and Political Theory. New Haven: Yale UP. E. Preiser, 1952. „Property, Power, and the Distribution of Income“. In: K. W. Rothschild (ed), Power in Economics. London: Penguin 1971. W. H. Riker, 1964. „Some Ambiguities in the Notion of Power“, APSR 58. No. 2, 341 – ​ 349. E. E. Schattschneider, 1960. The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. F. Tenbruck, 1975. „Frieden durch Friedensforschung“. In: M. Funke (Hrsg.), Friedensforschung – Entscheidungshilfe gegen Gewalt. Bonn: Bundeszentrale f. pol. Bildung. W. Vogt, 1973. „Das ökonomische Gesetz als Macht“. In: H. K. Schneider, C. Watrin (Hrsg.), Macht und ökonomisches Gesetz. Berlin: Schriften d. Vereins f. Socialpolitik N.F. 74/II. R. E. Wolfinger, 1971. „Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics“. APSR 65, pp.  1063  – ​ 1080.

2

Political Institutions and Social Power: Conceptual Explorations (2006)

The term “institution” is one of the most frequently used and, at the same time, most rarely defined in the social sciences. Social scientists relate to the theoretical concept of institution as ordinary people relate to some established institution: They take the meaning for granted and proceed to make use of it. The question that I want to focus on here concerns the implications of institutions for the generation, distribution, exercise, and control of social power. The question can be elaborated with the help of a quote from Sven Steinmo, one of the initiators1 of the research program of “historical institutionalism.” Steinmo writes: “Institutions define the rules of the political game and as such they define who can play and how they play […] [institutions] can shape who wins and who loses.”2 If we replace in this sentence the term “institutions” with the word “power” or “holders of social power,” the meaning remains virtually the same. “Institutions” and “power,” it seems, are being used almost interchangeably. But that cannot be right, as “holders of power” are clearly actors, while institutions are not. What I want to explore here are the mechanisms through which institutions affect the distribution of social power among actors and are, in a circular way, themselves the result of the exercise of power. To this end, I start with (1) a set of propositions, distilled out of the theoretical literature on institutions, on which social scientists (including economists) who study institutions seem to be largely agreed. These propositions refer to structural features of all institutions (or of subgroups that form types of institutions). In the next section, I turn to (2) the functions that institutions perform. Section (3) 1 2

Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Sven Steinmo, “Institutionalism,” in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 11 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001), 7555 – ​7558.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_2

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of the chapter deals with the capacity of institutions to endow actors with power and privilege and various trajectories of challenge and change of institutions. It is by mere coincidence that each of these three sections is subdivided into eight propositions.

1

The Structure of Institutions

(a) Rules vs. Regularities Institutions are systems of rules that apply to the future behavior of actors. They constitute actors and pro-/prescribe their scope and mode of action. These rules can be sanctioned through mechanisms that are specified in the charter, or legal specification, of an institution. These rules are, consciously or habitually, observed and complied with by actors who are aware not only of the rules but also of the fact that these rules are being enforced and deviant courses of action sanctioned. Institutions often impose severe constraints on what actors are permitted to do. In contrast, regularities are propositions based upon the observation of patterns in past events that do not have, by themselves, normative qualities; neither can they be sanctioned. A similar distinction can be made between institutions and conventions. Institutions differ from conventions in that the rules that they consist of are potentially contested. Violations of institutional rules can result from an actor’s interest and are not just a mistake. While it makes no intelligible sense to challenge the QWERT convention of organizing characters on a keyboard (as it becomes self-enforcing the moment it is adopted, as deviation is rendered prohibitively costly once the standard is adopted), institutions can meaningfully be challenged and their alteration advocated. “Excessive” challenges may be precluded through an enforcement agency. Formal institutions need guardians and enforcers. (b) Institution Building vs. Purposive or Instrumental Action Institutions are often explained and justified in terms of the problems they are designed to resolve or the values they serve. This problem-solving or value-achieving perspective on the origin and change of political institutions, often framed in metaphors taken from medicine or engineering, is deeply misleading. The logic of this perspective is something like this: If you don’t like the outcome, get a new set of institutions that yields better results. There are a number of things that are dubious with this perspective. For one thing, there may be outcomes and events for which simply no remedial institution is known. Or the speculation that a specific institutional pattern will result in an equally specific outcome may be erroneous, as “existing empirical knowledge is not adequate for an explicit policy of institu-

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tional design.”3 Ethnic conflict in deeply divided societies may be a case in point.4 Second, institutions (such as corporatist industrial relations systems) may yield desirable results in one evaluative dimension and highly undesirable ones in another, without a neutral metric being available that could measure the net utility of outcomes. It is often also the case that protagonists of institutional innovation make multiple claims, addressed to different constituencies, as to what the proposed innovation is good for. In order to build a winning coalition of supporters, they may need to remain rather unspecific regarding intended outcomes. Third, the utility that institutions generate may be distributed according the pattern of an inverted U. Highly repressive state institutions may first provide for political calm but later reach a tipping point and trigger rebellion. Fourth, the productivity of institution may be context-sensitive, with the context itself being formed by other institutions or conditions. In the absence of such favorable context, one particular institution may not yield the benefits that hence are not due to the institution itself but contingent upon synergetic effects with other institutions. Also, what Goodin has called the “Myth of the Intentional Designer” not only downplays the fact that “typically, there is no […] designer” but also suggests that if there were one, “social engineers always work with the materials […] unalterably shaped by the past.”5 Finally, and most importantly, legislators or other representative actors may be unable or unwilling to adopt institutions even though they are (let us suppose) demonstrably capable of coping with their most serious problems. The patient, as it were, suffers from a disease that renders him incapable of swallowing the pill. A long time ago, Ernst Fraenkel highlighted a case of this “incentive incompatibility” when he observed, shortly before the breakdown of the Weimar constitution, in Germany: “Were the existing legislature capable of passing a constitutional reform, such reform would be superfluous. It is exactly the impossibility to have the reform adopted by parliament that makes it necessary.”6 Somewhat less tragically, the patient may be willing to accept the remedy but do so only in exceptional

Johan P. Olsen, “Institutional Design in Democratic Contexts,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 5, 3 (1997): 221. 4 Donald L. Horowitz, “Constitutional Design: An Oxymoron ?” in Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo, eds., Designing Democratic Institutions, Nomos XIII (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 254; cf. Claus Offe, “Political Liberalism, Group Rights and the Politics of Fear and Trust,” in Claus Offe, Herausforderungen der Demokratie (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2003), 321 – ​334. 5 Robert E. Goodin, “Institutions and Their Design,” in Introduction to Goodin (ed.), The Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28 – ​30. 6 Ernst Fraenkel, “Verfassungsreform und Sozialdemokratie,” reprinted in Fraenkel, Zur So­ zio­logie der Klassenjustiz und Aufsätze zur Verfassungskrise 1931 – ​32 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968 [1932]), 102.

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moments of sanity (such as occur after wars, civil wars, or regime breakdowns). Horowitz speaks of “the exceptional character of the occasion for innovation.”7 What seems to follow from all of these doubts and objections concerning constructivist rationalism in institution building is this: The origin of institutions must be looked for not in terms of purposive rational, consequentialist, and outcome-related but in value-rational and deontological terms, or what March and Olsen8 have termed the “logic of appropriateness.”9 Institutions and institutional changes are more consistently explained in term of the balance of social power that they reflect than in terms of the goals and objectives that they are claimed to serve. (c) Institutions vs. Traditions Institutions differ from traditions or mere habits in that those involved in them show at least a rudimentary degree of reflexive awareness of the presence of these institutions and their claim to validity. For instance, institutions and the system of rules of which they consist are codified in law books and other books, they can be taught and theorized, reasons can be given for the validity of these rules and the bindingness with which they shape the action of actors, and so on. (d) Implicit Theories Institutions come with an implicit theory about themselves, an “animating idea”10 that provides reasons for their support and defense. For instance, democratic political institutions are framed in a set of ideas such as popular sovereignty, limitation of state powers, and procedural impartiality, while authoritarian ones invoke collective security, paternalism, or some doctrine promulgated by the political elite concerning the course of history. An institution that is entirely incapable of providing widely accepted reasons for itself is, as it were, intellectually naked (like the proverbial emperor in his new clothes) and, for this reason, in a precarious position and vulnerable to challenge. These implicit theories refer to how people normally behave and what kinds of desires they will pursue.11 7

Donald L. Horowitz, “Constitutional Design: An Oxymoron ?” in Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo, eds., Designing Democratic Institutions, Nomos XLII (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 275. 8 James March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (London: Collier Macmillan, 1989). 9 Cf. also Olsen, “Institutional Design in Democratic Contexts.” 10 Goodin, “Institutions and Their Design,” 26. 11 In the present demographic crisis, the first Chancellor of the West German state Konrad Adenauer, is often quoted as saying that “people are always going to have children.” This implicit theory supposedly serves undergirding the viability of welfare state and its pension system.

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(e) Priority in Time to Action Institutions precede the action of actors in time. They are premises of action. They are not created on the spot (as contracts are) but are “given” in the sense that less contingency applies to institutions than to actions. Contracts themselves, as a form that governs major parts of social interaction, have the quality of scripts, that is, of precluding the option of not using this form if actors want to put themselves in control of valued goods or services. This quality of being inescapably “given” is what made Durkheim speak of the “noncontractual” features of contracts, of “social facts,” and so on (“chosisme”). (f) Anonymity of Origin In contrast to organizations, institutions do not have founders or authors. To be sure, an individual constitution as an instance of the institutional pattern of constitutional government does have “founding fathers.” But this pattern itself of which individual constitutions are widely varying incarnations, has emerged out of arguments, experiences, demands, movements, discourses, and theories that evolved and came to prevail in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Rather than as a result of individual decisions or founding acts, they evolved and came into being as a result of some collective manifestation of “communicative power.”12 As widely observed practices, they “emerge” anonymously under certain conditions and contexts, which later historians then usually explain as having created a specific institutional pattern. There may have been heroes, protagonists, or prophets, as well as theorists who elaborated and explained the reasons for the validity of an institution. But any ascription of an institution to a personal and hence mortal creator would expose it to the risk of being later denounced as an arbitrary or self-interested, at any rate as a by now obsolete invention of that particular person, or to the risk of sectarianism, the recognition of which is limited to the followers of a particular person. Anonymity is also a defining element of institutions in that they refer to actors in terms of offices, rules, resources, and so forth, never in terms of persons and names of persons.13 Institutions such as the school, the family, the joint stock company, the political party, and the state and its bureaucracy owe their robustness and proclaimed timelessness to the fact that we cannot tell who “invented” them. In that sense, “fatherlessness” is an asset, as is the myth of 12 Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), Ch. 8. 13 It is symptomatic that totalitarian regimes not only demolish all inherited institutions/constitutions as soon as they come to power but also attach political power to persons rather than to roles and offices. Thus, the quasi-constitutional Nazi law, which was in fact the utter perversion of constitutionalism, of August 1, 1934, stipulates that the joint powers of the President and the Chancellor shall now be in the hands of “Adolf Hitler” and that the law becomes effective at the time of death of the (then nominally still president) Hindenburg.

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parthenogenesis in the case of the founder of Christianity. Similarly, human reason itself, rather than some personal founder, is held to be, according to contractarian political theory, the source of the state as an institution. (g) Contested Values Institutions regulate the distribution of values the access to which and the distribution of which are intensely contested.14 The access to wealth and income, the control of physical violence, the recognition of individuals as member of a group, authority over and solidarity within the group, sexual relations, generational relations, the access to social and physical security, health, education, knowledge, esthetic values, and spiritual salvation are all items on a list of potential conflicts in which the stakes and hence the potential for disruptive violence can be very high.15 Institutions can best be thought of as regimes that regulate the productions and distribution of these and other values – which is why they are the potential object of distributive conflict initiated by actors who desire a different pattern of the distribution of and access to these values. (h) Theorists’ Proposed Typologies of Institutions Typologies of institutions can be based on institutional fields and their respective core values (religion/salvation, schools/education). They can also proceed along the formal/informal or legal/moral/ethical divide.16 Or they can proceed according to a hierarchy of “basic” institutions (such as constitutions), intermediary institutions (statutory laws), and operative institutions (administrative decrees).17 Such hierarchies usually also imply a hierarchy of robustness, or resistance to change, as in the hierarchy of political community, regime form, and legislation18 or the hierarchy of basic versus incremental policy changes.19

14 Claus Offe, “Designing Institutions for East European Transitions” in Robert E. Goodin, ed., The Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 199 – ​226. 15 Cf. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Social Institutions: The Concept,” in David Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 14 (1968), 409 – ​421. 16 Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 17 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 50 – ​55. 18 David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965). 19 Peter A. Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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2

Functions of Institutions

(a) Formative Impact upon Actors Institutions shape actors’ motivational dispositions; goals and procedures are “internalized” by actors, who adopt goals, procedures, and interpretations of the situation that are congruent with the institutional patterns. Institutions shape actors so that they (many or even most of them) take these institutions for granted and comply with their rules. Institutions have a formative, motivation-building, and preference-shaping impact upon actors. They subsume and subordinate the individual, shape her tastes and desires, and promulgate habitual codes of conduct. In order for an institution to make the transition from an idea, a blueprint, or a vision to an actually existing arrangement widely enacted in social practices, the set of rules, forms, and constraints must “sink in,” “take root,” “make sense,” become “taken for granted,” and meet with the recognition and support of those who come to live with and under the institution in question. Institutions have less to do with strategy, choice, and instrumental rationality (as organizations do) and more with emergence, growth, and intrinsic valuation.20 Institutions are part of the stock of “common knowledge,” even of those who are unfamiliar with particular organizations that form instances of institutions. Even if I never attend church or a stock exchange, I still have an idea of what these institutions are thought to be good for and how people act when they are involved in the institution.21 (b) Congruent Preference Formation By virtue of this formative effect, as well as the shaping of actors’ expectations, institutions can provide for predictability, regularity, stability, integration, discipline, and cooperation. In the absence of institutions, actors would not be able to make strategic choices, because they would lack the information about what kind of action to expect from others, which they need to know in order to pursue their own benefit.22 More broadly and regardless of the special case of strategic action, institutions fulfill a requirement, as philosophical anthropologists23 have argued, that results from a basic and constitutive deficiency of human nature: Human beings are not only naked in the literal sense (and therefore in need of clothing and 20 Cf. Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 21 “One of the main features of institutional rules is that they are socially shared. The knowledge of their existence and applicability is shared by the members of the relevant group or community” (ibid., 68). 22 Ibid., Ch. 3. 23 Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur: Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen (Bonn: Athenäum, 1956).

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shelter); they are also “naked” in the metaphorical sense that they are lacking instinct-based behavioral programs that would provide them with guidance in responding to the challenges of the physical and the social world. Because human behavior is not naturally and fully governed by instinctual mechanisms (as is the case with all animals), humans, in order to cope with the destructive potential of their “fearsome naturalness,”24 need rules (or “culture”) to compensate for this deficiency. Freudian social Psychology (Civilization and Its Discontents) follows a similar idea of “requisite repression,” an idea that has later come to be challenged by the Freudian Left25 and complemented by the notion of institutions that perform not just the function of “necessary” but, beyond that, of unnecessary or “surplus” repression. From Aristotle to John S. Mill to contemporary theories of deliberative democracy, we find the notion of institutions’ (and, in particular, constitutions’) capacity for congruent preference-building. Good constitutions generate good citizens and enhance the capacities that are accorded to them in constitutional texts. The viability and robustness of institutions are in turn thought to be contingent upon the loyalty and supportive disposition of citizens toward those institutions, because no institution is capable of ensuring its durability through formal sanctions alone. Institutions are dependent upon requisite sectoral virtues and informal codes of conduct, such as honesty and competitiveness in business, impersonal neutrality in bureaucracy, non-corruptibility in politics, trust and affection in family life, collectivity orientation in the professions, learning efforts in schools, dutiful preparedness for self-sacrifice in military combat organizations, and so on. They also shape expectations of what others are likely to do, as well as a sense of collective identity among those who belong to and live in or under an institution. No institution can function unless such corresponding informal codes of conduct and sector-specific ethos are observed by participants. One important function of institutions is to inculcate such loyalty. At the same time, institutions are necessary in order to avoid states of ambiguity, anomie, and disorientation. It is only through political institutions that we can avoid the political nightmares of cycling majorities and arbitrary rule, and only through economic institutions that we can limit defection and opportunism, the absence of trust, and the uncertainty about the constraints that govern gain-seeking modes of behavior. As Goodin has put it succinctly, “there can be a market in anything only if there is not a market in everything.”26 24 Ibid. 25 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 26 Goodin, “Institutions and Their Design,” 23.

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Some institutions are more stringent than others. “Only in the limiting case will [institutions] restrict the [feasible] set to one alternative. […] The institution may establish the general parameters for the interaction (by excluding some strategies) but allow for considerable flexibility in the choice of strategies within that framework.”27 However, the actual range of choice of individuals need not be greater in the second than in the first case, as the institutionally mediated perception of the “normal” mode of action, the conformist discipline with which a code of conduct is observed, may be so narrow and rigid that actors spontaneously adopt a strict self-discipline (or “auto-governmentality”), thus acting as if the feasible set actually consisted of just one alternative. But many institutions leave considerable leeway for variations that follow from the values and interests of those who make use of institutions and build organizations premised on them. This variability of actually observable practices implies that explanations of action and outcomes based on the independent variable of underlying institutional patterns must rely on a soft and probabilistic notion of causation. (c) Economizing on Transaction Costs In particular, institutions increase the efficiency of transactions as they help to economize on search, negotiation, and enforcement costs of market and nonmarket interaction.28 To the extent that institutions are capable of cultivating their corresponding codes of conduct and the respective ethical dispositions, a by-product of their functioning is the avoidance of the costs of conflict and conflict resolution. Needless to say, the shape of institutions and their change cannot be explained, in a functionalist manner, by the objectives to which their operation turns out to contribute. However, with this proviso in mind, we can predict the kinds of transaction cost problems that will result from the weakness or failure of institutions in certain environments. For instance, in a society where exchange and interaction are limited to the members of tribes and primordial groups, tolerable levels of transaction costs will be obtained even in the absence of formal institutions. Personal knowledge of transaction partners will facilitate cooperation by virtue of tradition and informal rules alone. In contrast, “modern” societies provide opportunities and incentives to interact with “strangers” whom we do not know nor expect to ever come to know as persons. In such a post-traditionalist context, the only safeguard actors can have against the opportunism and defection of other actors is based upon institutions, the failure of which thus seems to be a much more serious problem in modern societies than in traditional ones.

27 Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict, 58 – ​59. 28 North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance.

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(d) Frictionless Self-Coordination Institutions shape action by providing opportunities and incentives to actors so that a spontaneous order (kosmos, or spontaneous regularities, vs. taxis, or intentionally designed rules) results.29 For instance, market institutions inculcate such virtues as prudence, diligence, punctuality, self-control, and self-attribution of both success and failure, thereby triggering spontaneous patterns of self-coordination. Rather than prescribe a particular course of action, institutions focus the attention of actors on what is relevant and irrelevant, what preferences are to be pursued and incentive or opportunities responded to, what resources employed, and so on. Institutions “act on the manner in which [individuals] regulate their own behavior,” which is why the institutionalization of liberty through “liberalism [represents] a specific rationality of government,” which cultivates “suitable habits of self-regulation.”30 (e) Continuity By virtue of their formative impact upon individuals, as well as their contribution to social order, institutions can be self-perpetuating: The longer they are in place, the more robust they grow, and the more immune they become to challenges. Institutions can breed conservatism. Innovation becomes costlier, both because those living in institutions have come to take them for granted and because those who are endowed by them with power and privilege resist change. For both of these reasons, they set premises, constraints, and determinants for future developments and thus become “path dependent” and limit change to the mode of (at best) incremental adjustment. (f) Failure and Breakdown of Institutions One way in which institutional failure may happen is through a more or less accidental change of conditions in the external world that undermines the viability of institutional patterns or limits their ability to function. If that happens, rules and institutionalized goals and power relations are rendered untenable, whether because of some emerging discrepancy between an institutional complex and its economic, demographic, or technological environment or because of an evolving lack of fit between institutional complexes, such as the incompatibility between institutions of higher education and labor market institutions. There is simply no “meta­institution” that is capable of coordinating sectoral institutional arrangements. In either of these cases, actors who have so far complied with institutional practices will start a process of (potentially self-accelerating) defection. An exam29 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1 (London: Routledge, 1973). 30 Barry Hindess, “Politics as Government” (ANU: unpublished manuscript, 2001), 2, 4, 11.

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ple from the German political economy is the assumption, built into the institutional pattern of wage bargaining, that semicentralized multi-employer bargaining (“Flächentarifvertrag”) in the long term converges with the interests of both workers and employers and also enhances the productivity and competitiveness of the economy as a whole, thus creating the conditions of its own sustainability. However, labor market crises, regional disparities, international competition, and not least the consequences of German unification have shattered this presumed equilibrium of interests. Another example is the institutions of family life in African societies, the rules of which prescribe that the care for young children must be taken over by specified members of the wider family in (the presumably relatively rare) case these children become orphans. However, as a direct consequence of the HIV epidemic, this situation has ceased to be rare, and the family-based institutions of vicarious care have turned out to be overburdened and are beginning to break down. These are just two examples of how institutions may lose their “fit” with the external context conditions on which they depend, and hence their viability. (g) Another Case of “Path-Departure” and Institutional Breakdown Other cases of institutional breakdown grow out of the failure, or loss of moral plausibility, of the implicit theory of a just social order that comes with any institution. Institutions can implode because of a shortage of the moral resources and loyalties that are needed for their support. For instance, the notion of a just gender division of labor, congealed in the “male breadwinner” family pattern, has come under pressure from individualistic and egalitarian normative ideas. The same syndrome of normative ideas has made the “collectivist consensus,” on which the Bismarckian institutions of contributory pay-as-you-go old-age pensions are based, falter. Here, we observe the breakdown of institutions as a result of their internal loss of a sense of “appropriateness”31 and justice. In the conceptual jargon of sociologists, the two cases (f) and (g) can be labeled “crisis” versus “conflict,” or failure of systems integration versus failure of social integration, respectively. (h) Institutional Transformation and a Gestalt Switch. What used to be seen and taken for granted as a valid and well-functioning arrangement is now being looked upon and challenged as a pattern that represents a frozen power structure inherited from a remote and now obsolete past. For instance, the privileged position of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council is a result of the fact that these five states are the victorious powers of the Second World War and also share among them a monopoly on the (legitimate) possession of nuclear weapons. However, both the post-World War II con31 March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions.

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figuration of the international system and the Cold War have become a matter of the past, and this nuclear monopoly has become entirely nominal and increasingly fictitious. Moreover, one of the permanent members can now afford, because of its unparalleled military power, to ignore and bypass Security Council decisions. The entire arrangement can therefore be discredited as the unwarranted projection of past power relations onto the present, thus cementing relations of power that cannot be justified under present conditions any longer

3

Social Power, as Provided by Institutions and as Challenging Institutions

Social power manifests itself in a mode of action that has the effect of setting parameters for the action of other social actors, be it in favorable or unfavorable ways, as seen by those others. In either case, the exercise of power is conflictual, controversial, and contested. In this conflict, some legitimating norm of (political, social, economic) justice is invoked and appealed to. The exercise of power affects others in ways that are perceived by them to be justice-relevant, either fulfilling or violating standards of justice. Given the controversial and essentially contested nature of these standards, I take it as axiomatic that any institution can be criticized for failing to live up to some version of justice. Note that this definition of power excludes two (arguably entirely fictive) phenomena that played a role in nineteenth-century political thought: the “administration of things” (as opposed to “rule over men,” as elaborated by Saint-Simon and adopted into Marxism by Engels), which supposedly affects objects other than social actors, or social actors in an essentially uncontroversial way, and the exclusively private and self-referential action that is of no consequence whatsoever to other actors.32 We can thus say that social power evaporates when externalities of action are either universally and unequivocally beneficial or entirely absent. Apart from these two (highly idealized) limiting cases, any formal institution does involve three kinds of power. First, it relies on the power of policing and enforcement agents, or guardians, including the socialization agents, media, and so on, that perform tasks of the educational propagation of institutional patterns and related ideas and implicit theories. Second, institutions preserve power relations as they contain patterns of privilege, power, and control that are biased in favor of some actors in some institutional field and work to the disadvantage of others. Third, there is the virtual power of those who might have reasons (for instance, reasons following from 2(f) or 2(g)), to defect from, obstruct, or challenge institu32 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1875).

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tional patterns and replace them with new ones. This triad of power phenomena that is embedded in institutional patterns can be illustrated using the famous line by Bertolt Brecht (Threepenny Opera, scene 9), who lets one of his protagonists ask the rhetorical question “What is breaking into a bank compared to founding a bank ?” The robbing of a bank is an act that the “guardians” are obviously called upon to deal with. The (by Brecht’s implication, far greater) “crime” of founding and operating a bank is the power structure embedded in the institution of banking, namely the power with which the institution of banking endows some economic actors at the expense of other actors. But Brecht’s speech act that puts matters this way makes sense only in a “revolutionary” perspective – a perspective, that is, that envisions the exercise of a kind of power that would be capable of overpowering the institutional pattern that is represented by the “bank” and replacing it with some different kind of credit mechanism. Institutions endow specific actors with power. They place players in a position that allows them to take (arguably unfair) advantage of others or to exclude others from the participating in the decision-making process even when the decision to be made affects them in significant ways (or whatever other justice-related complaint may be raised against them). The generalization that I want to suggest is a model according to which institutions operate in a tripolar field of power conflicts that unfold among the guardians (enforcers and educators), beneficiaries, and potential challengers. The dynamics of this power conflict surrounding institutions can range from vehement to latent. The latter applies if an institution consists of a set of rules that nobody needs to enforce because nobody violates it; that nobody can claim to involve unfair privilege or exclusion; and that nobody finds worth criticizing or challenging. It is not easy, I submit, to think of an example of an institution to which all of this applies and that is, in fact, an “institution,” rather than a widely shared habit or a perfectly self-enforcing convention. Perhaps equally rare are instances of the other extreme of open and vehement contest. Which leads me to the question of how the three parties that are hypothetically involved in the dynamics of social power concerning institutional rules manage to conceal, accommodate, or disperse this conflict. What follows is a typology of situations and modes in which institutions cope with power-related contests and challenges. (a) Institutions in which the bias of privilege is not obvious to participants but that endows some actors with benefits at the expense of some excluded, discriminated, or misrepresented interest will escape any serious challenge, particularly if the guardians can point to allegedly universal and nondiscriminatory incidence of benefits flowing from the institution. “Rule” is being camouflaged as “technically competent administration.” In this configuration, the power implications of the institutional pattern can just be perceived by the outside observer, rightly or not.

38

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(b) Even if some bias in favor of beneficiaries of holding power is widely perceived and objections concerning the justice of the arrangement raised, the institutional rules and procedures may be such that an open and promising challenge of the institutional pattern is not expected to have any chance of success. This may be so because a set of ideas and an institutional blueprint on the basis of which some critical alliance of challengers might crystallize is missing. This is the situation analyzed by theories of power that focus upon its “second” face (non-decisions and exclusionary agenda-setting),33 as well as its “third” face (manipulative interference with awareness of interests).34 Challenging the (dis)empowering effects of the institution may appear either unpromising, given the weakness of opponents, or not “worth the effort”, given the negative sanctions that are to be expected from the guardians. As potential sources of critique are silenced and disorganized, the power of the privileged is rendered invisible. (c) Some institutions are highly flexible and open to self-revision. Some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political thinkers believed it desirable to provide for a process of a radical ongoing “synchronization” of institutions so that the legacy of unfair distributional patterns that is inherent in inherited institutions could be effectively neutralized. For instance, according to Rousseau, each time the Assembly comes together, it should affirm the validity of the constitution and alter it if it is no longer unanimously supported. After all, why should we, those presently alive, allow defunct generations to exercise power over us ? But this solution is deceptive, because the neutralization of inherited unfairness would be tantamount to granting comfortable opportunities to present holders of social power. An institution that is in constant need of affirmation is not really an institution, because it fails to shape preferences and expectations in durable ways. While the inherited playing field on which we find ourselves may be far from level, treating it constantly as a tabula rasa may well leave us in an even more tilted terrain. Holding fast to inherited institutions and their effect of “long-distance” self-binding can protect us from the dangers of an overly direct impact of present power relations upon renovated institutions. This conservative approach certainly does not neutralize whatever power effects are built into institutions, but it at least helps to preserve the potential of institutions for creating predictability and stability and for economizing on transaction costs. The same logic applies to the requirement of supermajorities for institutional change. The advantage of synchronization must 33 Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 34 Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

Political Institutions and Social Power 39

be balanced against the dual disadvantage of just empowering present holders of veto power and the unpredictability of the behavior of everyone else. Even highly unfair institutions may be able to command the loyalty and compliance of actors because these have reason to believe that any transition to better ones will be prohibitively costly and because existing institutions are at least familiar and reasonably calculable; they are “the best we have” and can hope for for the time being.35 An example of how an excessive flexibility of institutions can have quite dubious effects is the opportunistic manipulation of electoral laws,36 that is, laws that normally do not partake of the rigidity accorded to constitutional rules proper. If every ruling party could use its majority to push through parliament the combination of electoral rules that best serves its interest in being re-elected, this strategy of opportunistically rewriting institutional rules would hardly be seen as enhancing fairness. The same applies to governing elites’ self-serving manipulation of rules governing federalism (examples from Nigeria and India come to mind) and the devolution of government functions. Institutions that can be opportunistically switched off and on, or altered in the pursuit of strategic considerations, are an oxymoron. Institutions perform their function only if they are protected by some degree of “requisite rigidity” and are designed in accordance with principles (what I have called their “implicit theory”) that allow us to value them for their intrinsic rather than their instrumental value (if perhaps only because their long-term causal effects are hidden behind a veil of ignorance). (d) A way out of this dilemma might be the reliance on mechanisms that allow for the institutionalization of institutional change, subjecting it to procedural constraints. All constitutions contain (“meta-”)rules that specify the procedures according to which they can be amended and changed. In addition, they often constitute agents, such as constitutional courts, and prescribe rules with which any binding (re-)interpretation of formal institutions must comply. To be sure, there is no guarantee that the space for self-revision thus provided, as well as the political determination to use it, will ever be sufficient to heal even the most blatant power privileges that are built into institutional arrangements.37

35 It is this web of beliefs on which the viability of state socialist authoritarian regimes depended and they have been able to effectively inculcate in their citizens. As a consequence, many of them have preferred to play with the proverbial “devil we know.” 36 Cf. Carles Boix, “Setting the Rules of the Game,” American Political Science Review 93, 3 (1999): 609 – ​624. 37 For example, according to German constitutional jurisprudence (revised in early 2005), the Grundgesetz does not permit the adoption of a mode of financing tertiary education that would rely to a significant extent on the payment of tuition fees. As a consequence, a condition is likely to remain immune to political challenge in which not only is the universi-

40

Political Institutions and Social Power

(e) Another option to appease challengers and to neutralize any alleged power content of institutional forms is to provide for a choice of parallel institutional forms that apply to the same field of action (i. e., the coexistence of public and commercial mass media and schools, business corporations and cooperatives, state and federal legislative competences), as well as the liberal option of opting out (e. g., of the representational monopoly of trade unions or employers’ associations). The power-neutralizing effect of these pluralization/liberalization options is, however, bound to be limited at best, because the choices that are made available are likely to be used in ways that reflect the status and privilege of those who make them, as in the opposition of public health systems and private health insurance. (f) In rare cases, institutions show the capacity for accommodating challenges without thereby exposing their core rules and actors to challenge. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the most impressive example of an institution that has been capable of preserving both the continuity of the institutional core of the una sancta and ongoing adjustment and self-revision. Another instance of the Lampedusa principle (“changing things so that everything stays the same”) is that of European monarchies: They have shown an amazing capacity for being constitutionalized and democratized, so that, arguably, today at least half of European consolidated democracies are in fact monarchies, not republics. Similarly, the legal institutions that make up les droits de l’homme, while originally destined to refer to the rights of French males, have gradually come to apply to all human beings through the creeping diffusion of an original “animating idea.” It is at least not evident that today’s liberal democracies belong to this small group of exceptionally “ultrastable” institutions, given the fact that the moral context condition of liberal democracy, the sovereign nation-state, together with the patriotic loyalty to shared principles and a common destiny that it evokes in citizens, is in the process of evaporating. On the other hand, many liberal democracies have at times shown great capacities for co-opting and incorporating both ideas and elites whose sources were those political forces that were most likely to challenge some given distribution of power and privilege. (g) Other institutions are even less capable of adjusting to challenges, although the need to respond to these challenges and the evidence of unfairness is widely understood. Often institutions, or those responsible for their management and enforcement, are trapped in their obsession with continuity and their refusal to

ty system massively underfunded, but also the universe of taxpayers subsidizes, with highly regressive distributional effects, the human capital formation of the middle class whose offspring will continue to attend universities for free.

Political Institutions and Social Power 41

concede change. This behavior is well known in authoritarian regimes, which sometimes (have good reasons to) fear that concessions will lead to breakdown, while not appreciating the fact that the failure to grant such concession is even more likely to lead to breakdown. The logic of this dilemma is not entirely absent from liberal democracies. To illustrate, let me return to the case of a Bismarckian system of contributory old-age pensions based upon contributions shared equally by employers and employees. It is a well-understood mathematical certainty that this system cannot yield, as it is legally committed to do, income-graduated pensions above the poverty line under conditions of a rapidly aging population with high levels of unemployment. It is also well understood that any attempted continuation of this system involves massive distributional injustices in favor of the retired and at the expense of the presently active generation. Yet, the electoral situation of any incumbent government makes it unfeasible (and politically virtually suicidal) to do either of the two things that evidently need to be done: to cut the benefits of the retired generation and/or to impose substantial additional burdens (which will not be shared by the employers) upon the employed of the active generation, the revenues from which can then serve to finance the transition to a funded system. In Germany, this configuration of constraints has been known for thirty years; had a revision of the pension system been initiated in the mid-1970s, the needed cuts in benefits and rises in contributions might have been spread over time and painlessly absorbed. Yet liberal democracies are not made (at least not all of them) for policies with a thirty-year time horizon; instead, they are tied to medium-term electoral cycles that provide strong incentives to dump the externalities of presently unresolved problems onto future generations. These, in turn, become the victims of procrastination as they lack the time slack that is needed to cope with them. To be sure, this is an extreme case of democratic institutional rigidity and the incapacity to adopt adequate and timely responses to challenges. But there are other examples of institutional arrangements being trapped in the sense that some paths are more difficult to depart from than others. The economic institutions of capitalist market societies can serve as an example of structurally precluded path-departure.38 As far as political institutions are concerned, let us consider the example of five basic design alternatives of constitutional democracies. These are:

38 Lindblom analyses the market as a mechanism “for repressing change through an automatic punishing recoil.” “The market might be characterized as a prison. For a broad category of political/economic affairs, it imprisons policy making and imprisons our attempts to improve our institutions.” See Charles E. Lindblom, “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, 2 (1982): 325, 329.

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1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Federalism versus a unitary form of state Direct democracy through referenda versus representative legislative bodies Majority voting versus proportional representation Parliamentary government versus presidentialism Intergovernmentalism versus supranational federalism (in the context of European integration).

The hypothetical argument I want to suggest (but cannot support here with any empirical evidence) is that the “transition probabilities” (or direction of entropy) between the first and the second of these design alternatives are quite asymmetrical. Some alterations of an institutional setup are uphill, others downhill. That is to say, it is easily conceivable that the government of a centralized state finds it in its interest and manages to mobilize support to pursue strategies of devolution and power sharing, but it is only under very exceptional conditions that the reverse takes place and a federal system generates a defederalizing reform. In order for uphill institutional innovations to materialize, some actors (federal states, the electorate, members of a duopoly of political parties, parliaments, nation-states) must be willing to deliberately disempower themselves, whereas they stand to gain power when reforms are adopted in the opposite direction. (h) One limiting case of institutional change is “de-institutionalization.” Whereas all the previous cases in this section have dealt with either the continuity of institutions or processes by which one institutional pattern is replaced by another one, the case of deinstitutionalization is special in that rules are being abandoned without being replaced by some alternative institutional pattern. Social action that used to be governed by binding rules now becomes – and is, by some, recommended to be made – a matter of unrestrained, inventive, and unilateral ad hoc decision making. In the early twenty-first century, the map of the world is littered with deinstitutionalized states, or state ruins. This condition does not apply only to the most obvious cases, Afghanistan and Iraq. It also applies to Serbia, where none of the three prerequisites of statehood, namely fixed territorial borders, an effective regime covering this territory, and a population with a sense of loyalty toward this regime, is firmly in place. It is interesting and arguably symptomatic to follow the use of the term “deinstitutionalization” in both positive and normative social science. The earliest use I was able to detect occurred in the late 1970s, when the term was introduced by specialists on the reform of psychiatric institutions (in the wake of the Italian Basaglia debate). In that usage, deinstitutionalization was equivalent to de-hospitalization, which was both observed as a trend and (arguably somewhat frivolously) recommended as a left-libertarian reform strategy. From this highly specialized usage, the term spread to other social services (such as the rehabilitation of drug

Political Institutions and Social Power 43

users and criminals) and to social policy studies in general.39 From there, it was adopted as a key analytical concept by specialists in the fields of sociology of the family,40 leisure activities, and religion. In the 1990s, the career of the concept continued in such diverse field as education and vocational training, development studies, organization and management, the economics of transformation societies, political culture (including the development of voting behavior and political parties), the formation of political elites, political decision making (e. g., through ad hoc committees rather than constituted parliamentary committees), international relations, and new types of military conflict, which are increasingly carried out by noninstitutional actors other than by (alliances of) states and their armies. The widely shared neoliberal belief that institutional constraints of markets, and in particular labor markets, are the prime obstacle to growth and prosperity points in the same direction. Other phenomena emerging in the institutionally uncharted terrain include “nongovernmental” and “nonprofit” organization, both of which are symptomatically designated in negative terms, that is, in terms of what they are not within the context of familiar institutional patterns. In fact, we can observe in many of these fields symptoms of institutional decomposition, the common denominator of which might be described as the erosion of encompassing rules and their enforcement mechanisms, stable hierarchies, consolidated patterns of specialization and cooperation, “animating ideas” and hegemonic notions of normal patterns of the life course, and widely recognized frameworks of constraints and codes of conduct. Needless to say, such erosion is not just widely observed but also welcomed and promoted by the proponents of two ascendant public philosophies: libertarian varieties of social, economic, and political postmodernism, with their standard suspicion that institutions are mostly pretexts for rent-seeking or rigidities that interfere with efficiency, and communitarian social philosophies and political doctrines, with their emphasis on moral communities, identities, and the neo-Tocquevillian belief that what is needed for the coordination of social action is not so much institutions (with their implicit dangers of centralization and majority tyranny)41 as the revitalization of community virtues and resources such as “social capital.” So, it is unsurprising that the kind of social scientists who are interested in the study, as well as the fair and ap39 The earliest book-length treatment in which the concept plays a central role is Paul Lerman, Deinstitutionalization and the Welfare State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981). 40 Hartmann Tyrell, “Ehe und Familie – Institutionalisierung und Deinstitutionalisierung”, in Kurt Lüscher et al., eds., Die “postmoderne” Familie (Konstanz, 1988), 145 – ​156. 41 Cf. Peter L. Berger and Richard Neuhaus, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977).

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propriate design, of institutions often show sympathies with left-of-center liberal republicanism, in Europe better known as social democracy.42 It is also worth noting that, while the concern with institutions, their stability and credibility, has been a typical concern of conservative political thinkers, this concern seems now to have shifted its political base to the political left, while economic and political libertarians have adopted and made use of (some of) the political left’s principled skepticism and suspicions concerning the illegitimate social power that is built into, as well as at the same time hidden by, institutions. The anti-institutional quest for unrestrained self-actualization, once having been proclaimed by leftist countercultural revolutionaries, is easily taken over by free-market libertarians. The reverse side of the anti-institutional libertarian advocacy of the market is the claim that institutionally unrestrained power should be used arbitrarily and to its full extent. For instance, populism is a political practice that is more concerned with understanding what “the people” feel and want than with observing the constraints of the institutions of representative political institutions. To the extent that these various projects succeed, it is no longer institutions that “structure politics” and “shape who wins and who loses”; it is power, sheer and naked, for the understanding of which institutionalist approaches may be no longer needed nor helpful. One concluding remark: In the 1990s, the concept of “totalitarianism” has been revived and employed in the retrospective historical and comparative analysis of both the Nazi and the Stalinist regimes. As to the former, it has been argued by contemporaries of the National Socialist regime43 that this regime represented an extreme form of “deinstitutionalization.” Not only did it lack a constitution; it even lacked a rule of succession for its top leadership, as well as even a rudimentary set of rules specifying the working relations between the four rival power centers of state, army, party, and industry. Everything that happened was based on decisions, virtually nothing on rules with any meaningful binding power, to say nothing about legal rights. Something similar might be argued concerning Stalin’s Soviet Union. Both of these cases serve to demonstrate, if in different ways how the “fearsome naturalness” of human action can unfold as a result of the radical erosion of institutions.

42 Bo Rothstein, Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political logic of the Universal Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), is an example. 43 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Toronto/New York: Oxford University Press, 1944).

3

The attribution of public status to interest groups: observations on the West German case (1980)

Like all social phenomena, interest groups can be analyzed from three theoretical perspectives. Either we start with the individual social actor and explore his or her intentions, values, and expectations in joining the organization and his or her actual chances of influencing its policies and utilizing the resources and achievements of the organization. Or we start with the organization itself, the generation of its resources, its growth, its internal bureaucratization and differentiation, and its relations to other organizations. Or finally, we can focus on the global social system and start by asking what role it assigns to interest organizations, what legal or other constraints it imposes on the pursuit of certain interests, and what links it establishes between particular interest organizations and other elements of the social structure. Speaking loosely and metaphorically, one could say that these three perspectives look on interest organizations from “below,” from “within,” and from “above.”

1

Three dimensions of the analysis of interest organization

It is only when we combine these three dimensions of organized forms of interest representation that we can arrive at a sufficiently complex explanation of their operation. When we ask such questions as: What factors lead to the formation of an interest group ? What determines its relative influence and power in the political process ? How can the specific articulation and definition of those demands be understood that an interest organization puts forward as being in “the interest” of those represented by the organization ? we immediately encounter the need to proceed on three levels of analysis simultaneously. These are (1) the level of will, consciousness, sense of collective identity, and values of the constituent members of © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_3

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The attribution of public status to interest groups

the interest group; (2) the level of the socioeconomic “opportunity structure” of the society within which an interest group emerges and acts; and (3) the institutional forms and practices that are provided to the interest group by the political system and that confer a particular status as its basis of operation. One of the biases of pluralist political theory results directly from its failure to take into account the relevance of the second and third elements of interest organizations. Pluralist theory tends to explain the existence, strength, and particular articulation of interest organizations by reference to properties of the constituent elements of the organization: their values, their willingness to sacrifice resources for the pursuit of their interest, their numbers, and so on. That this type of explanation leads at best to a very limited understanding of the dynamics of interest representation becomes evident as soon as we realize that an identical number of interested individuals with identical degrees of determination to defend and promote their interest may produce vastly different organizational manifestations and practices, depending on the strategic location of the groups’ members within the social structure and depending on the political-institutional status their organization does or does not enjoy. The concrete shape and content of organized interest representation is always a result of interest plus opportunity plus institutional status. To employ structuralist language, we can also say that interest representation is determined by ideological, economic, and political parameters. Such categorization of “factors” and “dimension” should not, however, prevent us from expecting – and exploring – the empirical connections among these three types of parameters. All three of the elements that together determine the shape and content of the system of interest representation do not operate with the same relative weight and importance. Historical changes in the system of interest representation (which would become manifest in a differentiation of organized interests, changes in the nature of conflict and cooperation, changes in the level of militancy, etc.) can be explained by changes on the level of values and ideologies in one period, changes of strategic positions and social power of groups in a second period, and changes on the level of political institutionalization of interest groups in still another period. In other words, there exists some historical variability of the relative importance of ideological, economic, and political parameters as they jointly determine the shape and content of interest organizations such as unions, trade and employers’ associations, and professional associations. Policies that provide status to interest groups, assign certain semipublic or public functions to them, and regulate the type and scope of their activities are, under conditions of advanced capitalist social and economic structures, far more important factors affecting ongoing change in the system of interest representation than factors that have to do with changes of either ideological orientations or socioeconomic opportunity structures. Interest representation, for a number of reasons to be explored,

The attribution of public status to interest groups 47

tends to become predominantly a matter of “political design,” and thus in part a dependent rather than independent variable of public policy making.

2

Two types of political rationality

In a highly schematic fashion, the changing relationship between the system of interest representation and public policy making can be represented as the shift from one type of political rationality to another one. Under conditions where the formation and activity of organized interest groups is not regulated by specifically attributed collective status given to the organization and its members, policy makers do not have much control over the intensity and content of specific demands that are being made in the political process nor over the number and identity of organized collectivities by which such demands are being made. At best, political parties are able to perform a reconciling function, thus overarching the specific conflicts of interest between organized groups and providing some programmatic directives and priorities to policy makers. Under such conditions of low institutionalization of interest groups – conditions that come closest to the liberal-pluralist model of the political process – articulations of interest and demand have to be accepted as given from the point of view of the policy maker. His or her objective – and his or her standard of political rationality – would be to serve as many of the specific demand inputs as possible, given the limitations of fiscal and other resources, so as to satisfy a maximum of special interests. This requires, in turn, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the governmental use of resources, maximizing predictive capacities, measuring cost/benefit ratios, employing sophisticated methods of policy and budgetary planning, using social indicators, and so forth. Because demand inputs have to be treated as given, the only thing that can and must be rationalized by a “good” policy maker is the efficiency and effectiveness of outputs. The working of civil society itself is considered as given – both in the sense that it can be taken for granted and that it is neither feasible nor legitimate to attempt to interfere with its internal dynamic. The political problem is one of compensating for market failures, resolving conflict, supervising rules, and fine tuning. To be sure, there is a considerable range of conflict over the extent and nature of such policies which may be more or less “interventionist”; but they converge on the notion of the separation between the political and the socioeconomic spheres of social life, which is the underlying notion without which the very term “intervention” does not make any sense. This type of political rationality, which we would associate with “active” interventionist policies aiming at optimal and comprehensive satisfaction of manifest (as well as some anticipated) interest is, however, not the only conceivable type

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of political rationality. If political parties fail to aggregate and reconcile, on the basis of their respective programmatic orientations, major segments of the electorate, and/or if policy makers find it difficult or impossible to accommodate significant interests due to the lack of sufficient fiscal and institutional resources at their disposal, the inverse type of political rationality is likely to take over. This one follows the imperative of keeping output constant, that is, at levels that are considered reasonable or affordable, while channeling demand inputs in a way that appears compatible with available resources. The variable to be manipulated and balanced, in this case, is not policy outputs, but the system of interest representation and the modes of resolution of conflict. It is this standard of political rationality that inspires “the search for the stable ordered society, for a system where competition, class conflict and political disunity [are] structurally rendered impossible” (Harris, 1972: 66). The standard of a “good” policy here, to put it in the simplest terms, is not to satisfy demands but to shape and channel demands so as to make them satisfiable. A parallel alternative of standards of political rationality can be found in the field of economic policy making. Just as the policymaking doctrine of “active interventionism” considers “interest” as the variable that is to be taken for granted and attempts to respond through effective policies, for Keynesian economic policy the strategic point of intervention is the demand side of markets. Again, the standard of rationality is to make “adequate” responses to problems that are accepted as they emerge. The configuration of macroeconomic conditions that raises serious doubts about the validity of this standard of political rationality are such phenomena as stagflation and the “dualization” of the economic structure. Stagflation renders demand management unpractical as an instrument of economic steering, for it exposes the Keynesian policy makers to contradictory imperatives: Expand demand and state indebtedness in order to fight stagnation and reduce it in order to achieve monetary stability. They necessitate the shift to an alternative type of rational economic policy making, the shift to the supply side of the economy. Here the effort is to structure problems so as to make them manageable. Quantity and skill level of the work force, energy and raw materials, the price level at which labor power and natural resources are available, and the level and rate of technical change are the foci of economic policies that no longer merely respond to problems but that try to change the “nature” of problems so as to make future responses possible. Both in the case of political rationality and economic policy, the common characteristic of the respective second alternative is to establish institutional parameters and/or physical and economic parameters that guarantee that the problems that have to be dealt with do not exceed the available resources and strategies of problem solving.

The attribution of public status to interest groups 49

The distinction between the two modes of political rationality can be conveniently made in terms of “conjunctural” versus “structural” policies. Conjunctural policies would seek to maximize the adequacy of policy responses to problems as they emerge and appear on the agenda; the concomitant expectation is that such problems and demands will remain within a range of manageability defined by existing capacities of state action and their continuing improvement. Structural policies, in contrast, become the predominant mode of intervention as soon as this expectation is no longer supported by experience. They are adopted in response to conditions of economic and institutional crisis. In response to such crises, the physical and economic parameters of production and the institutional parameters of interest representation, which together constitute the nature of the problem, become subject to redesign. The shift is from policy output and economic demand management to the shaping of political input and economic supply – from “state intervention” to “politicization.” This chapter argues that the transition from “conjunctural” to “structural” modes of political strategies has been a dominant trend in advanced capitalist nations since the late sixties. It concentrates on strategies of institutional change concerning political inputs and explores the strategic significance and consequences of such changes. Using materials from the Federal Republic of Germany, this chapter considers (1) whether changes in the structure of interest representation can actually be explained by the intention to influence the volume and nature of political problems that appear on the political agenda and (2) whether the strategy of elimination of “problem overload” by institutionalizing filter mechanisms designed to reduce the magnitude of problems to manageable proportions is actually a workable and successful strategy or whether it generates its own specific failures and contradictions. We should be careful, however, not to mistake a conceptual distinction for an evolutionary sequence. It would be far too simplistic and quite inaccurate to work with a historical periodization of this kind, arguing, in effect, that there was a time when instrumental rationality was the dominant mode and that, at the end of this period, there was an unequivocal shift toward the rationalization of inputs and the supply side of markets. Although it may turn out to be justified to describe a particular historical period or configuration of political forces as being dominated by either of the two types of political rationality, it may well be more fruitful to study the simultaneity and interaction of the two. At what point and for what reasons does the orientation of policy makers toward problem solving and the achievement of stated goals turn into an orientation toward regulating the institutional setting that leads to the emergence of goals and problems ? To what extent does the achievement of goals presuppose the creation of a new balance of supportive forces and the construction of new channels through which demands and political opposition are channeled ? Our theme, then, is to explore

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the mechanisms by which new issues, new items on the agenda of the state apparatus, and new imperatives of intervention lead to changes in the system of interest representation, or how functional changes of public policy affect the institutional framework of politics. Growing state interventionism and increasing political institutionalization through corporatist forms of “functional representation,” although conceptually distinct and even opposite modes of political rationalization, are nevertheless empirically connected developments.1

3

Reordering the system of interest representation – a new political issue

Although a harmonious and often euphoric view of a social and political order characterized by group processes prevailed throughout the fifties, a much more disenchanted attitude toward group processes has become prominent since the mid-sixties. What was discovered then, and has become part of the academic as well as nonacademic political discourse, was the propensity of a political order based of the uninhibited interplay of organized interest group forces to reproduce and even to exacerbate exactly those “anarchic” and disruptive tendencies that seemingly had been overcome in the transition from “competitive” to “organized” capitalism. More specifically, it came to be suspected that the bargaining power and political influence of organized interests undermined responsible parliamentary government based on political parties, caused an intolerably high rate of inflation and/or fiscal strain, and interfered with attempts at long-term and comprehensive social and economic planning. In addition, it appeared that conflict among the most powerful interest groups was settled, quite frequently, at the expense of social categories that are poorly organized (e. g., consumers, independent

1

An early example of the relation between new “output objectives” of public policy on the one side and new “input arrangements” on the other is, in German history, found in the coincidence of Bismarck’s social security legislation and simultaneous legislation outlawing the activity of the Social Democrats. Less well known than this often-analyzed parallelism is that Bismarck’s social policy innovations coincided with the creation of a corporatist constitutional body, the Preussischer Volkswirtschaftsrat (1881 – ​7), which formed one major element of what Wehler describes as “authoritarian interest group syndicalism” (Wehler, 1975: 90). This “National Economic Council” was the earliest corporatist experiment in modern German constitutional history, and it is interesting to note that most of its activity concerned consensus building among industrial, commercial, and agricultural interests on the new social policy (Dotzenrath, 1932: 4). New policy programs, the adoption and implementation of new state functions, seem to require new participants (or nonparticipants) in the political process and new institutional forms of interest intermediation.

The attribution of public status to interest groups 51

middle classes) and hence economically and/or politically vulnerable. These and similar concerns underlie various attempts to reorganize the relationship among interest groups and the relationship between interest groups and the state. In all cases the rationale has been to impose a certain measure of self-restraint, discipline, and responsibility on interest groups and to make the interaction between organized interests, on the one hand, and the legislative and executive branches of government, on the other, more predictable and cooperative. In short, the dynamics of “organized capitalism” were themselves seen in need of reorganization. There can be little doubt that this wave of postpluralist realism concerning the urgency of institutional changes in the framework of interest representation and the conduct of politics reflects new policy problems confronting the capitalist state. In spite of vast differences in kind and degree between the problems of the first German republic in the mid-twenties and those of the second republic in the mid-sixties, in both cases, the question arose of the compatibility of serious economic policy problems, on the one side, and of the dynamics of uncoordinated interest group pluralism, on the other. The conflict was one not of contradictory demands but of political and economic demands, on the one side, and systemic requirements, on the other. Certain “excessive” demands generated by interest group pluralism appeared to transcend the limits of tolerance of the economic order. To be sure, in the history of the Federal Republic there has always been a tradition of political commentary and analysis that is highly critical of the role played by organized interests (cf., e. g., Eschenburg, 1955; W. Weber, 1970). In sharp distinction to current contributions, however, the critical argument of this literature was not functionalist, but normative, appealing to such values as the bureaucratic ethos, the rule of law, the preservation of constitutional authority, and the separation of powers. What these authors were calling for was not institutional innovation in the system of interest representation but, rather, stricter adherence to existing constitutional norms that would protect the political system from illegitimate forms of influence and control that subverted state authority. Although this normative argument has never been fully abandoned in the academic and political literature, it figures only as an ideological façade for models and recommendations derived from functionalist arguments (Böckenförde, 1976; BethusyHuc 1976; Kevenhörster, 1976). That is, the focus of concern, the notion of what is threatened has shifted from constitutional norms to the requirements of socio­ political stability and the effective performance of public policy which by the more recent authors is held to make institutional changes of the system of interest representation an urgent imperative. The broad literature on planning and public policy making that has been produced in the Federal Republic since the late sixties started by exploring the organizational, informational, and budgetary requirements for effective and efficient

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policy making, thus trying to provide the necessary knowledge for the conduct of “active reform policies,” which were the programmatic base of the early years of the Social Democratic administration after 1969. Their belief in the desirability of innovative (rather than merely responsive), highly coordinated (rather than fragmented), and long-term policy strategies led their proponents to realize that such rationalizations within the state apparatus were insufficient to improve the reform capacity of the state. They realized that under conditions of party competition and interest group pluralism, such reformist activism would face insurmountable political difficulties: lack of consensus, short-term mobilization, and increased level of conflict (for an English summary of this theoretical and empirical literature, cf. Mayntz and Scharpf, 1975). Strategies that would facilitate the creation of consensus and the absorption of conflict, including institutional devices to secure coordination not only among the various agencies of the state apparatus but also among state and private actors and organizations were increasingly held to be the most crucial prerequisites of active reformism (Hauff and Scharpf, 1975). The need to achieve a “new social order” by “reforming democracy” had already been the substance of a political program by which Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the leader of the last postwar administration without Social Democratic participation, tried to inaugurate a new form of politics for the Federal Republic in May 1965 – one and a half years before he had to quit office as a direct consequence of the first major recession that affected the West German political economy since World War II. This offered a vision of political order under the title of “societal formation” (Formierte Gesellschaft). It was directly deduced from normative social theories of authors such as Eric Voegelin and Goetz Briefs. Basically, the theory consists in a grandiose developmental scheme specifying three stages in the development of nontotalitarian industrial societies. The first of these stages is “capitalism,” characterized by extreme inequalities of wealth and power and the resulting high level of class conflict. The second phase, generally reached by European nations after World War I, is liberal-pluralist democracy, which is basically a transitory stage: It solves the structural problems of the old “capitalist” order by allowing for the development of powerful mass organizations (such as unions and recognized Social Democratic parties) and by providing a mechanism for equalizing power differentials based on economic power. At the same time, however, liberal-pluralist democracy introduces centrifugal tendencies that reach dangerous proportions the more the ongoing process of industrialization transforms the political economy into a highly complex and interdependent whole. The pluralist dissolution of values, disciplines, and traditions – the “end of ideology” – renders this precarious system even more vulnerable. Hence the need for a transition to a third stage: Its rationale is the adaptation of politics to the requirements of the advanced industrial “technostructure” and overcoming the disruptive impact of

The attribution of public status to interest groups 53

liberal-pluralist democracy. Shortsighted, narrow-minded, irresponsible, and illegitimate mass organizations must be curbed. Most important, distributional and social policy demands must be reconciled with the imperatives of economic modernization, growth, and competitiveness.2 This diagnosis leads to the following dilemma: In an advanced industrial economy, interest organizations have the power to interfere with public policy making in highly dysfunctional ways; hence, the need to “keep them out.” At the same time, however, such representative organizations are absolutely indispensable for public policy, because they have a monopoly of information relevant for public policy and, most important, a substantial measure of control over their respective constituencies. Therefore, they must be made integral components of the mechanisms through which public policy is formulated. Their potential positive function is as significant as their potential for obstruction. The trick, from this perspective, is to utilize the first while avoiding exposing public policy to the second. Any conceivable solution to this problem would imply more than what is required to solve the problem of neutrality and the enforcement of rule-of-law norms. In the latter case, the solution would consist in strengthening the demarcation line between private powers and public policy, although leaving the nature of organized interest representation itself unaffected. In the first case, any solution would be insufficient that does not change the internal structure and composition of the system of interest representation so that their indispensable potential for cooperation is maximized, and their potential for the “selfish” and “irresponsible” pursuit of particularistic interests is eliminated. The new political problematique that has occupied the center of the stage since the mid-sixties is characterized by the growing sense of the failure of the purposive-instrumental type of rationality and the increasingly perceived need to “rationalize” the polity in terms of what Anderson calls a new “design.” Because the claims and interests articulated within the framework of liberal-democratic institutions can no longer be reconciled with the basic prerequisites of capitalist stability and growth, these institutions themselves are at issue. The pervasive shift is 2

For a critical analysis of the short-lived “Formierte Gesellschaft” campaign of 1965, see Opitz, 1965. Erhard’s programmatic statement can be found in his speech “Programm für Deutschland,” Protokolle des 13. Bundesparteitages der CDU, Bonn, 1965. Although the concept of “societal formation” has been dropped from the Christian Democratic party program, the idea that the major task required of the party is to implement a “policy of order” (Ordnungs­ politik) for the transition from the pluralist to a postpluralist stage of industrial society, including the developmental scheme already mentioned, certainly has not. Among the most recent documents proving this point, see the two volumes by W. Dettling (ed. 1976). For a lucid analysis of parallel American and British ideas developing in the late fifties, see Draper (1961), who seems to be one of the first authors to apply the term “neo-corporatism.”

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from conflict over group interest to conflict over ground rules, from the definition of claims to the definition of legitimate claimants, from politics to metapolitics. This shift takes place in the conservative as well as in the Social Democratic camp, even though in different variants. The conservatives propose the restoration of “order” and call for the abolition of state interventionism; the Social Democrats understand that reformist interventionism presupposes for its success and continuity new arrangements over orderly cooperation and relatively conflict-free modes of interest representation. Both variants imply changes in the mode of interest representation, new regulations for the conduct of group and class conflict. Both are forced to design these regulations not according to some normative conception of a good and just political order but by pragmatic reference to functional requirements, limits of tolerance, and economic mechanisms. Modern conservatives find themselves forced to acknowledge the irrevocable reality of mass democracy, the welfare state, and collective representation of the working class in wage and other negotiations, although their ideologies of an organicist order or a world of free competition may leave no place for such phenomena. Social Democrats, on the other side, find themselves forced realistically to recognize the non-transformability of essential premises of the capitalist political economy, in spite of the socialist visions of their individual or collective past. On both the conservative and the Social Democratic side, the question is thus raised not so much of the desirable goals and the most effective/efficient-purposive rational courses of action to accomplish them but of the appropriate ground rules, structural arrangements and institutional designs that would be the most appropriate environment of public policy. The policy area of monetary stability is a good case in point: The controversial debate that goes on among policy makers on the left and on the right is no longer about the undesirability of inflation (on which they agree) or about the best state policies to control it (on which the options seem to be exhausted) but on how the relative power position of actors outside the public policy-making system (e. g., unions and highly concentrated industries) can be altered in a way that appears to be more conducive to a lasting success.

4

Instances of institutional design

In the West German case, a partial list of institutional changes and proposals for such changes would include the following items in chronological order. 1) In the early sixties, the programmatic notion of a formierte Gesellschaft was launched by conservative politicians and intellectuals. The term formierte Ge-

The attribution of public status to interest groups 55

sellschaft, as just described, carries the connotation of growth, predictability, and unity. It was used to describe the projected social and economic order to follow the “end of the postwar period” of reconstruction. 2) In 1964, a Council of Economic Advisers (Sachverständigenrat) was instituted which has since reported annually on the course and further prospects of the economy. 3) In 1967, a coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats passed legislation creating the Konzertierte Aktion, a highly informal mode of discussion and negotiation that provides an opportunity for state bureaucrats, employers, unions, and some other interest organizations to exchange views on current economic issues on the basis of policy goals suggested by the government. 4) In the course of the period 1965 to 1969, an explosive growth took place in the frequency with which committees of the Bundestag resorted to parliamentary hearings (Anhörungen). In the same period, consultations between government officials and interest group representatives became established as a routine practice during the preparatory stage of legislation. 5) In 1972, a “code of honor” (Verhaltensregeln) for the members of Parliament was adopted, regulating the extent and manner in which deputies were supposed to disclose their relations to interest groups. 6) At the same time, all interest groups were required to register with the chairman of the Bundestag and to indicate their substantive area of interest and the number of members they represented. 7) In 1971, the Federation of German Unions (DGB) proposed legislation introducing an Economic and Social Council (BWSR) into the constitutional order. This new institution was intended to have far-reaching powers in the legislative process. Its proponents recommended the legislation because it would have the potential of concentrating all major government interest group interaction in one institution, thus making such interaction more visible and transparent. 8) In 1969, after the Social Democratic/Liberal coalition government came into office, various pieces of reform legislation, most notably the Urban Renewal Act (Städtebauförderungsgesetz), assigned a legal status to certain interest groups and prescribed the involvement of such groups in the planning and implementation of policies. Similarly, various Social Democratic proposals for an “active industrial policy” (Strukturpolitik) and “investment steering” (Investi­ tions­lenkung) would create joint decision-making bodies (e. g., “Branchenaus­ schüsse”) composed of delegates of industry, unions, and state agencies and authorized to consider and recommend investment decisions. A similar model of “tripartite” decision making was recently adopted and institutionalized in the area of health policy, in which the problem of the “explosion” of health ser-

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vices costs is now being attacked by state-supervised and state-initiated intergroup negotiations. 9) In 1975, the Christian Democratic party (CDU) proclaimed in its electoral platform that “the democratic state is called upon to establish a framework regulating both the internal organization and the external activities of social groups.” The promise to introduce such a framework was accompanied by complaints over the “irresponsible” behavior of such organizations in the past. The control of their allegedly enormous power and the need for its more balanced use in favor of hitherto unrepresented groups amounts to, according to the CDU platform, a solution of the “Neue Soziale Frage” (“new social question” – “soziale Frage” being the traditional Catholic and liberal term for class conflict). Although this notion of uncontrolled interest group power clearly was aimed at the “irresponsible”, “inflation-causing” behavior of unions, the general thrust of the argument is not too different from a declaration in a Social Democratic policy document (OR 85) adopted in 1975, which promised “to resist vigorously any attempt at group-egotistic blackmail” – an appeal that, among other things, reflected the experience of a paralyzing air traffic control assistants’ strike and several incidents in which employer organizations boycotted vocational training programs. The issue of illegitimate and uncontrolled interest group power was raised by both major parties during the 1976 campaign, in the course of which highly emotional terms such as Unternehmerstaat, Gewerkschaftsstaat, Filzokratie, all of them suggesting particularistic practices of corruption and patronage and illegitimate uses of power, became part of the common political vocabulary. 10) This issue has turned out to be neither superficial nor ephemeral, as can be seen from the continuing (and highly technical) political and academic debate on the desirability and the specific terms of a Verbändegesetz (Association Act), which was proposed by the Christian Democrats with the aim of imposing (cf. Dettling, 1976) a requirement of “common interest orientation” (Gemeinwohlbindung) on interest organizations. It is of some interest to observe that the legal term Gemeinwohlbindung so far has been exclusively used to refer to the use of private property; the extension of this criterion to organizations implies the view that organization today is as much a source of social power as private property has long been recognized to be; hence it needs to be subjected to analogous limitations. The relations between interest organizations and the state, and the restructuring of these relations through political means, have been issues in all these institutional changes and legislative proposals. Diverse as they are in significance and political context, a few generalizations emerge. First, all political parties represented in the

The attribution of public status to interest groups 57

Bundestag have recognized and accepted the problem of state interest group relations. Minor indications of reluctance on the part of the SPD3 notwithstanding, the issue can today be considered a nonpartisan one. Second, such institutionalization, or assignment of political status to interest groups, is always two-sided in its effects.4 Any attribution of status means that, on the one side, groups gain advantages and privileges although, on the other side, they have to accept certain constraints and restrictive obligations. In a typical case, access to government decision-making positions is facilitated through the political recognition of an interest group, but the organization in question becomes subject to more or less formalized obligations, for example, to behave responsibly and predictably and to refrain from any nonnegotiable demands or nonacceptable tactics. Third, none of the changes mentioned or suggested plans for the political reorganization of state interest group relations were inspired by motives foreign to the liberal-pluralist doctrine of representative democracy that today constitutes the creed of political elites of advanced capitalist societies. Such changes are neither proposed by reference to Catholic doctrines or authoritarian images of society as an organically ordered whole nor inspired by Socialist aims of overcoming exploitation and oppression by the introduction of new mechanisms of popular control of political and social power.5 The underlying motives are, rather, of a pragmatic and “functionalist” nature: to facilitate the resolution of distributive 3

The issue of granting (or reducing) political status to organized groups is of course a particularly sensitive one to the SPD. Proposals for an alteration of the political design of liberal democracy are most likely to affect the power position of the trade unions negatively. But friendly and cooperative relations with the unions are traditionally considered a major political asset by Social Democratic and Labor parties. Therefore the only kind of institutional changes to be seriously and openly considered by a Social Democratic administration are those that involve at least apparent status gains for the unions. 4 For an illustration of the two-sided noblesse oblige effects of political status attribution, we might consider the extreme cases. Even in the case where a group is attributed the absolute negative political status of illegality or prohibition, its (at least temporarily effective) gains resulting therefrom consist in the solidarity and support obtained from other groups and organizations as well as in new tactical opportunities resulting from “going underground.” This consequence, incidentally, is reflected in the usual second thoughts reactionary regimes are having regarding their own calls for “outlawing” Communist parties. Inversely, even the attribution of the most privileged political status to interest groups does regularly force them to at least use more moderate and more broadly acceptable language in stating and pursuing their interests. 5 Many of the recent students of neo-corporatist phenomena and developments seem to agree on the point that the corporatist status of interest organizations is “new” because of the “nonideological” nature of the legitimations offered to justify such transformations. Moreover, as Harris has demonstrated for the British case, the incorporation of interest groups into the state apparatus and the constitutional reliance on the principle of “functional” – rather than “territorial” – representation has always been among the constitutional aims of both Social-

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conflict, to obtain more reliable and predictive knowledge needed by policy makers, to relieve the state bureaucracy from the veto power of shortsighted interest groups, to combat inflation, recession, and fiscal crisis more effectively, and so forth. Such “nonideological”, highly pragmatic reasoning on which programs for interest group institutionalization are based is both the strength and weakness of such programs. It is a source of strength because no principled political opposition is likely to be raised against proposals for more interest group institutionalization. At the same time, it is a source of weakness because no one is able to justify and legitimate – other than on an ad hoc basis – what groups are for what reasons entitled to what kind of status. As Anderson observes, “It is extremely hard in democratic theory to find grounds for investing the interests of capital and labor [or, for that matter, any other group] with the authority to make what are in effect public decisions. This is the flaw in any corporate theory of representation.” (Anderson, 1977: 14) Fourth, regardless of whether institutionalization operates primarily through the attribution of privilege or the imposition of constraints (the two being, in effect, two sides of the same coin), we can conveniently categorize instances of institutionalization as belonging to one of three political approaches: Either the mode of interest representation vis-à-vis legislation (sometimes including participation in the administration and interpretation of legal norms in the court system) or the role of interest groups in policy implementation or the process of interest group organization itself (i. e., the relation between the organization and its members) is regulated.

5

Neo-corporatism – the dependent variable

In recent contributions by Anderson, Ionescu, Lehmbruch, Panitch, Ruin, Schmitter, Winkler, and others, the term corporatism (sometimes used in conjunction with qualifiers such as neo, liberal, or societal) has been used as an analytical concept to describe global changes in the political structure of advanced capitalist societies. Corporatism is a concept that does not describe a situation, but rather an “axis” of development. In other words, political systems can be more or less corporatist, more or less advanced in the process of corporatization, depending on the extent to which public status is attributed to organized interest groups. This process is relatively advanced when many interest groups have a publicly attributed status in all or most of the relevant dimensions of institutionalization, and it is ist and conservative movements. What is new about neo-corporatism is its “nonideological” origin and its peaceful coexistence with parliamentary doctrines and practices.

The attribution of public status to interest groups 59

relatively undeveloped where none or only few groups are institutionally defined in only a few of the dimensions. Empirically, approximation to the “ideal type” of corporatism thus depends on the number of groups affected and the number of dimensions in which they are affected. To begin with the latter, corporatization increases with: 1) The extent to which the resources of an interest organization are supplied by the state. This can take the form of direct subsidies or tax exemptions, forced membership, privileged access to state-controlled mass communication, and so forth. 2) The extent to which the range of representation is defined through political decision. Examples include a public definition of the range of substantive areas in which an interest organization may operate and/or of the potential membership (e. g., by number, by region, by individual position and status, etc.). 3) The extent to which internal relations between rank-and-file members and executive members of the organization are regulated. 4) The extent to which interest organizations are licensed, recognized, and invited to assume, together with a specified set of other participants, a role in legislation, the judicial system, policy planning, and implementation, or even are granted the right of Selbstverwaltung (self-administration). We can label these four dimensions of the concept of corporatism resource status, representation status, organization status, and procedural status. In all cases, by status we mean the specifically attributed formal status of a group (as opposed to relations of informal cooperation between political and other segments of the elite, clientilistic relations, and status resulting from ad hoc tactical considerations of various groups or branches of the state apparatus); formal status is based on legal statute and formally adopted procedural rules that give the interest group some claim on a specific status. In other words, a group that has status in any of the four dimensions ceases to be exclusively determined in its actions and accomplishments by the interests, ideologies, need perceptions, and so forth of its members, plus the relative strength it enjoys in relation to other groups with whom it is engaged in competition or alliance. In pluralist political theory, only those two factors determine behavioral outputs. Consequently, pluralist theory is rendered obsolete by the emergence in the real world of the third of those three factors that we have distinguished in the first section of this paper, namely, specific political status. The attribution of positive political status to, for example, an organization of political refugees, a sports association, or an association of automobilists results directly in an incomplete determination of the organization’s behavior by constituent members (because now the organization has resources to spend that do not

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flow from the willingness of members to contribute to a common objective; it has commitments to honor that are the price for political subsidy and hence are irreducible to the membership level); nor can the manifest behavior be explained by reference to the relative strength of conflicting groups or allies. Positive political status allows an organization to enjoy partial immunity from its members as well as from other organizations. Not all instances of corporatization imply, however, the attribution of positive status. Equally common is the attribution of negative status as part of the dynamics that occur along the corporatism axis. For instance, subsidies may be taken away from an interest group; its representational status may be reduced by a restrictive redefinition of the substantive areas in which organizational activities are allowed to take place; and organization rules may be altered so as to make the achievement of internal consensus more complicated and time consuming. Also, corporatist institutionalization does not mean that, in reference to one particular interest organization, all status definitions must be either in the negative or the positive direction. We frequently find “mixed cases” in which, as a consequence of its institutionalization, an organization gains in procedural status but loses in resource status, or gains in resource status but loses in representation status, and so forth. The second major component of the corporatism concept refers to groups that are affected by status attribution. 1) “Market” participants: This category includes all organized collectivities representing the supply or demand sides of either labor markets or goods and services markets. Here we find unions and employer organizations, investors, and consumers (as organized by branch of industry, region, size of firm, etc.). The chief reason they associate is to influence state policies that bear on the relative market position of their members. These organized collectivities are able to influence the state by directly making demands on policy makers, and their actions may have destabilizing effects on the social and political order. And although their influence varies greatly according to their class position, they are able to affect state policy making significantly – either by demands, by negative sanctions, or by side effects of their operation that are more or less un­intended, such as inflation, but that nonetheless have direct implications for the stability of the social and political order. 2) “Policy takers”: This is another category of interest groups in addition to organized collectivities of market participants, whose members are directly affected by state policies. They are participants in a political “market” in which taxation, subsidies, transfer payments, group privileges, and so forth are exchanged for political support and opposition. Coalitions of urban and regional governments are the most obvious and probably the most significant example

The attribution of public status to interest groups 61

of this category vis-à-vis the central state. Other examples are associations of taxpayers, welfare recipients, students, public hospitals, and automobile associations. The common denominator of all these groups is that they are affected by policy decisions made on the level of the central state. This distinction between organized interest groups that are in fact class organizations (at least to the extent that they comprise either the supply or the demand side of the labor market) or organizations of class fractions, on the one side, and organized interest groups representing collectivities that are specifically affected by state policies, on the other, raises a serious problem, which is brought up again and again in the corporatism literature.6 The dilemma is this: either to transcend the limitations of the pluralism paradigm and base the analysis on categories of class and class conflict or to maintain the basic idea of pluralism, namely, the notion of structural differentiation of industrial society and the mechanism of collective action that leads to a multiplicity of interest organizations, which, increasing state intervention stimulates. The first interpretation of corporatism has the advantage of taking into account the aspect of repressive discipline imposed by corporatist arrangements specifically on the unions, suggesting that such arrangements can primarily be understood as the outcome of a ruling class strategy to co-opt, integrate, and discipline working-class organizations and to create conditions that typically lead to a high degree of internal bureaucratization and hence to the containment of economic and political struggles. The shortcoming of this interpretation lies in its failure to come to grips with the phenomenon of corporatization of nonclass organizations (e. g., taxpayers, students, city governments, doctors, etc.), to which we have referred as “policy takers.” The alternative conceptual framework, however, is no less deficient. Although recognizing that corporatization affects groups far beyond the limits of class organizations, it fails to account for the impact of corporatist arrangements on the terms and institutional channels of class conflict and for the fact that such ar6 For instance, Panitch, arguing from a class theoretical perspective, insists in his discussion of corporatism that it is a political form that “is not so general as to encompass … any interest-group state relation,” but that is rather specific to the “associations of business and labor” (Panitch, 1978: 2, 3). He then ends by narrowing the concept of corporatism by describing it as “a political form designed to integrate the organized working class in the capitalist state” (Panitch, 1978: 44). Similarly, Bob Jessop argues that “it is the involvement of organized labor that is distinctive about corporatism” (Jessop, 1978: 15). In sharp contrast and not without considerable plausibility, Schmitter develops the concept of corporatism in view “of highly organized and specialized representatives of class, sectoral, regional, sexual and generational interests,” which form “complexes of specialized associations often bypassing, if not boycotting, more traditional and more general partisan and legislative structures of articulation and aggregation” (1977: 7 – ​8).

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rangements are typically advocated and promoted where the economic and political power of working-class organizations has grown beyond what the ruling class is willing to accept in the interest of continued and balanced capitalist accumulation. The phenomenon of corporatist developments thus seems, in view of this theoretical dilemma, to require a dual or combined explanation that relies exclusively neither on the social class nor on the pluralist group paradigm. In such an explanation the state would pursue quite different objectives when granting the right to functional representation to unions, on the one hand, and to any “pluralist” interest group (e. g., doctors) on the other. We hypothesize that despite apparent similarity in the two cases, the underlying function that corporatization serves in the two cases is quite different. For working-class organizations, what is to be achieved is restraint, discipline, responsibility, and the greater predictability of conflict behavior that results from bureaucratization. In the case of ordinary pluralist interest groups, which are granted a public law status and the right to “self-administration,” the dominant motive is the delegation, devolution, and transfer of political issues and demands into an arena in which they do not directly affect the stability of (central) government and the cohesion of its supporting party or party coalition but, on the contrary, help to reduce “overloaded” agenda. To be sure, every instance of the institutionalization of functional representation involves an exchange: The organized group gives something up and gains something in return. However, the political reason for instituting such arrangements may well be to reduce power in one case (i. e., loss of power in the case of working-class organizations) and, in the next one, to grant autonomy (i. e., the right to “self-government” or privileged access to the institutions of government granted to pluralist groups for the sake of devolution). We would expect, then, that corporatization means quite different “terms of trade” for the different collectivities affected by it and that the trade-off of losses and gains differs depending on whether “restraint” or “delegation” is the prime motive. This two-sidedness of corporatism is essential: It implies restrictions imposed on the power base of groups as well as a gain in autonomy. It means “etatisation” of group politics in one case and “contracting out” of state power to private groups in another case. The question is what the balance of losses and gains, or discipline and autonomy, looks like in the case of particular groups and class organizations. Before we turn to this question, we have to look into the thorny problem of a functional explanation of the rise of corporatist arrangements. Only after we understand the functions performed and the specific benefits achieved by interest group institutionalization can we explain why it is precisely corporatism – and not, say, the socialization of the means of production, the restoration of market forces uninhibited by monopolization and state intervention, or

The attribution of public status to interest groups 63

other solutions – that seems to be so attractive as a solution to the problems just mentioned in advanced capitalist economic and political systems. In the next section I shall try to give two tentative answers to why it is precisely corporatism that becomes broadly considered and accepted as an effective and efficient solution to problems that we typically find in these systems. One answer deals with political institutions of the liberal democratic state, the other with class forces and their relative social power. In the final section of this chapter I shall explore the possibility that corporatism, in spite of its apparent virtues as a solution to some systemic problems of the political economy, turns out to be a mixed blessing, which may not only heal major institutional defects but also generates new patterns of political conflict. In a developed corporatist system, a second circuit is added to the machinery of the democratic representative polity. The institutional order of which periodic elections, political parties, and parliamentary government are the main elements is supplemented by a political arrangement consisting of major organized interest groups, their relative procedural status, and bodies of consultation and reconciliation. The characteristic feature of modern corporatism, in contrast to authoritarian models of corporatism (cf. Mayer-Tasch, 1971), is the coexistence of the two circuits with only a limited substitution of functional for territorial representation. The advantage of corporatist modes of interest representation over democratic representative ones resides in the potential of the former for depoliticizing conflict, that is, in restricting both the scope of the participants in conflict and the scope of strategies and tactics that are permitted in the pursuit of conflicting interests. The explanation of such a shift would be that more traditional arrangements generate more conflict than can be processed. Traditional channels of the democratic policy lead to “overparticipation” or an “overload” of unresolved issues. The major reason for the attractiveness of corporatist rearrangements of political decision making is its presumably greater capacity to deal with conflict. In order to support this argument, it is essential to demonstrate that the hypothesized “need” for depoliticization has actually become manifest in the political institutions of the democratic representative “circuit.” The following sketchy observations on the West German political system may serve to make it plausible that such a need exists. These observations concentrate (1) on the functions performed by political parties and (2) on dilemmas of bureaucratic policy making and policy implementation. Political parties Political parties, according to democratic representative theory, are to perform the dual function of aggregating votes, thereby providing the major channel for political participation to citizens, and designing comprehensive programmatic policy

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alternatives to be executed once the party has achieved sufficient electoral success to occupy government positions. There is considerable agreement among political scientists that parties today are much more successful in performing the first function – attracting voter support – than the second function – designing coherent policy alternatives. This is certainly true in the West German case. Whereas the voters vote for political parties, or even the government personnel representing political parties, political parties seem no longer to be the main authors of programmatic policy decisions. Such policy decisions (e. g., on tax reform, nuclear energy, economic policies, education reform, etc.) tend to result not from intraparty deliberations and consensus building but, rather, from interparty negotiations involving the parties in coalition.7 Or else the proposals emerge from and are advocated by clearly identifiable segments, wings, and factions within the party and fail to get approval of the party as a whole. In fact, there is presently not one major issue of domestic policy making on which one party opposes another party more strongly than factions oppose each other within one and the same party. It is hardly an exaggerated to argue that the party as a political institution has ceased to perform the function of formulating and securing agreement on programmatic policy guidelines. More often than not, such decisions emerge from levels either superior (coalition government) or inferior (faction) to the party level.8 This condition might well be explained as the paradoxical effect of the secular transformation of “class parties” into “mass integration parties” (Volksparteien). The more diffuse and heterogeneous the electoral basis of a party, and the more it attenuates its theoretical and ideological identity in order to become acceptable to as many groups and strata within the electorate as possible, the less it can decide on clearcut policy options and alternatives. The erosion of the identity of political parties is also reflected in the changes in the organizational structure of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats that result from an increase in the strength of interest group wings and fractions within parties. Both the Social Committees (Sozialausschüsse) and the Economic Council (Wirtschaftsrat) of the CDU, as well as the Committee for Labor Questions (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Arbeitnehmerfragen) and the Young Socialists (Jungsozialisten) within the SPD, have become major centers of intraparty conflict (as well as channels for intraparty political careers). 7 8

Sometimes they even appear to be the outcome of what has been called a latent all-party coalition, to which German politicians often appeal by the standard phrase “solidarity of all democrats” (Solidarität aller Demokraten). One could even argue that programmatic alternatives and innovations do increasingly originate from sources outside the formally constituted national political system. Such sources include, in the West German case, the Protestant church, organized science, and extraparliamentary single-issue movements; also the imitation of foreign examples appears often to play an important innovative function.

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The dissolution of party identities, originally hailed as a healthy sign of the “end of ideology” and the victory of the “catch-all-party” model, seems to have resulted in the growing inability of political parties to perform a major function. The burden of building a programmatic consensus on policies is shifted to the level of coalition governments. This condition of often unresolvable intraparty conflict, plus the concomitant instability of governing party coalitions, generates the need for simpler, more reliable and predictable ways of reaching policy agreements. Governments depend on more direct supportive relations to major organized interests, and thus supplementary corporatist relations (as well as more plebiscitarian practices of government conduct) are the solution to a problem emerging from the disorganization of political parties. Somewhat contrary to Lehmbruch’s notion of an alternative mode of consensus building being “increasingly required for economic steering,” I would argue that it is not any specific characteristic of the policy area in question (i. e., economic steering) that gives rise to corporatist structures but the failure of political parties to perform as agents of the “formation of political will of the people” (a task that the West German Constitution assigns to political parties) and the “functional gap in consensus building” that results. Bureaucratic policy making and policy implementation There is still another gap that corporatist modes of interest representation are more likely to close than any other political arrangement. This gap becomes visible when we look at the policy “techniques” through which a government can control certain critical variables in its environment, that is, national and international society. To summarize what I have elaborated elsewhere (Offe, 1975: Chap. 3), there are three basic alternatives, or policy methods, that can be applied to attain such control, and they appear to be used in a certain sequence and cumulatively, due to inherent limitations. The first of these methods of political control is the application of positive and/or negative incentives that are intended to modify courses of action citizens choose to follow. Hypothetical consequences (monetary rewards, punishment, etc.) are attached to specified kinds of action or inaction, so as to induce individual actors to produce the desired aggregate outcome. The limitation of this method of political control becomes manifest whenever actors do not respond to such incentives, especially if there are actors who are strategically placed to ignore incentives; an example of the latter occurs when a business firm does not react positively to tax exemptions and other benefits and when the failure to react is due to the expectation that a higher dose of incentives will, as a consequence, be offered by government. Sooner or later the exclusive use of this method becomes too costly in fiscal terms (or otherwise impractical as far as detailed surveillance of behavior and administration of sanctions are concerned).

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The additional method of political control that is likely to be put into practice then is transformation of the production and distribution of certain goods and services into “public goods,” increasing state spending for investment and consumption infrastructure, nationalization of certain vital industries, and so forth. The underlying theory in this second method of political control is that a framework of conditions is created that individual actors cannot escape even if they want to. Reliance on this method of political control, however, eventually stirs up significant political opposition to the regulations involved in producing and distributing these goods and services publicly and to the taxes required to finance them, which are interferences with individual freedom of choice and action. The objection is raised that such politically supplied goods and services cannot meet standards of efficiency and effectiveness. Active reformist policies of capitalist states have always encountered such resistance – be it in the area of welfare policies, socialized medicine, nationalized industries, education policies, and so forth. The impasse of political techniques that are politically feasible but economically ineffective (namely, control by parametric incentives) and political techniques that might achieve the desired ends but are uncertain in their effectiveness and impractical because of political resistance (namely, the state production and distribution of “public goods”) constitutes a favorable condition for corporatist rearrangements of the political structure. This third political technique rests on the premise that (1) the return to purely parametrical types of control is not tolerable and (2) the government cannot possibly acquire sufficient directive capacity to enable it to design and implement policies over the political resistance that interventionist programs are especially likely to provoke. What remains is the political method of absorbing potentially obstructive political resistance by granting “voice” options to those who are, due to the use of the second method, deprived of some of their “exit” options in order to prevent them from exerting their veto power on policies. The price for cooperation is to delegate parts of the policy-making power to those who might object to more “etatist” approaches to the solution of social and economic problems. Therefore, procedural status is attributed to groups whose resistance could become critical to the implementation of policies. In the areas of economic, labor market, education, and social policies the establishment of tripartite bodies (consisting of labor, capital, and state representatives) has become a widely used instrument of policy making. It leaves an often-considerable range of discretion about public policy to intergroup negotiations. The resort to the method of tripartism suggests itself, as many observers have noted, because of its anticipated conflict-reducing effects. This effect can be the combined outcome of three separable mechanisms. First, the formal admission of corporate groups to the process of public policy formation favors the production of decisions that minimize the probability that social power will be used in order to

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obstruct or resist public policy, because the actual power of labor and capital, respectively, are already “registered” and taken into account in the process of its formation. Second, to the extent that interest organizations do control the attitudes and behavior of their members (which is, as we shall see, more likely in the case of labor than in that of business organizations), this organizational discipline can be used to prevent opposition from groups within the organization’s membership. In this way the authority of the group’s leadership is, so to speak, added to that of the state. Thus, it functions as a mechanism of extended governmental control. Third, in case a policy meets or creates conflict and opposition, in spite of these safety mechanisms, the government alone is not to blame: All the actors that have participated in the process of making the decision in question would be held responsible. This makes such opposition less likely than otherwise, for any “relevant” opposing group would have to attack not only the government but also its own leadership. Combined, these three mechanisms can be expected to reduce the likelihood and intensity of conflict over public policy, and thus to depoliticize public life. The fact that such corporatist policy-making bodies often provide equal rights and equal numbers of representatives to labor and capital does not contradict the conclusion that a partial privatization of political power takes place. For in these bodies, the use of political power becomes a group privilege (1) as far as common interests of all participating groups are concerned, which may well differ from a politically defined “common interest” and (2) as far as equal votes of labor and capital by no means balance differences of market power that prevail, due to structural as well as conjunctural reasons, between the demand and supply sides of the labor market. As soon as we have left the realm of those political institutions for which democratic representative political theory can provide legitimation (as we certainly have if we consider, say, the tripartite managing board of the West German labor market agency [Verwaltungsrat der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit]), a 50 : 50 proportion of votes for labor and capital is by no means more justifiable than is either 10 : 90 or 90 : 10. The only virtue of the 50 : 50 formula is that of creating the appearance that things are open and not decided in advance on the level of procedural rules, thereby relieving the state that has instituted such “balance” from objections of either of the two sides. To summarize the argument, corporatist structures are the solution to situations in which parametrical methods of political control have become insufficient for economic reasons and interventionist methods have become impractical for political ones. In such situations, parademocratic political structures serve to contain and depoliticize conflict in a fragile reconciliation of the functionally required and the politically feasible.

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Differential impact of corporatization on the organizations of labor and capital

Thus far, the analysis has led us to the identification of two “gaps” or instances of malfunctioning of the institutions of democratic representative government, which are serious enough to explain the resort to corporatist political structures: One is the erosion of party identities, the other is the typical impasse in bureaucratic design and implementation of policies. Explaining corporatist tendencies from institutional defects, however, is at best an intermediary step toward a theory of corporatism. It raises the questions: (1) Why do political parties, at least in the West German case, seem increasingly unable to catalyze the “political will of the people” ? and (2) Why, in turn, has bureaucratic policy-making capacity declined ? Instead of speculating about causes of political decay, I prefer, rather, to explore some of the consequences of corporatist changes in the political structure. Here my argument will be that corporatist transformation not only compensates for the functional deficiencies of democratic institutions by depoliticizing conflict in terms of groups, issues, and tactics but also that it does so in an asymmetrical way. First, I want to demonstrate that organizations of labor and capital, although affected by exactly the same forms of institutionalization (i. e., attribution of political status, which provides them with the license to participate directly and jointly in the process of policy formation), are inhibited to a greatly differing extent in their freedom to pursue their respective interests, and, second, I argue that current proposals for interest group institutionalization are specifically designed so as to impose much more far-reaching restrictions on labor than on capital. The social power of both capital and labor rests on ultimate sanctions of economic obstruction or withdrawal. Capital can threaten to discontinue its purchases of capital goods and labor power; and labor, to withhold labor power. The power of economic obstruction distinguishes labor and capital from traditional middle-class interests and interest groups, such as farmers and shopkeepers. Because very often there are too many of them in the first place, withdrawal of their contributions to the economic process would not help to improve their economic situation but would simply accelerate an economic process against which members of the traditional middle class indeed are trying to defend themselves. It is for this economic reason that if the traditional middle class is to win at all, it must withdraw political resources (votes) or become politically active (as in demonstrations, etc.), which is why the old middle class defies definition and analysis in economic terms. Although the social power of both labor and capital rests on the possibility of withdrawing something, their organizations play a different role in mobilizing

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these sanctions. Whereas capital can bring its obstructive power to bear even if it is not organized as an interest group, the withdrawal of labor power can function as an instrument of power only if it is practiced collectively, that is, if it is organized in at least a rudimentary way. If a firm decides not to invest and/or not to employ workers, its decision is made autonomously on the level of the individual accumulating unit and in accordance with calculations of individual profitability. If workers decide to strike, they need some mechanism of aggregation and coordination; individual attempts to exercise their “negative” market power would be, in all but the most exceptional cases, negligible in effect and therefore counterproductive from the viewpoint of the individual actor. Moreover, workers’ interests are normally divided not only between different strata and segments of the working class but, as it were, within the individual worker. In contrast to business firms, workers do not have an unequivocal standard of “rationality” by which they can “optimize” among conflicting ends. Workers are always simultaneously interested in wages, continuity of employment, and working conditions. As long as they live in capitalist market societies according to the rules of which labor is treated as if it were a commodity, those three ends or interests remain to some extent mutually exclusive. The “optimal” mix of those conflicting ends can’t be calculated by individuals but only collectively by an organization. Organization thus provides both the quantitative aggregation of the means of power and the qualitative definition of the ends to which power is to be applied. This dual role is reflected in the importance working-class organizations have always attributed to such non-individualistic principles as “solidarity” and “discipline.” In other words, workers’ organizations – in contrast to business organizations – are effective only to the extent that they manage to suspend partially the ties of their members to the environment of individualistic monetary incentives. Neither of these principles is of major significance in the internal operation of employers’ and investors’ associations. Such organizations do not generate power that does not already exist, nor do they formulate ends that do not derive directly from the ends that are already defined and consciously pursued at the level of the individual member firms. What the organization does is provide services to member firms (which in this way may achieve a substantial cost reduction relative to a situation in which they would have to provide such services themselves) and to formulate and defend in the political arena those individual interests (relating to taxes, tariffs, regulation of industrial relations, etc.) that are common to all or most member firms. In contrast to unions, employers and investors associations do not create power and definitions of interest as the result of an organized process of mobilization and internal discourse among members; they merely state power positions that are already established and interest definitions that are already de-

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cided on.9 Interest organization is thus much more essential to the defense and promotion of labor interests than to capital interests, because capital, mergers, monopolies, cartels, and so forth are the decisive instruments of enhancing social power. Conversely, restrictive political regulation of the forms of association and organizational activities must have a stronger impact on labor organizations than on employers’/investors’ organizations. Given that the power of labor and capital resides in their potential for obstruction, and given the unfeasibility of eliminating the power of either by political means, interest organizations must be subjected to constitutional forms and responsibility, so the argument runs (cf. Böckenförde, 1976: 475; Teubner, 1977). To the extent that such institutionalization is inspired by principles of democratic representation and aims at democratizing relations between the organization and its individual members, the group’s participation in public policy making will gain in legitimacy. It is obvious, however, that internal democratization cannot provide the same measure of legitimacy to interest organizations as it is able to provide, according to democratic representative theory, to governments, because it is not the entire people but functionally defined organization members who “legitimize” organization policies. Moreover, as becomes evident from a recent legislative proposal written by a committee of the Liberal party (FDP), the principle of internal “democratization” has very different meanings for labor and capital. Its (latent) function is not to confer greater legitimacy on corporatist elements within the political structure but to make it more difficult for labor in particular to mobilize power through organization. Although the proposal never specifically mentions unions but is rather intended to apply to “all politically significant associations,” the organizational rules it imposes on such organizations would have quite selective impacts for organizations defending and promoting workers’ interests as a result of the differences between labor and capital previously discussed. For instance, section 6 of the proposed law requires all interest organizations to “limit clearly” in their statutes those interests on which the organization wishes to represent its members. Because capital organizations are generally not instrumental in articulating those interests but simply in stating and transmitting them, it is much easier for them to comply with this specific requirement than it is for labor organizations, whose first task is to formulate a unified interest, the specifics of which cannot be stated in advance. If a union were forced to do so, this would limit its range of legitimate issues and activities – including those that might well be considered to bear on the defense of workers’ interests. Similarly, the absence of a “calculus of optimiza9

For similar arguments emphasizing the different nature of labor and capital interest organizations, cf. Preuss (1969: 170 ff.) and Ehrlich (1966: 272).

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tion” in the case of unions that could be used to reconcile conflicting goals makes intra- or interorganizational competition, disunity, and rivalry much more likely in labor unions than in business organizations. Here the question is to what extent unions achieve, in spite of such divisions, some measure of unity. Such unity is less likely to be achieved if the law prescribes the extensive protection of minorities (section 14), if it guarantees to nonmembers a legal claim to membership, taking partially away from the organization the right to deny admission (section 10), if it punishes acts of an interest organization designed “to discriminate against competing interest organizations” (section 22), if it requires state agencies to “give equal treatment to competing organizations with parallel goals” and to “maintain pluralism” among them (sections 4, 23), and finally if it entitles members to sue organizations in court for “partisan one-sidedness in representation or information of members” (section 25). Although these rules are meant to apply equally to labor and capital organizations, their impact will be highly asymmetrical, causing increased divisions and fragmentation only within the former.10 Other proposals, too, for interest group institutionalization are quite explicit about the aim of taming “radical” and “irresponsible” inclinations within organizations to which political status is attributed, especially unions. Yet another reason for the class bias of corporatist interest group institutionalization must be discussed. We have argued before that organization and leadership are of particular importance to the defense and promotion of working-class interests because they provide the only means of uniting and reconciling the social power of labor that otherwise would remain atomized in means and fragmented in ends. If this is true, any constraints imposed on the leadership and the forms in which organizational activities are conducted will have direct consequences for the type of demands that are being made as well as the intensity and unity by which they can be supported. Control of institutional form means at least partial control of political content and demands – in the case of labor, but not in the case of capital. Contrary to labor unions, capital organizations do not have any substantial control over the actions that their members choose to pursue. The attribution of political status to employers’/investors’ groups therefore does not justify any expectation that the behavior of member units of such organizations will thereafter be under any greater political control than before such status was attributed. The traffic runs in one direction, because the viewpoint of organized capital can be transmitted to the political system but the spokesmen of these groups can make no 10 For the more limited argument that politically imposed “democratization” may well be considered as being contrary to the interests of group members, see Foehr (1976: 50) and Mueller (1977: 40). Further proposals for democratizing internal structures of interest groups are summarized in Teubner (1977: 24 – ​5).

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binding commitments11 and seem to have no more than a highly informal and unreliable influence on the behavior of their member units. In contrast, institutionalization in the case of unions means an exchange transaction in which cooperation is traded for formal participation in policy decision or moderation is achieved as a consequence of imposed “democratic” organization rules. No such “return” can be safely expected from government interaction with investor interest groups. Paradoxically, the political power of investors depends to some extent on the condition of powerlessness of their interest organizations, which have, neither de lege nor de facto, more than marginal control over members’ investment decisions. What the government can do, then, in order to secure the willingness of investors to cooperate, is to design policies that are most conducive to profits – which remain the only channel by which investors are to be “controlled” – and win the support of organized labor for such policies (cf. Böckenförde, 1976: 480, 483). Only with this important qualification can we speak of corporatism as implying a “shift from a supportive to a directive role for the state in the economy” (Winkler, 1976: 103).

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Alternative patterns of political conflict

In what direction and within which limits will corporatist changes in political structure affect the intensity of social and political conflict and its content ? In order to explore these interconnections, I shall sketch three alternative cases, one stable and two unstable. Stable corporatism Stable corporatism is a condition in which corporatist political structures succeed in providing an interest group consensus unchallenged by radical or “immoderate” demands or tactics of conflict. The viability of this solution depends on how the political system manages to deal with the basic theoretical (as well as highly practical) deficiency of corporatist arrangements, namely, that no legitimizing principle can be provided for this particular fusion of private power and political authority. Why should these interest groups, in particular, be admitted to policy-making positions (instead of other groups) ? Why should they be licensed to decide on these issues (as opposed to any wider or narrower agenda) ? Or why 11 Knowing that they are not binding for their constituencies anyway, employers’ and investors’ organizations can – and frequently do – make public commitments of the most popular sort. For interesting historical evidence supporting the argument (1) that big industry does not really need interest organizations in order to be politically successful and (2) that their interest organizations are unable to impose a binding discipline on employers and investors, see Abromeit (1977).

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should they follow these (rather than any other) procedural rules ? Answers to these kinds of questions are, if given at all, at best pragmatic and hence debatable. Even if questions of justification of a particular institutional arrangement are usually of concern mainly to intellectuals, and of little concern to most people most of the time, will this indifference continue when significant material advantages are at issue ? The ongoing debate on industrial codetermination as well as on macroand sectoral codetermination in West Germany demonstrates that there are hardly any generally agreed-on principles about which group deserves what political status. Consequently, neither a “solution” nor the programmatic acceptance of given routines is in sight; but continued conflict is more probable. At the very least, corporatism, in order to be stable, must not only continually generate consensus; it must first of all presuppose consensus, that is, a solid and undisputed acceptance of a certain mode of interest representation and accommodation. This requires, first, a certain tradition and organization of labor unions, which results in their willingness to accept the rules of “social partnership” (Sozialpartnerschaft), so “countries with a conflict oriented labor movement are not well suited for liberal corporatism” (Lehmbruch, 1977: 115). Apart from political traditions of the national working class, the attitude of “social partnership” seems to be reinforced by the organizational doctrine of a “unitary” union (Einheitsgewerkschaft), as opposed to organization by partisan affiliation or organization by trade; this type of organization is favorable to the maintenance of a highly “cooperative” attitude, because West German “unitary” unions are quite fragmented internally but lack the centralized political mechanisms to resolve their internal factional disputes (cf. Bergmann et al., 1975; Böckenförde, 1976: 483). Second, this condition of undisputed acceptance can be maintained if those oppositional forces that are unwilling to comply with the rules of corporatist political structures are deprived of some of their political and civil rights. Finally, corporatist arrangements could win de facto acceptance if the goals of prosperity and growth are accomplished to an extent that makes the quest for – and the conflict over – principles legitimizing such arrangements irrelevant. Although economic crisis, as Winkler maintains, is a precipitating factor in corporatist arrangements, it seems unlikely that prosperity will resolve or even obscure the issue of legitimacy. Without engaging in social prophecy, all we can say is that if corporatist political structures develop and stabilize, this most probably will be due to specific national traditions and forms of organization of the labor movement and/or to a high level of political repression and/or to a condition of uninterrupted economic prosperity.

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Increase in noninstitutional political conflict The standard liberal warning against corporatist arrangements (or at least their extension) is that subjecting interest groups to overly rigid status obligations might reduce their “integrating capacity” and hence undermine their ability to influence and discipline rank-and-file members, who would rather engage in unconventional and unpredictable modes of conflict (cf. Scharpf 1978: 37). This argument clearly focuses primarily on the unions because, as we have seen, other interest organizations do not have any significant measure of control or influence over their constituencies. A wave of unexpected unofficial strikes that broke out in Germany in September 1969 is often cited as evidence to support this claim. These strikes were disapproved of by unions and partly directed against union leadership. Another recent phenomenon that is often interpreted as indicative of serious deficiencies in the “integrating power” of interest groups (and political parties) is a dramatic increase of militant citizen groups and single-purpose movements focusing on urban, environmental, educational, and other issues (Bürgerinitiativen) and occasionally using violent tactics. Thus, the second scenario would be one of polarization between highly institutionalized modes of representation of “core” interests and highly amorphous social movements of “marginal” segments of the social structure. This pattern of conflict appears most likely to emerge where core interests are not only highly institutionalized but also have interacted in a way that suggests the disappearance of conflict and outright class collaboration. In such situations, the archetypal image of the “traitor” tends to be projected on unions, Social Democratic and Communist parties, or parliamentary government as such. This image in turn provides justification for focusing on particularistic identities and causes as being the only thing left that is worth struggling for. For instance, there has hardly ever been a more sudden increase in noninstitutional political conflict in postwar Germany than in December 1966, when the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats formed a “grand coalition” government. The current large antinuclear energy movement in West Germany received broad support when cases of collaboration between union officials and nuclear energy industry bordering on corruption became public. Two important consequences follow from the polarization between institutional and noninstitutional conflict. The first is that such movements may well be able to undermine the feeble legitimacy of political institutions, to disseminate feelings of suspicion and cynicism, and sometimes even to interfere with the functioning of political institutions. The second is that such “marginal” militancy, without any tradition, theoretical foundations, or organizations, will be unable to establish the coherence and continuity that would be needed in order to create a serious alternative to what it perceives as the solid alliance in power of the corrup-

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tor and the corrupted. Taken together, these two aspects suggest the scenario of a standoff confrontation, unproductive of major social changes except for an escalation of repression and violence. Balancing the class bias of corporatism This third scenario includes developments that result from the two unresolved tensions inherent in any corporatist system. One, as we have seen, is the class bias of corporatist arrangements, the depoliticizing effect of which favors capital organizations and discriminates against labor organizations. The other inherent tension is the polarizing effect that leads to a joint increase of both institutionalization of conflict and noninstitutional conflict. These tensions could precipitate a process in which, in order to maintain the loyalty and allegiance of their rank-and-file members, union leaders would insist on demands and strive for accomplishments that are impossible to achieve unless the inherent bias of corporatism is overcome. This would require equalizing the participatory status of labor and capital within the framework of economic policymaking institutions so as to make agreements binding on investors to the same extent as they already have been accepted as binding by unions in the past. More specifically, it would mean that economic programs on which agreement has been achieved in tripartite policy-making bodies can be put into effect irrespective of whether or not investors, who are represented at the bargaining table by their respective interest organization, find it individually profitable to comply with such programs. This, of course, would imply doing away with a key element of the property right of investors, namely, the right not to invest, which is the source of the social power of private capital. Because unions, by accepting the status obligations assigned to them and by participating in tripartite policy making, do in fact give up some of the right to struggle more militantly for more far-reaching demands, an analogous “sacrifice” of employers’/investors’ interest groups could hardly be considered disproportionate. It would, however, shake the economic system at its foundations. The idea of developing and using forms of functional representation to expand working-class power has a long tradition in the European labor movement. For instance, the concept of “functional democracy,” according to which factory councils and workers’ cooperatives were to play a strategic role in securing Socialist power and overcoming bourgeois hegemony in the Parliament and administration, was central to the programmatic thinking of Austro-Marxism (cf. Adler, 1926: 151 – ​8) and has been taken up by some Euro-Communists. Even if not thought of as an instrument of Socialist transformation, the possibility has been raised that, contrary to the intentions of its inventors, the political status attributed to unions within the policymaking apparatus of the state might become usable not as a means of

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containing the working class but to enhance its power. Esping-Andersen et al. argued in a recent article: Corporatism is an internally contradictory mode of incorporating the working class. The premise of a corporatist strategy is that the inclusion of […] working class organization […] in formal state planning processes will reduce working class opposition to state policies without requiring massive concessions to popular demands. […] If [however, the working class] leadership maintains close ties to the working class and remains a legitimate instrument of real working class organizations […] [this will] undermine the planning function of corporatism and brings class struggle into the administrative heart of the state apparatus itself. (Esping-Andersen et al., 1976: 197; cf. Jessop, 1978: 10)

As is the case with the two other scenarios, it is not difficult to find indications in present West Germany that lend some plausibility to the expectation that things will develop along these lines. For instance, union models of “co-determination beyond plant level” (überbetriebliche Mitbestimmung) have since 1971 been a demand in the trade-union (DGB) program that was given highest priority by union leadership. Union leaders and intellectuals close to the unions argue that wage restraints must be compensated for by institutional gains, because otherwise the legitimacy of unions would suffer in the eyes of rank-and-file members. After the Federation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) had filed legal complaints over a recent codetermination act with the Federal Constitutional Court, the unions for the first time used their option of strategic nonparticipation and refused to continue to cooperate in the “concerted action.” And one conservative opposition leader warned in Parliament that concerted action was in danger of being inadvertently transformed into an instrument of macro-codetermination. The issue may no longer be participation as such but, rather, the equalization of the extent to which parties will be constrained by decisions reached within corporatist policy-making bodies. How likely an outcome this is may well be questioned, especially in view of the present condition of high unemployment, which generally tends to force unions to adopt defensive and cooperative strategies. One also must question the prospects for either of the two alternative scenarios. Which of them, if any, will be realized is certainly beyond the capacity of the social scientist to predict.

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Bibliography Abromeit, H., “Interessendurchsetzung in der Krise.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (supplement to Das Parlament) 11 (1977), 15 – ​37. Adler, M., Politische oder soziale Demokratie. Berlin: Lamb, 1926. Anderson, C. W., “Political Design and the Representation of Interests.” Comparative Political Studies 10 (1977), 127 – ​152. Beer, S., British Politics in the Collectivist Age. New York: Random House, 1969. Bergmann, J., et al., Gewerkschaften in der Bundesrepublik. Gewerkschaftliche Lohnpolitik zwischen Mitgliederinteressen und ökonomischen Systemzwängen. Frankfurt/M.: EVA, 1975. Gräfin von Bethusy-Huc, V., “Vorschläge zur Kontrolle des Verbandseinflusses im parlamentarischen Regierungssystem.” In W. Dettling (ed.) Macht der Verbände – Ohnmacht der Demokratie: Beiträge zur Theorie und Politik der Verbände. München: Olzog, 1976, 221 – ​236. Böckenförde, E. W., “Die politische Funktion wirtschaftlich-sozialer Verbände und Interessenträger in der sozialstaatlichen Demokratie.” Der Staat 15 (1976), 457 – ​ 483. Dettling, W., ed. Macht der Verbände – Ohnmacht der Demokratie ? Beiträge zur Theorie und Politik der Verbände. München: Olzog, 1976. Dettling, W., et al. Die Neue Soziale Frage und die Zukunft der Demokratie. Bonn: Eichholz, 1976. Dotzenrath, F. J., Wirtschaftsräte und die Versuche zu ihrer Verwirklichung in PreußenDeutschland. Diss: Köln, 1932. Draper, H., “Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers.” New Politics 1 (1961), 81 – ​106. Ehrlich, S., Die Macht der Minderheit. Wien: Europa, 1966. Friedrich, C. J. and B. Reifenberg (eds.) Sprache und Politik. Festschrift für Dolf Sternberger zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, Heidelberg: Schneider, 1968. Enquete-Kommission Verfassungsreform des Deutschen Bundestages. Beratungen und Empfehlungen zur Verfassungsreform, 2 vols., Bonn, 1977. Eschenburg, T., Herrschaft der Verbände ? Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955. Esping-Andersen, G., et al. “Modes of Class Struggle and the Capitalist State.” Kapi­ talistate 4/5 (1976), 186 – ​220. Föhr, H., “Innere Demokratie in den Verbänden.” Freiheit in der sozialen Demokratie. Materialien zum 4. rechtspolitischen Kongress der SPD, Berlin, 1976. Freie Demokratische Partei. Entwurf eines Verbändegesetzes. Bonn, April 26, 1977. Goldthorpe, J., “Industrial Relations in Great Britain: A Critique of Reformism.” Politics and Society 4 (1974). Harris, N., Competition and the Corporate Society. London: Methuen, 1972. Hauff, V., and Scharpf, F. W., Modernisierung der Volkswirtschaft: Technologiepolitik als Strukturpolitik. Frankfurt/M.: EVA, 1975. Ionescu, G., Centripetal Politics: Government and the New Centers of Power. London: Hart-Davis, 1975.

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Jessop, B., “Corporatism, Fascism and Social Democracy.” Unpublished paper, 1978. Kevenhörster, P., “Kollektive Güter und organisierte Interessen – Zur Steuerungskapazität politischer Institutionen gegenüber organisierten Sozialinteressen.” In: W. Dettling (ed.) Macht der Verbände – Ohnmacht der Demokratie ? Beiträge zur Theorie und Politik der Verbände. München: Olzog, 1976, pp. 189 – ​220. Lehmbruch, G., “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government.” Comparative Political Studies 10 (1977), 91 – ​126. Lowi, T., The End of Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Maier, C., Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. Mayer-Tasch, P. C. Korporativismus und Autoritarismus. Frankfurt: Athenaeum, 1971. Mayntz, R., and Scharpf, F. W., Policy Making in the German Federal Bureaucracy. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1976. Mueller, E., “Das Unbehagen an den Verbänden.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 8 (1977), 36 – ​44. Naphtali, F., Wirtschaftsdemokratie. Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes GmbH, 1928. Nocken, U., “Corporatism and Pluralism in Modern German History.” In: D. Stegmann et al. (Hg.), Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System, Beiträge zur politischen Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag. Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978, pp. 37 – ​56. Offe, C., Berufsbildungsreform: Eine Fallstudie über Reformpolitik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1975. Offe, C., and Wiesenthal, H., “The Two Logics of Collective Action – Theoretical Notes on Social Class and the Political Form of Interest Representation.” Political Power and Social Theory 1 (1979). Opitz, R., “Der große Plan der CDU: Die ‘formierte Gesellschaft’.” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 9 (1965). Panitch, L., “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies.” Comparative Political Studies 10 (1977), 61 – ​90. Preuss, U. K., Zum staatsrechtlichen Begriff des Öffentlichen. Stuttgart: Klett, 1969. Ruin, O., “Participatory Democracy and Corporatism: The Case of Sweden.” Scandinavian Political Studies 9 (1974), 171 – ​186. Scharpf, F. W., Die Funktionsfähigkeit der Gewerkschaften als Problem einer Verbände­ gesetzgebung. Berlin: International Institute of Management, discussion paper 21, 1978. Schmitter, P. C., “Models of Interest Intermediation and Models of Social Change in Western Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 10 (1977), 2 – ​38. Shonfield, A., Modern Capitalism – The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Teubner, G., “Verbändedemokratie durch Recht ?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 8 (1977). Ders., Organisationsdemokratie und Verbandsverfassung. Rechtsmodelle für politisch relevante Verbände. Tübingen: Siebeck-Mohr, 1978.

The attribution of public status to interest groups 79

Weber, W., Spannungen und Kräfte im westdeutschen Verfassungssystem. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970. Wehler, H.-U., Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1918. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975. Winkler, J. T., “Corporatism.” European Journal of Sociology 17 (1976), 100 – ​136.

4

Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? Notizen über seine Voraussetzungen und demokratischen Gehalte (1984)

Die eigentümlich zerfaserte politisch-soziologische Theoriediskussion, die sich in fast sämtlichen Ländern des OECD-Bereichs seit Mitte der 70er Jahre um den Begriff des Korporatismus rankt1 und in den letzten Jahren zunehmend von teilweise großangelegten empirischen Forschungsprojekten2 begleitet wird, bezieht ihre Faszinations- und bisweilen Provokationskraft aus der Tatsache, dass die Ergebnisse dieser Debatten und Forschungen enge Bezüge zur normativen politischen Theorie, insbesondere zur Demokratietheorie aufweisen. Solche politisch-normative Brisanz gewinnen sie schon deswegen, weil sie die unverhoff‌te Wirklichkeit und Wichtigkeit von soziopolitischen Gebilden beweisen oder jedenfalls behaupten, für das es im Koordinatensystem geltender verfassungsrechtlicher Normen und ordnungspolitischer Sollvorstellungen sozusagen keinen Platz gibt, bei denen man vielmehr geneigt wäre, sie als Relikte vormoderner Epochen und Regimetypen einzustufen.3 Bei korporatistischen Arrangements handelt es sich um soziopolitische Regelungspotenzen, die im demokratischen Verfassungsstaat jedenfalls nicht vorgesehen sind: Es handelt sich um Formen, die zwischen Verein und Interessenverband einerseits, Regierung, Verwaltung und öffentlichen Zwangskörperschaften, den Institutionen der Parteienkonkurrenz und des Parlamentarismus 1

2 3

Vgl. die Beiträge in den Sammelbänden P. C. Schmitter u. G. Lehmbruch (Hg.), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, Beverly Hills 1979; G. Lehmbruch u. P. C. Schmitter (Hg.), Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making, Beverly Hills 1982; und U. v. Alemann (Hg.), Neokorporatismus, Frankfurt 1981. Vgl. W. Streeck u. P. C. Schmitter, The Organisation of Business Interests. A Research Design to Study the Associative Action of Business in the Advanced Industrial Societies of Western Europe, Berlin 1981. Vgl. zur Ideen- und Verfassungsgeschichte des Korporatismus vor allem P. C. Mayer-Tasch, Korporatismus u. Autoritarismus. Eine Studie zu Theorie u. Praxis der berufsständischen Rechts- u. Staatsidee, Frankfurt 1971.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_4

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andererseits ein inoffizielles, bloß faktisches Dasein führen, insofern sie der Struktur nach mit keinem dieser Gebilde übereinstimmen, der Funktion nach aber sehr wohl in einer gewissen Konkurrenz zu diesen vertrauten Strukturelementen der politisch-gesellschaftlichen Ordnung stehen.4 Das Vorkommen gesellschaftlicher Großverbände, die zwar einerseits auf freiwilliger Mitgliedschaft beruhen, andererseits aber kraft des von ihnen errungenen oder ihnen vom Staat eingeräumten Vertretungsmonopols nicht durchweg einer wirksamen Kontrolle durch die Mitgliederbasis unterliegen müssen; welche die Mitglieder nicht nur „vertreten“ und repräsentieren, sondern gleichzeitig auch regierungs- und verwaltungsähnliche Funktionen gegenüber den Mitgliedern – eventuell sogar gegen deren manifeste und kurzfristige Interessen – wahrnehmen; und die dadurch Ordnungsfunktionen in Sachgebieten vor allem der Wirtschafts-, Einkommens-, Bildungs- und Sozialpolitik übernehmen – der Nachweis solcher Erscheinungen und die Behauptung, dass sie in Ländern wie Schweden, Österreich und der Bundesrepublik gar in noch zunehmendem Maße anzutreffen sind, wird dann auch aus verschiedenen politischen Perspektiven und Lagern mit Beunruhigung quittiert. Beunruhigt ist man einerseits darüber, dass dann offenbar parlamentarisch-repräsentative wie exekutive Instanzen des Staates auf wichtigen Politikbereichen einen Teil ihrer Zuständigkeit und Handlungskompetenz an Gebilde abgegeben haben, die zwar nominell als bloße Interessenverbände bzw. Gewerkschaften auftreten, der Sache nach aber den Status von „privaten Regierungen“ einnehmen, von denen ganz ungewiss ist, wie sie von wem kontrolliert und zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden könnten. Beunruhigt ist man insbesondere auf der politischen Linken über die Gefahren, die für den Fall befürchtet werden, dass die Gewerkschaften sich auf die Übernahme korporatistischer Regelungsfunktionen einlassen und ihre Politik dadurch der Kontrollmöglichkeit seitens der Mitglieder entgleitet. Mitunter wird eine solche Transformation der Gewerkschaften in disziplinierenden Agenturen parastaatlicher Steuerung als das eigentliche Wesen und treibende politische Motiv korporatistischer Politikformen beargwöhnt; dies insbesondere dann, wenn sich Gewerkschaften mit Arbeitgeberseite und Teilen des Staatsapparates in „tripartistische“ Verhandlungssysteme einlassen, deren Ablauf und Ergebnis dem Auge der Öffentlichkeit wie der Reichweite der Streikwaffe entzogen bleiben müssen.5

4 5

So auch E. W. Böckenförde, „Die politische Funktion wirtschaftlich-sozialer Verbände u. Interessenträger in der sozialstaatlichen Demokratie“, Der Staat 15. 1976, S. 457 – ​83. So v. a. L. Panitch, „The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies“, Comparative Political Studies 10. 1977, S. 61 – ​90); u. ders., „Recent Theo­rizations of Corporatism: Reflec­ tions on a Growth Industry“, British Journal of Sociology 31. 1980, S. 159 – ​87.

Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? 83

Während ein guter Teil der Korporatismus-Literatur mit Gesten des Demaskierens und Warnens durchsetzt ist, mit denen solche Gefahren deutlich gemacht werden sollen, gibt es auch für die genau entgegengesetzte Perspektive Beispiele: Die Perspektive nämlich, aus der parastaatliche Abstimmungs- und Regulierungsfunktionen als eine vielversprechende Lösung erscheinen, welche komplexe Industriegesellschaften mit hohem wachsendem Regulierungsbedarf in die Lage versetzen könnten, jenseits der weithin blockierten Kanäle spontaner Marktanpassung einerseits, hoheitlicher Intervention seitens des Staates andererseits strategische Ordnungsleistungen zustandezubringen.6 In dieser Perspektive geht es also darum, die spezifische Leistungsfähigkeit korporatistischer Arrangements für die Steuerung kapitalistischer Industriegesellschaften theoretisch und empirisch zu explorieren und gegebenenfalls ordnungspolitisch zu empfehlen. Die folgenden Notizen nehmen sowohl die Vorbehalte der skeptischen Position wie die Hoffnungen auf eventuelle Steuerungs-Vorteile korporatistischer Arrangements auf und formulieren zunächst einige Hypothesen über die Bedingungen, unter denen überhaupt zu erwarten ist, dass sich korporatistische Regelungspotenzen in nennenswertem Umfang entfalten. Daran anschließend ist zu erörtern, in welchem Verhältnis solche Formen der gesellschaftlichen Steuerung zu den normativen Prämissen einer Demokratietheorie stellen. Zunächst ist jedoch das ordnungspolitische Bezugsproblem zu klären, für das neokorporatistische Arrangements als Lösung angeboten werden.

Markt, Staat und Solidarität In allen sozialen Systemen muss das Problem bewältigt werden, die Handlungsstrategien von Akteuren mit den Bestandsbedingungen des Systems zu vermitteln. Von der klassischen politischen Ökonomie bis zu den weitgehend formalisierten Modellen der modernen Entscheidungs- und Spieltheorie ist für dieses fundamentale Bezugsproblem der Sozialtheorie immer wieder nach Modellierungen und Lösungen gesucht worden. Die beiden Dimensionen dieses Problems – Handlungsrationalität und Systemrationalität – lassen sich jeweils dichotomisieren: Akteure können entweder interessenrational oder nicht-rational handeln und dabei können sich entweder „vernünftige“ oder „unvernünftige“ Makro-Resultate einstel6 Diese Position wird mit Nuancierungen vertreten von W. Streck, Interessenverbände als Hindernisse u. Vollzugsträger öffentlicher Politik, in: F. W. Scharpf u. M. Brockmann (Hg.), Institutionelle Bedingungen der Arbeitsmarkt- u. Beschäftigungspolitik, Frankfurt 1983. S. 179 – ​ 98: H. Willke, Entzauberung des Staates. Überlegungen zu einer sozietalen Steuerungstheorie, Frankfurt 1983: H. E. Ritter, „Der kooperative Staat. Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis von Staat u. Wirtschaft“, Archiv des Öffentlichen Rechts 104. 1979, S. 389 – ​413.

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len. Die Kombination dieser beiden Dimensionen führt zu einem einfachen VierFelder-Schema: Systemzustand

„vernünftig“

„unvernünftig“

Markttheorien

Kollektivgüter durch Staat erzeugt

1

2

Kollektivgüter durch Solidarität

Anomie- und Krisentheorien

3

4

Handlungsrationalität Interessenrationalität

„Irrationalität“

Die in das Feld 1 gehörigen Fälle werden von Markttheorien beschrieben. Es handelt sich hier um die ebenso glücklichen wie unwahrscheinlichen Fälle, in denen durch Vermittlung einer „unsichtbaren Hand“ die handlungsrationale Interessenverfolgung zur Gleichgewichtslage des Systems führt. Die in Feld 2 gehörigen Fälle werden von Theorien und Modellen wie dem des „Prisoners Dilemma“7 beschrieben. Es geht bei dieser Konstellation darum, dass gerade die rationale Interessenverfolgung zu Ungleichgewichten und suboptimalen Systemzuständen führt. Eine der für ordnungspolitische Diskussionen folgenreichsten Ausarbeitungen dieser Konstellation stammt von Mancur Olson,8 der gezeigt hat, dass unter bestimmten Prämissen kollektive Güter (d. h. Güter, deren Genuss nicht auf den Kreis derjenigen beschränkbar ist, die dafür gezahlt haben) zwar sehr wohl produziert werden „könnten“, aber gerade dann nicht produziert werden, wenn alle Beteiligten interessenrational handeln. Jeder wird versuchen, „den anderen“ zahlen zu lassen und selbst „Trittbrett zu fahren“; deshalb wird (außer in „sehr kleinen“ Gruppen) schließlich niemand zahlen. Im Extremfall geht das Handlungssystem an der „rationalen“ Weigerung seiner Mitglieder zugrunde, für die Bestandsbedingungen des Systems aufzukommen. Das in Feld 2 thematisierte Vermittlungsproblem findet Olson zufolge eine Lösung nur dann, wenn es entweder eine Instanz gibt, die das „Trittbrettfahren“ unter Strafe stellt (Beispiel: Zwangsversicherung) oder die Mitwirkung an der Erzeugung kollektiver Güter durch Gewährung anderer („selektiver“) Güter belohnt (Beispiel: Dienstleistungen, die ein Verband nur zahlenden Mitgliedern zur Verfügung stellt). Aber die Existenz einer Staats- oder Verbandsgewalt, die solche Lösungen zustande bringen könnte, ist selbst ein Kol-

7 B. Barry u. R. Hardin (Hg.), Rational Man and Irrational Society ?, London 1982. 8 M. Olson jr., The Logic of Collective Action. Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, New York 1968.

Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? 85

lektivgut und unterliegt daher derselben Problematik, die sie nach Olson zu lösen geeignet ist. In beiden Fällen handeln die Akteure nach wie vor interessenrational; aber das Dilemma von Feld 2 wird dadurch bewältigt, dass durch das Dazwischentreten staatlicher bzw. verbandlicher Herrschaft Strafen bzw. Anreize ausgesetzt werden, deren Vorhandensein die Präferenzen und Kosten der Akteure abändert. Herrschaft überbrückt hier die Diskrepanz zwischen Mikro-Rationalität und Makro-Irrationalität. Zu dieser Lösung verhält sich die Lösung spiegelbildlich, die für den in Feld 3 vorgesehenen Fall einer Diskrepanz gefunden werden kann. Hier haben wir es damit zu tun, dass wünschbare und vernünftige Aggregat-Ergebnisse nur dann zustande kommen, wenn die Akteure darauf verzichten, sich gemäß den Standards der Interessenrationalität, also durch Abwägung von Kosten und Nutzen individuelle Präferenzen maximierend zu verhalten. Ihre Interessenrationalität muss hier also nicht (wie in Feld 2) herrschaftlich umgesteuert, sondern suspendiert werden. Eine Lösung kommt nur zustande, wenn sie sich an Normen wie Solidarität, Verantwortung usw. orientieren, „Gemeinsinn“ praktizieren und aufhören, die dabei anfallenden Opfer als solche zu kalkulieren.9 Soziale Strukturen, die ihre Angehörigen genau hierzu veranlassen können, bezeichnen wir im Anschluss an die Terminologie von Tönnies und Weber als „Gemeinschaften“.10 Zelle 4 des Schemas ist in unserem Zusammenhang uninteressant; hierher gehören die Fälle, in denen – wie etwa in „Anomie“-Theorien oder Theorien der „Massengesellschaft“ beschrieben – die Handlungsrationalität suspendiert ist und – wie von Krisentheorien beschrieben – systemische Gleich­gewichtszustände verfehlt werden. Die Lehre, die man diesem Tableau von Steuerungsproblemen und ihren Lösungen entnehmen kann, lässt sich so zusammenfassen: Wenn Marktprozesse nicht ausreichen, können Lösungen nur dann zustande kommen, wenn entweder über ein herrschaftlich gesetztes Rahmenprogramm von Anreizen und Strafen Kosten, Präferenzen und Nutzen umgesteuert werden oder wenn die Interessenverfolgung durch Aktivierung der Bindungs- und Verpflichtungskräfte von „Gemeinschaften“ und ihrer Orientierung an einem „Gemeinwohl“ suspendiert wird. Ein Blick auf die heute in der Diskussion befindlichen wirtschafts-, sozial- und ordnungspolitischen Doktrinen und Strategieangebote zeigt, dass sie sich den Feldern 1 – ​3 unseres Schemas sinnfällig zuordnen lassen. 9

Eine originelle Theorie über das Umschlagen von „private“ in „public involvements“ bietet A. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, Princeton 1982. 10 Vgl. den Beitrag des Herausgebers und andere Beiträge in G. Vobruba (Hg.), Wir sitzen alle in einem Boot. Gemeinschaftsrhetorik in der Krise, Frankfurt 1983; ebenso Kap. IV und V in ders., Politik mit dem Wohlfahrtsstaat, Frankfurt 1983.

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Da ist zunächst (Feld 1) eine orthodoxe Erholungsstrategie, die „angebots­ orientiert“ auf die Selbstheilungskräfte des Marktes sowie auf die Eliminierung jener Hemmnisse und wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Kneblungen setzt, die diesem Modus der Wiedergewinnung eines Makro-Gleichgewichts angeblich im Wege stehen. Da ist (Feld 2) eine Theorie des keynesianischen Wohlfahrtsstaates,11 die (Stichworte: Rahmenplanung, Investitionsprogramme, aktive Beschäftigungspolitik usw.) Versuche zu ermutigen sucht, die private Interessenverfolgung unter etatistisch definierte und implementierte Parameter zu stellen, um auf diesem Wege eine Annäherung an die Sollwerte einer systemischen Gleichgewichtslage zu bewerkstelligen. Und da ist schließlich (Feld 3) die – theoretisch wie praktisch gewiss weniger als die beiden anderen entwickelte – Strategie der Aktivierung nichtstaatlicher Steuerungspotentiale organisierter gesellschaftlicher Großgruppen, für die intern und in ihren Verhandlungen untereinander, so wird unterstellt, die Wünschbarkeit bestimmter Makro-Zustände und – Resultate unmittelbar handlungsmotivierend werden soll.

Konstruktive Lösungen und ihre Hindernisse Die Triade Markt – bürokratische Regulierung – gemeinschaftliche Selbstbindung scheint das Repertoire zu bezeichnen und zugleich zu erschöpfen, das komplexen Gesellschaften zur Bewältigung des Spannungsverhältnisses von individueller Handlungsrationalität und kollektiver Systemrationalität zur Verfügung steht.12 Selbstverständlich handelt es sich in allen beobachtbaren Fällen um eine Mischung oder Verschränkung von Anwendungsfällen dieser drei Steuerungsprinzipien. Aber Schwerpunkte zeichnen sich doch insofern ab, als die skizzierten ordnungspolitischen Positionen eine sie jeweils charakterisierende Vorliebe dafür aufweisen, bei neu auftretenden oder sich krisenhaft verschärfenden Steuerungsproblemen bei einem der Pole dieses Dreiecks Abhilfe zu suchen. Es gibt Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass am Anfang der 80er Jahre am Pol der „etatistischen Regulierung“ sich nicht gerade, um es vorsichtig auszudrücken, die Hoffnungen darauf zusammenballen, dass man hier die Kapazitäten für neuen Regelungsbedarf noch wird auftun können.13 Die Leistungsfähigkeit etatistischer Regelung, ja des Rechtmediums selbst scheint (um es weniger vorsichtig auszudrücken) weitgehend aus-

11 Vgl. C. Offe. „Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization“, Policy Sciences 15 (1983): 225 – ​46. 12 So auch C. E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets, New York 1977. 13 Vgl. W. Streeck, Interessenverbände.

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gereizt.14 Gründe dafür hat man in der chronischen Finanzkrise der öffentlichen Haushalte gesehen, die den materiellen Interventionsspielraum sowohl keynesia­ nischer Wirtschaftspolitiken wie wohlfahrtsstaatlicher Sicherungs- und Umverteilungspolitiken einschränken. Andere Gründe mag man in der heute überall schmerzhaft fühlbaren Diskrepanz zwischen dem beschränkten Aktionsradius nationaler (oder selbst supranationaler) Regierungskapazität einerseits und dem globalen Aktionsradius andererseits sehen, der sich den Dispositionen von Investoren bietet. Etatistische Regulierung setzt sich – drittens – in vielen ihrer Anwendungsfelder dem Verdacht bzw. Vorwurf aus, in unzulänglich intelligenter, ja geradezu lerngestörter Weise mit ihren Entscheidungen (von der Schulpolitik bis zur Energiepolitik) dem Problemstand hinterherzuhinken und ihn schon mangels zureichender bzw. zureichend schnell ergänzter Sachkenntnis zwangsläufig zu verfehlen. Das Stöhnen über „zu viel Staat“ ist heute auf jedem beliebigen Niveau von sophistication zu vernehmen; es findet Anhaltspunkte sowohl in dem hohen Zeitverbrauch von Programmentwicklung und Gesetzgebungsprozessen wie in der Kurzlebigkeit der alsbald revisions- und novellierungsbedürftigen staatlichen Regulierungsversuche. Solche auf breiter Front dann politisch auch ausgewertete Erfahrungen und Analysen geben der Suche nach Alternativen zum Recht und zu bürokratischer Regulierung reiche Nahrung.15 Diejenigen, die sich mit dem Gedanken an „stärker marktwirtschaftliche“ Lösungen auf diese Suche begeben, werden jedoch realisieren müssen, dass es sich bei dem von ihnen projektierten Umschalten auf verstärkte Marktsteuerung nicht nur im gesellschaftspolitisch normativen, sondern zudem auch in einem präzisen analytischen Sinne um einen „Rückschritt“ handelt. Um Größenordnungen unterschätzen sie nämlich in der Regel die „Sperrklinken-Effekte“. die auf dem Entwicklungspfad von einer überwiegend durch unregulierte Marktprozesse gesteuerten Ökonomie zum entwickelten interventionistischen Wohlfahrtsstaat mit seinem keynesianischen Instrumentarium eingerastet sind. Insofern stellt sich die Rückkehr zu einem marktwirtschaftlichen Status quo ante nicht als SelbstRücknahme einer angeblich hypertroph gewordenen staatlichen Politik, sondern als eine Hypertrophie der Politik dar, als massiver und gewaltsamer Eingriff. Selbst wenn die Empfehlung, zu „mehr Markt“ zurückzukehren, steuerungstheoretisch in allen Einzelheiten überzeugen könnte (was nicht der Fall ist), dann bliebe der entscheidende Mangel, dass die Analyse auf einem komparativ-statischen

14 N. Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, München 1981. 15 Vgl. R. Voigt (Hg.), Verrechtlichung: Analysen zur Funktion u. Wirkung von Parlamentarisierung. Bürokratisierung u. Justizialisierung sozialer, politischer u. ökonomischer Prozesse, Königstein, 1980 und verschiedene Bände des Jahrbuchs für Rechtssoziologie.

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Niveau verharrt und das der dynamischen Analyse nicht erreicht.16 Absehbarer Weise nämlich wäre der Rückweg zur marktwirtschaftlichen „Vernunft“ mit gesellschaftspolitischen Grundsatzkonflikten gepflastert und mit Hürden bestellt, die mit den Beschränkungen, die etwa das Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland staatlichen Akteuren auferlegt, also im Rahmen von parlamentarischer Demokratie, Koalitionsfreiheit und Tarifautonomie, schlechterdings nicht zu nehmen sein dürften. Auch von scharfen Kritikern des etatistischen Problemlösungsmodells kann man daher die Warnung beziehen, dass der Versuch verfehlt wäre, Fehlentwicklungen dadurch zu bekämpfen, dass man einfach zum Status quo ante zurückkehrt.17 Die hier durchaus unvollständig zitierten immanenten Schwierigkeiten sowohl des etatistischen wie des marktwirtschaftlichen Regelungsprinzips lenken nun den Blick mit einer gewissen Zwangsläufigkeit auf die einzig verbleibende, nämlich die „gemeinschaftliche“ Alternative. Hier geht es, wie wir sahen, um das Problem der Institutionalisierung eines Handlungstypus, dem die Maxime zugrunde liegt: Es liegt im höchsten eigenen Interesse, den eigenen Interessen nicht den höchsten Rang einzuräumen. Die Lösung wäre demnach dort zu finden, wo nach den Prinzipien einer von einzelwirtschaftlicher ökonomischer Rationalität allein keineswegs ableitbaren oder gar diktierten Verantwortung, Mäßigung, Partnerschaft und Vertrauensbeziehung verfahren wird. Das ist nach allen Befunden und Annahmen, welche die Sozialwissenschaften über die Natur moderner, differenzierter und komplexer Gesellschaften produziert haben, gewiss ein erstaunlicher und zunächst abwegig erscheinender Gedanke. Der Reiz und das Innovationspotential der theoretischen und empirischen Studien über korporatistische Arrangements besteht jedoch, wie ich meine, in genau dieser überraschenden Perspektive. Sozialtheoretisch wird dabei Anschluss gesucht an die von Durkheim in der „Arbeitsteilung“18 bzw. dem „Selbstmord“ erörterte konstruktive Problematik der Absicherung differenzierter Sozialstrukturen gegen „anomische“ Selbstzerstörungstendenzen,19 andererseits auch an bestimmte Denkfiguren in der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie.20 In der Tat lässt 16 Das ließe sich leicht demonstrieren. z. B. an den in M. Miegel, Die verkannte Revolution. Einkommen u. Vermögen der privaten Haushalte, Stuttgart 1983, vorgeschlagenen sozialpolitischen Neuerungen. 17 Vgl. Luhmann, S. 152: Es muß „mitberücksichtigt werden, daß es für die Selbstüberforderung des politischen Systems gesellschaftsstrukturelle Gründe gibt, die so gut wie irreversibel festliegen.“ 18 E. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, New York 1964. 19 H. P. Müller, Wertkrise u. Gesellschaftsreform. Emile Durkheims Schriften zur Politik, Stuttgart 1983. 20 V. a. §§ 250 – ​256 von G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Hoffmeister, und die gerade für den Zusammenhang der Korporatismus-Diskussion nicht un­aktuelle

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sich das ordnungspolitische Problem ohne Rest als Frage nach einem modernen Äquivalent für das formulieren, was Hegel zum Wesen der „Korporation“ erklärt, nämlich die „Beschränkung des sogenannten natürlichen Rechts, seine Geschicklichkeit auszuüben und damit zu erwerben, was zu erwerben ist, als sie darin zur Vernünftigkeit bestimmt; nämlich von der eigenen Meinung und Zufälligkeit der eigenen Gefahr wie der Gefahr für andere, befreit, anerkannt, gesichert und zugleich zur bewussten Tätigkeit für einen gemeinsamen Zweck erhoben wird“ (§ 254). Ganz ähnlich das Durkheim’sche Programm einer Institutionalisierung der Berufsgruppen als intermediärer Instanzen: „Eine Nation kann sich nur dann erhalten, wenn sich zwischen den Staat und den Bürger eine ganze Serie von sekundären Gruppen einschiebt, die den Individuen genügend nahe sind, um sie in ihren Wirkungsradius einzufangen und sie im allgemeinen Strom des sozialen Lebens mitzureißen“.21 Steuerungstheoretische Überlegungen und Empfehlungen, wie sie in jüngster Zeit zum Beispiel von Willke22 vorgetragen worden sind, laufen ebenfalls auf das Prinzip intermediärer Verantwortlichkeit und Kooperation hinaus. Die „Paradoxie einer immer perfekteren Rationalisierung und Rationalität der gesellschaftlichen Teile und einer immer weniger übersehbaren Irrationalität des Ganzen“ (10) soll dadurch bewältigt werden können, dass unter Verzicht auf einen „integrativen Primat des Staates“ (56) eine „dezentrale Makrosteuerung“ etabliert wird, in deren Rahmen den beteiligten Akteuren die „reziproke Rücksichtnahme auf die jeweiligen Bestandsbedingungen der anderen Teile“ (129) und die Verpflichtung „staatlicher und nichtstaatlicher Akteure zu wechselseitiger Abstimmung“ (130) angesonnen wird. Nur bleibt das Problem, dass die postulierten Rationalitätsgewinne eines solchen Steuerungsmodus keineswegs den Schluss auf ein tatsächliches Zustandekommen dieses Steuerungsmodus und des ihm entsprechenden „praktisch und faktisch reflektierten Interaktionsstil(s)“ (134) der gesellschaftlichen Großgruppen untereinander und mit dem Staat zulassen. Das alles läuft auf die Frage nach den sozialstrukturellen Voraussetzungen einer sich selbst „beschränkenden“ und dadurch zur „Vernünftigkeit bestimmten Geschicklichkeit“ hinaus. Willke benennt das Problem selbst: „Weshalb sollten die Tarifparteien sich diesen Zwängen freiwillig aussetzen ?“ (130). Die Idee einer dezentralen Makro-Steuerung durch verantwortlich Agierende und die Bedingungen der Systemintegration dauernd reflektierende Großorganisationen hat Voraussetzungen in der Binnenstruktur dieser Organisationen selbst Kritik an „ständischen“ Harmonisierungsbemühungen des „modernen Staatszustandes“ bei K. Marx, Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts, in: Marx-Engels-Werke, Bd. I, Berlin 1961, S.  201 – ​333. 21 Zit. n. Müller, S. 152. 22 H. Willke, Entzauberung; die folgenden Seitenzahlen in Klammem beziehen sich auf diese Schrift.

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wie in ihrem Verhältnis zueinander. Zu diesen beiden Gruppen von Voraussetzungen sollen hier je drei Hypothesen kurz genannt und erörtert werden. Was zunächst die binnenstrukturellen Voraussetzungen für „Verantwortlichkeit“ und systemische „Kontextsensitivität“ angeht. so bietet es sich an, diese Variable mit der Größe, der Solidarität und der organisatorischen Verpflichtungsfähigkeit der betreffenden Organisationen in Zusammenhang zu bringen. Dass „große“ Organisationen, d. h. solche mit einem umfassenden sozialen, sachlichen und auch zeitlichen Zuständigkeits- und Operationsfeld reflexionsfähiger sein sollten als andere, ist insofern plausibel, als sie stärker als andere gezwungen sein können, die Folgen ihres Handelns zu bedenken. Mit wachsender Größe des Organisationsbereichs verwandeln sich „externe“ in interne, d. h. im Organisationsbereich selbst anfallende Effekte, die deswegen nicht unbeachtet bleiben können.23 Es ist indessen leicht zu sehen, dass dieser heilsame Effekt nur unter der Voraussetzung eines „endlichen Universums“, d. h. nur dann eintritt. wenn mit wachsender Gruppengröße der verbleibende Bereich tatsächlich schrumpft, demgegenüber man sich, ohne selbst Schaden zu nehmen, tatsächlich „rücksichtslos“ verhalten kann.24 Anders ausgedrückt: Der Quotient von Beteiligten und Betroffenen wächst keineswegs zwangsläufig mit der absoluten Größe einer Organisation; er kann vielmehr sogar sinken, zum Beispiel dann, wenn die Kehrseite von „verantwortlichen“ Vereinbarungen die Vergrößerung des Feldes der Betroffenen (aber nicht Beteiligten) ist, auf deren Kosten man sich einigt.25 Die von Tarifparteien gemeinsam betriebene und durchgesetzte Forderung nach Subventionierung niedergehender Wirtschaftszweige, nach protektionistischer Handelspolitik, nach technologischen Innovationen mit langfristigen Belastungen und Risiken usw. sind Beispiele für diese Konstellation, bei der es trotz gesteigerter Rücksichtnahme auf die Be­lange des „Partners“ keineswegs auch zu einem gesteigerten Maß an Systemrationalität kommt. Der Lerneffekt würde sich in solchen Fällen darauf beschränken, in durchaus „kooperativer“ und kreativer Weise diejenigen „Dritten“ zu konstituieren, zu deren Lasten ein Einigungsspielraum eröffnet werden kann. Man kann sogar unterstellen, dass „große“ Organisationen (etwa nach dem Muster von Branchenkartellen) dieses Spiel dank der entsprechend umfangreicheren internen und externen Ressourcen, die ihnen zur Verfügung stehen, besser beherrschen als

23 Vgl. M. Olson jr., The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven 1982. 24 So im Ergebnis H. Wiesenthal, Die Konzertierte Aktion im Gesundheitswesen. Ein Beispiel für Theorie u. Politik des modernen Korporatismus, Frankfurt 1981. 25 Ein sinnfälliges Beispiel für eine solche „Erfindung“ von Dritten: Die Betreiber eines Kraftwerkes einigen sich mit den von den Emissionen unmittelbar betroffenen Nachbargemeinden darauf, höhere Schornsteine zu bauen – mit den für den Waldbestand eines halben Kontinents vermuteten, räumlich und zeitlich weitverteilten Folgen.

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„kleine“, und dass mithin „Größe“ eine durchaus zweischneidige Bedingung für „Verantwortlichkeit“ ist. Eine zweite Voraussetzung für einen Einklang zwischen Verbandszielen und Gleichgewichtsbedingungen besteht im Vorhandensein quasi-ständischer Soli­ darnormen innerhalb der sozialen Domäne von gesellschaftlichen Verbänden. Denn nur wenn solche Normen vorhanden sind und aktiviert werden können, können es sich diese Organisationen leisten, an einer gesellschaftspolitischen Steuerung mitzuwirken, welche die Kriterien der Interessenrationalität auf der Ebene der Mitglieder durchaus verletzen kann. In solchen Fällen kommt es entscheidend darauf an, ob sich die Organisation unter Berufung auf standes- und berufsethische Normen, die in der Mitgliedschaft lebendig sind, auf deren Unterstützung verlassen kann, oder ob ein Prozess der interessenrationalen Abwanderung einsetzt, in dem die Mitglieder auf „Bevormundungen“ und „Zumutungen“ ihres Verbandes negativ reagieren. Ein untersuchenswerter Testfall für diese Frage wäre etwa die Reaktion von Handwerksverbänden auf das ihnen (z. T. von der staatlichen Politik) zugeschobene Problem des Lehrstellenmangels: Gelingt es ihnen, ihre Mitglieder in folgenreicher Weise an Pflichten und Verantwortlichkeiten in der beruflichen Bildung zu gemahnen, oder stoßen sie, wo sie dies versuchen, an die Barriere einzelwirtschaftlicher Rentabilitätskalküle und handeln sich die entsprechenden verbandsinternen Auseinandersetzungen ein ? Die erstgenannte Alternative wird nur dann eintreten, wenn sich jedes Verbandsmitglied (als Adressat entsprechender Appelle) kraft einer lebendigen berufsständischen Solidarität und Reziprozität darauf verlassen könnte, dass es nicht das einzige bleiben würde, das entsprechende Opfer auf sich nähme, und dass mithin die Befolgung des vom Verband angemahnten gemeinsinnorientierten Verhaltens nicht auch noch durch zusätzliche Wettbewerbsnachteile bestraft würde, bei denen man dann allein „der Dumme“ wäre. Die Tatsache, dass ein solcher Test vermutlich gerade bei Handwerksverbänden vergleichsweise positiv ausgehen würde, suggeriert den Umkehrschluss, dass eine den Handlungstyp der rationalen Interessenverfolgung mäßigende und „beschränkende“ moralische Infrastruktur wohl eher in solchen Bereichen der Wirtschafts- und Sozialstruktur angetroffen werden kann, die gegen Prozesse der Modernisierung und Rationalisierung von Produktion, Verteilung und Verwaltung relativ abgeschirmt geblieben sind, während in „moderneren“ Bereichen eine quasiständische von der kommerziell-rationalen Wirtschaftsgesinnung stärker verdrängt worden sein dürfte. Zumindest ergibt sich in diesem Zusammenhang ein Widerspruch zu dem zuvor genannten Kriterium der „Größe“. Gerade Großverbände lassen, mag auch ihre Führung zur Berücksichtigung externer Effekte durchaus Anlass haben (s. o.), wegen ihrer inneren Heterogenität die Fähigkeit vermissen, eine interne „Kultur der Reziprozität“ zu pflegen und im Bedarfsfalle zu aktivieren. So gehört ja die Klage darüber zum Repertoire

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der Sozialpolitiker, dass die „Solidargemeinschaft der Versicherten“ ein bloß objektiver Tatbestand sei, der im subjektiven Nutzungsverhalten der Millionen von Versicherten keine subjektive Entsprechung in solidarischer Selbstbeschränkung finde und finden könne. Eine dritte binnenstrukturelle Voraussetzung für die Fähigkeit von gesellschaftlichen Verbänden, als korporative Akteure an einem neuen Typus makrosozialer Steuerung mitzuwirken, dürfte in ihrer internen Verpflichtungsfähigkeit bestehen. Damit ist ihre Fähigkeit gemeint, die Mitglieder bzw. Mitgliedsverbände auf bestimmte, gegenüber dem Staat oder anderen Verbänden eingegangene strategische Grundpositionen und insbesondere auf Zugeständnisse so festzulegen, dass die entsprechenden Vereinbarungen auch dann noch „halten“, wenn sie den Partialinteressen von Mitgliedern entgegenstehen; denn andernfalls müssten ja die im Verhandlungssystem eingenommenen Positionen eines Verbandes von seinen Partnern als fragwürdig und potentiell nichtig beargwöhnt werden. Es ist bekannt, dass gerade „große“ Verbände, die sich auf eine bei den Mitgliedern eingelebte ständisch-moralische Loyalität nicht verlassen können, dieses Problem dadurch zu bewältigen versuchen, dass sie ihren Mitgliedern gegenüber wie Quasi-Regierungen auftreten, indem sie Konformitätspflichten etablieren und im Abweichungsfalle Sanktionen anwenden. Das kann ihnen aber nur gelingen, wenn der (im Prinzip ja immer freiwillige) Status des „Verbandsbürgers“ hinreichend attraktiv und/oder hinreichend alternativlos ist, dass die mit ihm verbundenen Beschränkungen und Verpflichtungen in Kauf genommen, jedenfalls nicht durch individuelle oder organisierte Abwanderung bzw. Abspaltung unterlaufen werden. Je umfassender die Regelungskompetenz korporatistischer Arrangements sein soll, desto umfassender und zuverlässiger muss offensichtlich auch ihre interne Verpflichtungsfähigkeit sein, – und zwar in sozialer wie in sachlicher und auch zeitlicher Hinsicht. Zu diesem Punkt nur drei Hinweise bzw. Thesen, die diese Voraussetzung problematisieren: Es gibt zahlreiche theoretische und empirische Anhaltspunkte dafür, dass diese Verpflichtungsfähigkeit bei den Tarifparteien ungleich verteilt, d. h. auf der Gewerkschaftsseite wesentlich größer als auf der Arbeitgeberseite ist.26 Eine Steigerung und zugleich Gleichverteilung jener Verpflichtungsfähigkeit wäre nur auf dem Wege einer faktischen oder legalen „Verkammerung“ der Verbände auf dem Wege über Zwangsmitgliedschaften vorstellbar, wodurch das Problem freilich nur auf die Ebene etatistisch-adminis26 Vgl. dazu C. Offe u. H. Wiesenthal, „Two Logics of Collective Action: Theoretical Notes on Social Class and Organizational Form“, Political Power and Social Theory 1. 1980, S. 67 – ​115, sowie C. Offe, „The Attribution of Public Status to Interest Groups. Observations on the West German Case“, in: S. Berger (Hg.), Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics, Cambridge 1981.

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trativer Regulierung zurückverschoben wäre, das ja gerade durch dezentrale und autonome Selbstregulierung gesellschaftlicher Gruppen und ihrer Verhandlungssysteme bewältigt werden sollte. Schließlich zeichnet sich insbesondere auf der Arbeitgeberseite ab, dass (nach dem Muster der „negativen“ Koordination bzw. der „Nichtbefassung“ mit potentiell konfliktreichen Materien) ein großer sozialer Einzugs- und Vertretungsbereich nur um den Preis einer in der Sachdimension schrumpfenden Domäne aufrechterhalten werden kann: Der Verband spricht dann zwar für viele, aber gerade deshalb (d. h. zur Vermeidung interner Streitigkeiten) nicht über alles, sondern ist aus organisationsinternen Gründen auf Vetound Defensivpositionen, Tabukataloge usw. festgelegt, die ihn als Akteur einer „dezentralen sozietalen Makrosteuerung“ (Willke) nicht eben empfehlen. Es zeigt sich also: Wenn gesellschaftliche Großverbände in ihren Verhandlungen miteinander und mit dem Staat übergeordnete Systeminteressen fördern sollen, welche mit unmittelbaren Interessen der von ihnen repräsentierten Gruppen nicht im Einklang stehen, dann müssen sie sich zu diesem Zweck auf einen Vertrauenskredit und die Folgebereitschaft ihrer Mitglieder verlassen können; denn sonst würden die Verbände ihre eigene Existenz als Organisationen aufs Spiel setzen. Ebenso muss eine Vertrauensbeziehung unter den Mitgliedern selbst (zumindest aber das Zutrauen in eine alle Mitglieder bindende Disziplinierungsfähigkeit des Verbandes) bestehen, welche bewirkt, dass sich wirklich jeder an die im Geiste der „Verantwortung“ aufgestellten Regeln und Selbstbeschränkungen hält; denn sonst würde ja der Schaden, den man durch den Verzicht auf konsequent inter­ essenrationale Strategien auf sich nimmt, durch das Risiko ganz unzumutbar noch verschärft, dass man dies eventuell einseitig und alleine tut. Der Gemeinsinn, den die strategischen Verbände im Verhältnis untereinander und zum Staat praktizieren sollen, steht und fällt mit der Belastbarkeit einer verbandsintern lebendigen Kultur der Solidarität und Verantwortung. Es gibt kaum handfeste soziologische Befunde oder Theorien darüber, ob und wo sich solche gruppentypischen normativen Kohäsionskräfte antreffen lassen und wie belastbar sie ggf. sind. Die drei genannten skeptischen Gesichtspunkte lassen es aber wenig geraten erscheinen, die Durkheim’sche Ordnungsvorstellung einer von berufsständischen Gruppensolidaritäten geprägten organischen Solidarität27 für die Wirklichkeit zu nehmen. 27 Vgl. Durkheim, S. 360: „The government cannot, at every instant, regulate the conditions of the different economic markets, fixing the prices of their commodities and services, or keeping production within the bounds of consumptionary needs, etc. All these practical problems arise from a multitude of detail […] which only those very close to the problems know about. Thus, we cannot adjust these functions to one another and make them concur harmoniously if they do not concur of themselves […] What gives unity to organized societies […] is the spontaneous consensus of parts. Such is the internal solidarity which not only is as indispensable as the regulative action of higher centers, but which also is their neces-

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Eher verschärft sich der Anlass zur Skepsis noch, wenn wir auch die äußeren Bedingungen einer nach dem korporatistischen Muster funktionierenden dezentralen Makro-Steuerung in den Blick nehmen. Positiv steht hier gewiss das Argument – und die in Feldforschungen auch explizit bestätigte Erfahrung – zu Buche, dass es zumindest in der Bundesrepublik so etwas gebe wie eine insgeheime große Koalition der Sachverständigen, bestehend aus den Führungsgruppen der Verbände und der Ministerialbürokratien, die einerseits durch Herkunft aus ähnlichen Bildungsgängen, langjährige persönliche Bekanntschaft, wechselseitigen Respekt und übereinstimmenden Informationsstand zur Entwicklung von Kompromissstrategien disponiert sind.28 und andererseits ihrer verbandlichen Basis (bzw. parlamentarischer oder parteipolitischer Kontrolle) weit genug entrückt sind, um abseits des Blicks der Öffentlichkeit „konstruktiv“ miteinander reden und dabei eine gewisse Empathie für die „essentials“ der jeweils anderen Seite entwickeln zu können. Freilich sind die so zustande kommenden interorganisatorischen Kommunikationsnetze von delikater Natur und können durch Brüskierungen. Indiskretionen, Skandale, spektakuläre gerichtliche Auseinandersetzungen oder schlichten Generationswechsel abrupt blockiert werden. Wichtiger ist wohl ein anderer Punkt. Kooperative Lösungsanstrengungen für Makro-Probleme werden im Dreieck zwischen Staat, Gewerkschaften und Investoren bzw. Arbeitgebern umso eher zustande kommen, je gleichmäßiger die beteiligten kollektiven Akteure von ungelöst bleibenden Systemproblemen selbst betroffen werden, und je sensitiver und berücksichtigungsfähiger sie daher für diese Probleme allesamt sind. Alle müssen tatsächlich „im selben Boot sitzen“. Diese Bedingung trifft nun aber in arbeitsmarkt-, beschäftigungs- und sozialpolitischen Zusammenhängen gerade auf diejenige Seite in auffälligem Maße nicht zu, welche die Metapher von dem Boot, in dem wir alle sitzen, bisweilen in den Rang einer Verbandsphilosophie gehoben hat – nämlich die Arbeitgeberseite. Nur wenig vergröbernd kann man sagen, dass es schlechterdings unerfindlich ist, aus welchen Gründen die Arbeitgeberseite an einem hohen und stabilen Beschäftigungsstand interessiert sein und dementsprechend den Zustand anhaltender Massenarbeitslosigkeit nebst ihren Folgeproblemen für das System der wohlfahrtsstaatlichen sozialen Sicherung für ein auch ihsary condition, for they do no more than translate it into another language and, so to speak, consecrate it. Thus, the brain does not make the unity of the organism, but expresses and completes it […] The parts must be already solidary with one another for the whole to take conscience of itself and react in this way. Else, as work is divided, one would see a sort of progressive decomposition produced, not only at certain points, but throughout the society, instead of the ever stronger concentration that we really observe.“ 28 Vgl. als vorzügliche Untersuchung der Funktionsweise der österreichischen Sozialpartnerschaft B. Marin, Die paritätische Kommission. Aufgeklärter Technokorporatismus in Österreich, Wien 1982.

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ren Verantwortungssinn herausforderndes Systemproblem halten sollte. Denn offenkundig konditioniert hohe Arbeitslosigkeit auf betrieblicher Ebene gesteigerte Arbeitsproduktivität, auf tariflicher Ebene gemäßigte Lohnforderungen und vor allem auf politischer Ebene strikte Prioritäten für eine investitionsfreundliche Wirtschaftspolitik.29 Abgesehen von vagen, aber ersichtlich weitgehend gegenstandslosen Befürchtungen über eine Infragestellung des politisch-ökonomischen Systems gibt es demgemäß auf Arbeitgeberseite kaum Anlass, das Problem einer anhaltenden Beschäftigungskrise als „Systemproblem“ ernst zu nehmen – statt es als ein für die eigenen kollektiven Interessen nicht ganz unwillkommenes „Problem der anderen Seite“ zu behandeln. Zumindest sinkt aus dieser Sicht der beschäftigungs- und sozialpolitische Problemsektor in den Rang eines sekundären, nur mittelbar, d. h. im Gefolge erneut ansteigenden wirtschaftlichen Wachstums lösbaren Problems ab. Ich sehe hierin den wohl wichtigsten Beleg für die Tatsache einer auf die sozialen Klassen und Gruppen höchst ungleich verteilten „Schmerzempfindlichkeit“ für Systemprobleme, die mithin als solche keineswegs selbstevident sind. Das legt den Schluss nahe, dass der effektive Wirkungsbereich einer korporativen „dezentralen Makro-Steuerung“ sachlich auf das reduziert bleiben wird, was tatsächlich alle beteiligten Seiten als Systemproblem zu adoptieren bereit sind. Mit der Klassenstruktur hängt auch ein weiteres Bedenken zusammen. Es bezieht sich auf die Tatsache einer asymmetrischen Verpflichtungsfähigkeit im Verhältnis zwischen den Verbänden von Arbeit und Kapital.30 Wenn man die korporatistische Bearbeitung von Makro-Problemen als einen Tausch modelliert, in dem sich zwei oder mehr Seiten wechselseitig dazu verpflichten, im gemeinschaftlichen Interesse am Bestand eines Systems Zug um Zug gewisse Opfer zu leisten und sich Beschränkungen aufzuerlegen. dann wird klar, dass das Zu­ standekommen eines solchen Tausches von der reziproken Gewissheit abhängt, dass auch die jeweils andere Seite verlässlich „ihren Beitrag leisten“ wird. Ohne diese wechselseitige Gewissheit über den Tausch von Opfern besteht das Risiko, man werde schließlich allein geopfert haben, und also ein Motiv, das eigene Opfer für ebenso sinnlos wie unzumutbar zu halten. Genau dies ist aber die Problemlage in einkommens- und beschäftigungspolitischen Zusammenhängen: Es kann weder theoretisch noch moralisch-institutionell sichergestellt werden, dass die Opfer der einen Seite (etwa in Gestalt einer „verantwortlichen“ und zurückhaltenden Lohnforderung) von der anderen Seite (etwa in Gestalt von zusätzlicher Beschäf-

29 Vgl. C. Offe, „Perspektiven auf die Zukunft des Arbeitsmarktes“, Merkur 1983, S. 489 – ​504. 30 Vgl. Offe u. Wiesenthal.

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tigung bzw. dem Verzicht auf Preiserhöhungen) auch honoriert wird.31 Investi­ tions-, Beschäftigungs- und Preisentscheidungen der Unternehmen sind ja deren privatautonome und marktgesteuerte Angelegenheit, für die deren Verbände über kein Verhandlungsmandat verfügen. Nichts und niemand kann daher garantieren, dass die Gegenleistung tatsächlich erbracht wird. Ein Spiel, für welches dies zutrifft, unterliegt offensichtlich der Regel, dass derjenige mit Sicherheit verliert, der sich länger als der andere an die Regeln hält. Ein solches Spiel wird allenfalls Zustandekommen, wenn der Einsatz nahe Null ist. Sein Zustandekommen wird aber bereits dann scheitern, wenn Gegenleistungen erst nach einer ungewiss langen Zeit eintreten und/oder nicht den Charakter von erkennbaren eigenen Opfern, sondern lediglich den eines Verzichts auf steigende Opfer der anderen Seite haben. Letzteres wäre der Fall, wenn die Arbeitgeberseite sich als Leistung zugute­hielte, dass die Beschäftigungslage zwar nicht besser, aber jedenfalls nicht noch schlechter geworden sei. Ein ausgebliebener Verlust ist kein Gewinn, der zuverlässig zur Fortsetzung des Spiels motivieren könnte. Damit ist bereits die Frage der konjunkturellen Rahmenbedingungen einer Steuerung durch korporatistische Verhandlungssysteme berührt. Solange plausibel zu machen ist. dass praktizierter Gemeinsinn und Verantwortungsbereitschaft sich in einer zwar ex ante nicht kalkulierbaren, ex post aber durchaus denkbaren Weise „lohnt“, man mit den Systemproblemen also auch die jeweils eigenen mittelbar bearbeitet und die Opfer zumindest im erträglichen Rahmen bleiben, mag sich der Bestand eines solchen Steuerungssystems von den positiven Erfahrungen nähren, die es laufend erzeugt. Das Gegenteil wäre für die Bedingungen eines Negativsummen-Spiels vorauszusehen, etwa für anhaltende Wachstumskrisen. Die Bereitschaft zu verantwortlichem, die Kriterien des Systemgleichgewichts im Auge behaltenden Handeln würde dann den Flankenschutz seiner auch inter­ essenpolitischen Rationalität einbüßen und – im Binnenverhältnis wie im Verhältnis zwischen Verbänden – weniger zuverlässig werden. Dies würde auf die paradoxe Folge hinauslaufen, dass korporatistische Abstimmungsmechanismen gerade dann sich zurückbilden und strikt pluralistisch-interessenpolitischen Strategien der Verbände Platz machen, wenn die Rationalität solcher Abstimmungsmechanismen am dringendsten für die Bewältigung krisenhafter Systemzustände benötigt würde. Die Möglichkeit einer solchen Paradoxie wird von funktionalistischen sozialwissenschaftlichen Argumentationsfiguren systematisch unterschätzt, insofern diese unterstellen, dass ordnungspolitische Arrangements, deren steue31 Welche organisationsinternen Spannungen sich bei Gewerkschaften aus dem Mangel an Reziprozität ergeben, diskutiert sehr instruktiv am Beispiel Italiens M. Regini, „Gewerkschaftliche Klassenpolitik u. die Repräsentationskrise der Arbeitnehmerorganisation“, Leviathan 10 (1982): 376 – ​91.

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rungstechnische Überlegenheit sich mit guten empirischen und theoretischen Argumenten postulieren lässt, schon deswegen auch als Handlungsnormen der beteiligten kollektiven und individuellen Akteure akzeptiert und befolgt werden.32 Die bloße Funktionsfähigkeit korporatistischer Muster der Steuerung wird eine entsprechende Praxis umso weniger motivieren können, als es keine förmliche Garantie dafür gibt, dass das bloß faktisch bestehende Geflecht von Austausch-, Kommunikations- und Kooperationsbeziehungen auch wirklich den Charakter einer dauerhaften, von Verhandlungsrunde zu Verhandlungsrunde fortbestehenden Einrichtung hat. Die Regeln des bisher Üblichen können morgen schon zum Vorteil dessen aufgekündigt werden, der zuerst „aussteigt“. Was sollte ihn daran hindern ? Auf diese Frage sind im Wesentlichen zwei nicht sehr starke Antworten geboten und empirisch plausibel gemacht worden. Zum einen: Eine starke sozialdemokratische Hegemonie, die in der Tat mit der relativen Stabilität korporatistischer Problemlösungsverfahren in den betreffenden Ländern (Österreich, Bundesrepublik, Schweden, Norwegen, Niederlande, zum Teil Großbritannien) einhergeht.33 Für diesen Zusammenhang bietet sich die naheliegende Erklärung an, dass die für die Arbeitnehmerseite mit partnerschaftlichen Strategien verbundenen Risiken notfalls immer noch seitens der sozialdemokratischen Regierungspolitik abgefangen, erträglich gehalten oder kompensiert werden können. Damit verschiebt sich das Problem aber nur auf die Frage nach der Kontinuität einer solchen Hegemonie. Zum anderen: Die glaubwürdige Androhung staatlicher Interventionen, die als für alle Beteiligten „zweitbeste“ Lösung und somit als ein Damokles-Schwert oder als „Rute im Fenster“34 über das Verhandlungssystem gehängt wird und auf diese Weise einen heilsamen Kooperations- und Einigungszwang auf die potentiell betroffenen korporativen Akteure ausübt, Als Beispiele hierfür werden Entwicklungen in der Berufsbildungs- und Umweltschutzpolitik angeführt. Dieser Gedanke löst jedoch nur die Anschlussfrage aus, für wie lange Zeit eine solche Drohung effektiv bleiben kann bzw. wann die in Reserve gehaltenen Instrumente staatlicher Intervention durch Nichtbenutzung einrosten und damit aufhören, von den Beteiligten als eine zu vermeidende Eventualität ernstgenommen zu werden.

32 Vgl. den Kommentar d. Verf. zu entsprechenden Überlegungen von W. Streeck, Interessenverbände, ebd., S. 199 – ​206. 33 Dazu M. Schmidt, „Does Corporatism matter ? Economic Crisis, Politics and Rates of Unemployment in Capitalist Democracies in the 1970s“, in: Lehmbruch u. Schmitter, S.  237 – ​58. 34 Vgl. Marin.

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„Räte-Kapitalismus“ ? Das funktionalistische Argument, dass korporative Strukturen einer dezentralen Makro-Steuerung aus einer Reihe von Gründen die steuerungstechnisch überlegene und problemadäquate Lösung für das Versagen von Markt und Staat sind, weil sie die Regelung von Verteilungskonflikten rationalisieren und Kollektivgutprobleme berücksichtigen können, lässt den normativen Gehalt solcher Strukturen völlig im Dunkeln. Dass ein Design gute Aussichten hat, vergleichsweise befriedigend zu funktionieren, ist nicht selbst schon ein zureichender Grund, es auch für normativ wünschenswert zu halten, zu adoptieren und auf Dauer beizubehalten. Natürlich kann man sich dazu durchringen, demokratietheoretische Vorstellungen über den Vorrang der territorialen über die funktionale Repräsentation bzw. über die höhere Legitimität hoheitlicher Staatsregulierung gegenüber korporativer Selbstregulierung für vollends gescheitert und normativ obsolet zu erklären, um dann nur noch die List zu bewundern, mit der ein System sich über seine eigenen konstitutiven, aber unsachgemäß gewordenen Normen hinweg­gesetzt hat. „Ist der Funktionsverlust der Parlamente durch eine mehr oder weniger eingestandene Kollusion von Administration und Spitzenverbänden längst offensichtlich und auch akzeptiert“, dann bilden sich eben „deshalb Zusatzeinrichtungen der Interessenmediatisierung, Konsensbildung und Systemintegration“ korporatistischer Art aus. Nur fragt sich, welche normativen Gehalte des demokratischen Verfassungsstaates auf der Strecke bleiben, wenn „die List der Gesellschaft den Staat entzaubert“.35 Die nach dem Modell der korporatistischen Steuerung funktionierende, mit sich selbst kurzgeschlossene Gesellschaft entlastet den Staat von zentralen Steuerungsaufgaben, macht ihn zu einem Verhandlungspartner unter anderen und setzt seine Aufgabe zu der einer residualen Regulierung herab. Damit wird aber eine ganze Kategorie von Möglichkeiten der Gesellschaft, vermittels politischer Herrschaft auf sich selbst und ihre Entwicklung einzuwirken, hinfällig. Das normative Bezugsproblem der Demokratietheorie besteht ja darin, dass politische Institutionen und Prozesse am Maßstab ihrer Fähigkeit zu messen sind, gesellschaftliche Emanzipation zu verbürgen und zu vermitteln. Diese Aufgabe erfüllt der demokratische Staat in zwei Stoßrichtungen, und dort jeweils in einer „defensiven“ und einer „konstruktiven“ Variante. Defensiv ist die institutionell gesicherte Abwehr von und der Schutz vor zunächst politischem Machtmissbrauch (liberale Freiheitsrechte), dann gesellschaftlichem und ökonomischem Machtgebrauch (soziale Grundrechte und Wohlfahrtsstaat). Konstruktiv dagegen ist die Perspektive, aus der die öffentliche Gewalt nicht nur in Schranken gehalten und gebändigt, sondern ge­rade 35 Willke, S. 140, 144.

Korporatismus als System nichtstaatlicher Makrosteuerung ? 99

in den Dienst verallgemeinerungsfähiger Wohlfahrtsinteressen gestellt werden soll, und aus der ganz analog das Kapital nicht nur an öffentlicher Machtausübung gehindert, sondern auf ein positives Entwicklungsprojekt („Gemeinwohldienlichkeit“) festgelegt werden soll. Im Sinne dieser Perspektive sind politische Herrschaft und ökonomische Macht also nicht nur Faktoren möglicher Bedrohung, sondern unverzichtbare Ressourcen eines wie auch immer vorgestellten, eben demokratisch zu bestimmenden Fortschritts- und Entwicklungsprojekts. Nun würde eine Prüfung der Institutionen und Prozesse der auf Parteienkonkurrenz beruhenden Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik anhand dieser Kriterien sicher zu Ergebnissen führen, die in allen vier Punkten zu Enttäuschung Anlass geben. Man mag Anstoß nehmen an der Unzulänglichkeit der Vorkehrungen, die den Bürger gegen Übergriffe des Staates auf seine Freiheitssphäre schützen sollen, und ebenso an der höchst lückenhaften politischen Neutralisierung ökonomischer Machtverhältnisse. Erst recht konzentriert sich die Kritik der politischen Theorie auf das Versagen von Parteien und Parlamenten vor ihrer Aufgabe, die Ressourcen staatlicher Herrschaft für eine demokratisch legitimierte gesellschaftliche Entwicklungsperspektive zu programmieren, und mehr noch auf die durch Garantie privater Investitionshoheit blockierte Chance, die materiellen Ressourcen der Gesellschaft in den Dienst einer solchen Entwicklungsperspektive zu stellen. Aber selbst extreme Varianten der Kritik, die diesem Muster folgt, bieten keinen zureichenden Anlass, das Projekt einer über den demokratischen Staat vermittelten Einwirkung der Gesellschaft auf sich selbst zugunsten eines Steuerungsmodus fallenzulassen, in dessen Rahmen dergleichen normative Kriterien nicht nur nicht erfüllt, sondern nicht einmal mehr als Erinnerungsposten mitgeführt werden. Was das erste Kriterium angeht, so nehmen Empfehlungen zugunsten eines korporatistischen Modus der wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischen Entscheidungsproduktion freilich manchmal beiläufig ein antietatistisch-libertäres Freiheitspathos in Anspruch und rühmen sich, die Regulierungsprobleme unter Vermeidung exzessiver staatlicher „Gängelung“, Bevormundung und Verrechtlichung bewältigen zu können. Ein solcher Vorzug würde freilich wegen des in­formellen, verfahrensmäßig unstrukturierten Vollzuges der Regelung durch verbandsautono­ me Verhandlungssysteme mit einem wesentlichen Verlust an Informations- und Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten, an liberaler Öffentlichkeit also, bezahlt und außerdem noch, da das Modell ohne massive interne Verpflichtungsfähigkeit der Verbände nicht funktionieren kann, mit einer Beeinträchtigung der inneren Freiheitsrechte der „Verbandsbürger“. Was zweitens die in der demokratischen politischen Theorie36 postulierte Neutralisierung der auf Eigentum beruhenden gesellschaftlichen Machtverhältnisse 36 Vgl. als moderne Präzisierung dieses Arguments R. A. Dahl, „On Removing Certain Imped-

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angeht, so werden im Rahmen des Korporatismus solche Machtquellen nicht nur nicht suspendiert, sondern geradezu festgeschrieben und mit der Kompetenz ausgestattet, nach Maßgabe ihrer funktionalen Relevanz für sozialökonomische Prozesse und Entwicklungen an faktisch bindenden öffentlichen Regulierungen mitzuwirken. Je mehr das Prinzip der territorialen Repräsentation durch funktionale Repräsentation ergänzt und verdrängt wird, desto mehr wird zwangsläufig die Norm staatsbürgerlicher Gleichheit von der Tatsache wirtschaftsbürgerlicher Ungleichheit in Mitleidenschaft gezogen. Zwar mag die Kompetenz und Sachkunde einer Debatte, die im Kreis der unmittelbar Betroffenen geführt wird, wegen dieser Exklusivität durchaus steigen; umso leichter wird es ihnen aber umgekehrt dann auch fallen, im Kreise der mangels Zuständigkeit bzw. eigener Organisations- und Konfliktfähigkeit ausgeschlossenen Gruppen diejenigen ausfindig zu machen, die dann mit den Kosten der gefundenen Kompromisse belastet werden können. Dabei mag im Zuge solcher Problemlösungen durchaus die Konfliktlinie zwischen Arbeit und Kapital verwischt und im Namen einer produktivistischen Lagermentalität eine Koalition gegen die Interessen außenstehender Dritter (Verbraucher, Arbeitslose usw.) aufgebaut werden. Dies ändert aber nichts an der Tatsache, dass eine im Vergleich zu den Formen territorialer Repräsentation wesentlich schär­fere soziale und auch sachliche Exklusion zustande kommt, die durch eben jene Kriterien sozialökonomischer Macht gesteuert ist, die vom demokratischen Gleichheitsprinzip gerade neutralisiert werden sollte. Diese Bedingungen würden auch – drittens – das Kriterium der politischen Programm- und Gestaltungsfähigkeit negativ berühren müssen. Reformpolitische Initiativen, die in ihrem Wirkungsradius über die unmittelbaren Verteilungsinter­ essen scharf abgegrenzter Berufs- und Wirtschaftsgruppen hinausgehen, werden sich schwerlich aus Verhandlungssystemen ergeben können, deren Partner nur für die Vertretung dieser Interessen über ein Mandat verfügen. In dem Maße, wie die staatliche Politik, etwa aus Gründen mangelnder eigener Kompetenz und Sachkunde, Zuständigkeiten an gesellschaftliche Akteure delegiert, sie mit Kompetenzen beleiht und in gewissen Grenzen zu autonomen Regulierungstätigkeiten autorisiert, mag zwar (im günstigen Falle) die Rationalität der so entwickelten Selbstregulierung steigen, aber gleichzeitig schrumpft der Spielraum zusammen, in dem überhaupt Regelungen gefunden werden können. Denn es ist ja nicht zu erwarten, dass aus solchen Verhandlungssystemen Regelungen hervorgehen, die im Ergebnis einem der beteiligten Akteure einen Status quo minus bescheren würden;37 eher käme es zum Rückzug der betreffenden Verbände aus den biiments to Democracy in the United States“, in: I. Howe (Hg.), Beyond the Welfare State, New York 1982. sowie jüngst J. Cohen u. J. Rogers, On Democracy, New York 1983. 37 Wiesenthal, a. a. O.

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oder multilateralen Verhandlungssystemen, mit der Folge, dass zwar keine etatistisch-„unsachlichen“, dafür aber überhaupt keine Lösungen gefunden würden, sondern die Dynamik der Interaktion auf das Rationalitätsniveau von Marktprozessen zurückfiele. Wenn staatliche Souveränität als eine Ressource, als ein bedeutendes Instrument der gestaltenden und reformierenden Einwirkung der Gesellschaft auf sich selbst verstanden werden darf, dann geht diese Ressource in dem Maße verloren, wie man vor den zweifellos enormen Schwierigkeiten ihrer rationalen Verwendung kapituliert und die Kontrolle über ihren Einsatz an gesellschaftliche Subsysteme abtritt, in deren Händen sie, sei es gegen partikular inter­ essierte Verwendung, sei es gegen Kooperationsverweigerung und Sabotage nicht unempfindlich ist. Am wenigsten ist zu erwarten, und dies bezieht sich auf das vierte der oben genannten Kriterien einer (zugegebenermaßen normativ anspruchsvollen) Demokratietheorie, dass durch die Abtretung von Teilen der staatlichen Regelungskompetenz an gesellschaftliche Verbände, die dadurch den Charakter „privater Regierungen“ gewinnen, das auf sozialökonomischen Differenzen beruhende gesellschaftliche Machtgefälle eingeebnet oder neutralisiert wird. Eine korporatistische Ordnungspolitik, die im Namen der angeblich höheren Rationalität verbandlicher Selbstregulierung die „Zuständigen“ zu Beteiligten macht, muss deren Interessenpositionen und Machtressourcen zunächst einmal anerkennen und festschreiben, ehe sie sich ein einvernehmliches Zusammenwirken dieser gesellschaftlichen Akteure erhoffen kann. Das bedeutet umgekehrt, dass sie auf Politik­ ziele Verzicht leisten muss, welche eine Umverteilung oder Neuallokation von Machtmitteln auf die gesellschaftlichen Akteure zur Voraussetzung oder zur Folge hätten. Ob dann auf diesem Wege überhaupt ein Interessenausgleich zustande kommt, und in welchem Maße bzw. auf welche „Dritten“ die dafür entstehenden Kosten dann externalisiert werden, das alles könnte in einem rein korporatistischen Modus dezentraler Makro-Steuerung keinerlei politischer Kontrolle mehr unterworfen werden. Das Standard-Argument, mit dem derartige normativ begründete Vorbehalte abgewiesen werden, ist ein funktionalistisches. Es lässt sich auf den Gedanken reduzieren, dass die außerordentliche Leistungsfähigkeit korporatistischer Formen der Regulierung, also ihre Effizienz, Anpassungsfähigkeit, ihr vergleichsweise geringer Zeitverbrauch, ihr direkter Anschluss an Sachkunde und Urteilsvermögen der Beteiligten sowie die relative Konfliktarmut der so zustande kommenden Regulierung Vorteile seien, welche die demokratietheoretisch begründbaren Defi­ zite mehr als aufwögen.38

38 Vgl. Streeck, und den dort abgedruckten Kommentar des Verf.

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Was an diesem Argument empirisch haltbar ist, ist oben erörtert worden. Aber was wäre, wenn die dort vertretene skeptische Einschätzung sich als gänzlich gegenstandslos erwiese, und die Bedingungen des Entstehens bzw. des krisen-immu­ nen Fortbestehens korporatistischer Arrangements als gegeben angesehen werden könnten ? Für diesen, freilich nicht besonders wahrscheinlichen Fall würde man offensichtlich auf die Annahme angewiesen sein, dass bei aller zuzugestehender Bedeutung einer erwiesenen und überlegenen Funktionsfähigkeit es sich politische Systeme schwerlich leisten können, an den sie konstituierenden normativen Prinzipien und Rechtfertigungsmodellen auf die Dauer gleichsam „vorbei“ zu funktionieren. Eine vollends zur Normalität gewordene Praxis korporatistischer Regulierung „would require justification on quite different principles from those which underly parliaments based on universal suffrage. Part of the justification would be in terms of results, but the fact that Mussolini got Italian trains to run on time has never vindicated Italian fascism. The basis on which we as citizens can justify giving what amounts to a double vote to economic producers cannot rest solely on performance. If we are to call the institution ‚democratic‘, than legitimacy must be given or withheld on democratic grounds.“39 Daraus wäre zumindest zu folgern, dass sich in Gesellschaften, die ihren politischen Regulierungsbedarf zunehmend auf derartigen „halboffiziellen“ Wegen abwickeln, ein erheblicher Bedarf an politisch-theoretischen Fortschreibungen, Revisionen und Umdeutungen ihrer demokratischen Legitimationsprinzipien einstellt; ihre politischen Institutionen würden sonst die Grundlagen ihrer eigenen Anerkennung verschleißen. Solche Revisionen müssten, sofern sie nicht nur in der „realistischen“ Verabschiedung angeblich unrealistisch gewordener normativer Gehalte der Demokratietheorie bestehen sollen, deren Geltung auf die neuen, partiell „entstaatlichten“ Formen kollektiver Regulierung auszudehnen suchen. Natürlich entfiele ein großer Teil der zuletzt genannten, von der Per­spektive einer normativen Demokratietheorie aus vorgetragenen Einwände dann, wenn eine effektive Gleichverteilung gesellschaftlicher Machtressourcen zwischen Arbeit und Kapital, Professionellen und Klienten, Anbietern und Verbrauchern usw. schon unterstellt werden könnte. Eine derartige „Waffengleichheit“ wird oft postuliert,40 aber selten überzeugend nachgewiesen. Normalerweise verlässt man sich auf die Annahme, dass die gesellschaftliche Macht des Eigentums durch eine auf Organisation beruhende „countervailing power“ ausgeglichen werde. Diese Konstruktion ist nicht überzeugend. Erstens deshalb nicht, weil keineswegs auszuschließen ist. dass Eigentümer besondere Organisationsvorteile bzw. Nicht-Ei39 A. Cawson, Corporatism and Welfare. Social Policy and State Intervention in Britain, London 1982. S. 110. 40 So auch Böckenförde.

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gentümer typische Organisationsprobleme haben, der Mangel der einen Machtressource folglich nicht durch den Gebrauch der anderen einfach kompensiert werden kann.41 Zum anderen deshalb nicht, weil ähnlich wie bei militärstrategischen Kräftevergleichen eine situationsunabhängige Bestimmung von „Äquivalenz“ oder „Nicht-Äquivalenz“ gar nicht möglich ist, sondern nur „szenarioabhängig“42 durchgeführt werden kann. Man müsste also wissen, wie ein konkreter Konfliktfall gelagert ist, um die Frage der Äquivalenz der Verhandlungspartner beurteilen zu können. Aber es bleibt richtig und einzuräumen, dass unter der Voraussetzung situationsabhängig nachgewiesener Kräfte-Äquivalenz ein wichtiger Teil der demokratietheoretisch motivierten Einwände gegen korporatistische Verhandlungssysteme entfallen würde. Auch wenn in diesem Punkte ein positiver Nachweis gelänge, bliebe davon die Frage nach dem Kreis der „Teilnahmeberechtigten“ ungelöst, die in auf funktionaler Repräsentation beruhende Verhandlungssysteme einzubeziehen wären. Dieses Problem lässt sich am hypothetischen Beispiel eines „Beschäftigungspakts“ zwischen den Tarifparteien illustrieren: Solange die aktuell Arbeitslosen – aber warum nicht auch die erst demnächst in den Arbeitsmarkt Eintretenden ? – am Zustandekommen eines derartigen Abkommens nicht beteiligt sind, wäre zu erwarten, dass das Abkommen lediglich beschäftigungssichernde, nicht aber -steigernde Effekte hätte und folglich die Kosten der Arbeitslosigkeit umso wirksamer auf Dritte externalisiert würden. Aber wie ließe sich solche „Vollständigkeit“ gewährleisten ? Offensichtlich nicht nur durch institutionelle Garantie des Verhandlungssystems, seiner Teilnehmer und sachlichen Zuständigkeiten selbst, sondern darüber hinaus durch die Gewährung von Organisationshilfen für diejenigen, die (wie die Arbeitslosen) zur Ausbildung eigener Organe funktionaler Repräsentation typischerweise nicht in der Lage sind. Bevor eine diesem Prinzip der „Vollständigkeit“ der Beteiligung genügende dezentrale Makro-Steuerung einsetzen könnte, müssten mithin die entsprechenden Verhandlungssysteme erst einmal (etwa nach dem Muster eines Wirtschafts- und Sozialrats oder des vorläufigen Reichswirtschaftsrates der Weimarer Verfassung) „verfasst“ sein, – womit dann freilich ein guter Teil der offenbar gerade auf ihrer Unvollständigkeit beruhenden Steuerungsvorteile, die Flexibilität ihrer parakonstitutionellen Einigungsfähigkeit, wieder verlorenginge. Entkräftet würde schließlich ein Teil der vorstehenden Bedenken gewiss auch dadurch, dass man das bestehende Nebeneinander, die konkurrierende Zustän41 Vgl. Schmitter u. Streeck, S.  95 – ​114. 42 So D. S. Lutz, Zur Methodologie militärischer Kräftevergleiche. Anmerkungen zu einem sicherheitspolitischen Instrument unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Nuklearwaffen in u. für Europa, in: Politische Vierteljahresschrift 23. 1982, S. 22.

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digkeit von funktional-korporatistischen und territorial-parlamentarischen Mechanismen der Regulierung hervorhebt, wie es in den idealtypischen Darstellungen des „liberalen“ oder „Neo“-Korporatismus auch regelmäßig geschieht. Auf eine solche Balance zwischen beiden Typen der Regulierung wäre aber nur dann einiger Verlass, wenn klar wäre, was sie daran hindern sollte, in Richtung auf eine fortschreitende Aushöhlung staatlicher Regelungskompetenz zugunsten korporatistischer Regelung umzukippen. Ein solcher begrenzender oder balancierender Mechanismus ist jedoch weder in der Praxis der an Symptomen von Finanzkrise und „Unregierbarkeit“ laborierenden demokratischen politischen Systeme noch in den theoretischen Konstruktionen derer zu erkennen, welche die korporatistischen Arrangements für den steuerungstechnisch überlegenen Ausweg aus eben jenen Krisenlagen eines vermeintlich „hypertrophierten“ Etatismus halten.

5

“Homogeneity” and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights ? (1998)

In this article I explore some ancient issues of political theory in the light of some contemporary social and cultural issues. After developing a check list of the virtues and vulnerabilities of constitutional democracy (Section I), I go on to discuss some types and symptoms of difference, conflict, fragmentation and heterogeneity (Section II). I then proceed to a critical review of a particular set of strategies and institutional solutions – political group rights – that are often thought promising devices for strengthening the virtues and overcoming the vulnerabilities of the constitutional democratic form of regime (Section III). Much of the contemporary philosophical and political discussion of these issues is enchanted by the post-modern spirit of “multiculturalism,” “diversity” and “identity.” It tends to neglect issues of citizenship and social justice. It also tends to fixate on North American examples, neglecting some of the less benign West European and, in particular, Central East European varieties of identity politics.1 The discussion here, while mostly raising questions rather than claiming to provide definitive answers, nevertheless tries to overcome some of these biases.

I

Virtues and vulnerabilities of constitutional democracy

To start with some basics, a state is the coincidence of three things. First, the concept of a state (or “country”) refers to a fixed territory. This territory is defined by borders recognized by neighboring states, as well as by other members of the international community. Even in the special case of island states where borders are defined by (salt) water, these borders, nevertheless, also need to be recognized by other states; or, failing that, the island state must be able to defend its territorial in1

Cf. Offe 1996, Ch. 4.

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_5

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tegrity against attempted moves by other states to occupy or conquer it (as in the ongoing conflict between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan). Thus territories, in order to serve as the material foundation of statehood, must be based upon agreements and the internationally binding recognition of borders. Second, the concept of a state presupposes that the territory is inhabited by a population, the state’s “people” forming a nation. Largely empty land, such as Antarctica, is not suitable for supporting a state, if only because there is nobody to defend it and virtually nobody to be defended. Third, the concept of the. state presupposes a constituted government, or sovereign authority. Such authority is supposed to be superior to any other political authorities or social powers within the territory, as well as being capable of asserting itself against foreign interference. In short, a state is the coincidence of a country, a nation and a regime. The problem with these three constituent elements of a state is that they are, in a specific sense, “contingent.” That is to say, they are the outcome of historical events and developmental trends. They originate, among other things, from climatic and physical features of the territory that make it inhabitable and resource-rich, from migration and other demographic trends, wars, dynastic politics, military occupation, conquest, revolutions, contracts of international law and the like. In other words, states are in all three of their aspects the accumulated sediment of history. Negatively, that means that democratic politics (that is, politics determined by egalitarian mass participation and elite accountability within the framework of constitutionally fixed rights and procedures) cannot determine the constituent features of a state. All three components of a state must be in place before any specific form of regime, including the democratic one, can possibly begin to operate. Next, constitutional democracy. There are a number of valuable accomplishments that constitutional democracies are often credited with. If we ask the (uncommon)2 question of what democracy is “good for” and what makes it preferable to other regime forms, we would come up with four cumulative answers. First, there is the “liberal” accomplishment. Rights and liberties are guaranteed and a clear line of demarcation is thereby drawn between what can be contingent upon the outcome of the political process and the conflicts of interest entering into it, and what cannot be the object of such conflict because it is constitutionally entrenched. As a consequence of both rights and procedures being thus guaranteed, democracies make for a non-violent, limited and civilized character of political conflict and incremental change. Second, there is the “international” accomplishment. The “democratic peace” hypothesis posits that democracies will not 2

Cf. Schmitter and Karl 1991.

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wage war against other democracies. Third is a “social progress” accomplishment. Since democracies rest upon majority rule, and majorities are typically made up of those who do not enjoy economic privilege and social power, and since democratic state power is in fact able to affect the size and distribution of economic resources (through, for example, promoting growth, progressive taxation and social security) in non-marginal ways, therefore democracies will normally work to serve the interests of the less fortunate segments of the population, thereby promoting “positive” or “social” rights and prosperity and social justice more generally. Finally, there is the “republican” accomplishment. “Subjects” are transformed into “citizens” – agents committed to and capable of employing their cognitive and moral resources in deliberative and intelligent ways so as to solve political problems, according to a logic of collective learning, and eventually striving to serve the “public good.” There are of course a number of conditions which must be fulfilled in order for democracies to do all those good things (or at least to do them more consistently and reliably than any alternative regime-form). For instance, there must be a solid and widely shared support for the democratic regime form, emanating from a democratic political culture. There must be an actual possibility of controlling, through the means of democratic politics, parameters and conditions of social life (such as the means of production and the means of violence) which are crucial for the protection of liberty and the promotion of social progress, with no “reserved domains” standing in the way of such political control.3 There must be a judiciary and an administrative system that actually implements democratically legitimated laws and policies, without either violating the rights of citizens or being overly (or corruptly) “sensitive” to some economic or military “de facto powers” or subservient to the corporate self-interest of the state bureaucracy itself. But all that is well known and therefore need not be of any further concern in the present context. Those are the (evidently, I submit, highly desirable) accomplishments that we have come to associate with, and expect from, the democratic form of government, at least as a realistic possibility. There are also, however, a number of democratic impossibilities: matters which, by their very logic, cannot be resolved in democratic ways. If we ask what democracies cannot do – and what hence, in case it needs to be done, must be done by methods other than democratic procedures – four things come to mind. First, the democratic form of government cannot be brought into being by democratic means. This is almost a matter of logic. The pouvoir constituant is prior to and unconstrained by the democratic principles which govern a democratic regime once it is established. The agents governing that pouvoir constituant may 3 Linz and Stepan 1996.

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well be, and as a rule are, inspired by democratic beliefs and values. Yet the “initial framework in which democratically legitimated power is to be created is not enacted democratically.”4 Moreover, all democracies appear to have non-democratic roots – be it a coup d’état, a democratic popular movement, round-table talks, a regime breakdown, an occupation regime, a war of independence or whatever. This observation is less trivial than it may seem, as this feature of non-democratic origin may later be held against the democratic regime itself, as an alleged “birth defect” or self-contradiction. It can be denounced, as by the far right under the Weimar Republic, as owing its existence not to its inherent qualities but rather to a “stab in the back” of the old regime, or to the exploitation of its weakness or defeat, thus being a coup as much as any other imposition of a regime form. Furthermore, nascent democracies are not state-founding but merely regime-transforming, a limiting case being the transformation of a former colony into an independent democratic state. Democracies cannot establish states, but they impose new forms upon preexisting non-democratic states upon whose previous existence they are parasitic – also in the sense that the experience of authoritarian rule, with its systematic denial of liberties, may nurture the aspirations and resolve for a transition to democracy.5 In these two senses, democracies are by necessity heirs of nondemocracies: they owe their existence to an antecedent non-democratic state and, as I just pointed out, to a non-democratic process of overthrowing the regime form of this non-democratic state. Furthermore, not only are democracies unable to bring themselves into being: they are also able to undo themselves. That is to say, democracies are ultimately defenseless against movements and anti-democratic elites that use democratic procedures to reinstall an authoritarian regime. Taken together, these considerations lead us to conclude that democracies are unable either to create or reliably to preserve themselves. Democracies are neither self-founding nor self-enforcing.6 Both their origin and their continued existence is a matter of favorable circumstances which are beyond the reach of what can be done through democratic procedures proper. 4 Linz 1996, p. 10. 5 “It is important to stress that democracy is a way to govern a state and that, therefore, in countries where the existence of the state is in question […] it is not possible to talk about a transition to democracy […] To put it simply, no state – no democracy. Stateness [is] a requirement for political democracy” (Linz 1996, pp. 6 – ​7, 9). Incidentally, it is not entirely clear what this means regarding the potential democratic quality of the European Union, which lacks not only a pre-established stateness but also a fixed territorial extension. 6 At best, it might be said that the democratic regime form propagates itself via imitation – arguably in the same way as the nation state spread internationally as a political form during the “spring of the people” throughout nineteenth century continental Europe.

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A second democratic impossibility concerns the scope of the political community which the democratic regime governs. It is democratically impossible for the people to decide or (re)define who belongs to the people (as opposed to who is to be enfranchised within an existing people), either by excluding parts of the population from the citizenship (for example, through ethnic cleansing) or by unilaterally incorporating collectivities that are outside the “given” political ‘community.7 Democratic theory or constitutionalist doctrine do not provide us with good reasons as to why the social extension of the people should be what it empirically is.8 But neither are there good reasons to undo the “arbitrariness” of history that has brought together a number of individuals in a certain territory under a shared regime of citizenship by claiming that “in some cases there are two or more ‘peoples’ in a single country,” as Kymlicka puts it.9 Third, and closely related to the previous point, territorial borders cannot be changed in obviously democratic ways. Again, this applies to moving the borders “inward” (creating borders where there were none before) as much as “outward” (eliminating pre-existing borders at the expense of the territorial base of some other state). The “inward” case is equivalent to secession or separation, while the “outward” case is the military conquest of the territory controlled by other states. Any inward move is bound to lead to procedural deadlock. After all, which constituency is to decide on secession: the majority of the separatist part, the whole, or concurrent majorities of both constituencies ? And which constituency is to decide in the highly likely event of a second-order conflict over these procedural alternatives ? A democracy cannot provide a formula for this kind of conflict, and a broad popular consensus to disunite (and where exactly to draw the line)10 is highly unlikely to emerge, though not logically to be excluded. If the constitutionally unpaved road to an accord reached through inter-group negotiations fails, the most likely outcome is secessionist ambitions and, possibly, civil war. Conversely, it is international war in the “outward” case of territorial change, as there are no populated stateless territories in the modern world. To be sure, international law and treaties provides the instrumentalities that can lead to the fusion of two states (as in the case of German unification); but that is not a matter of democratic

7

Note that the latter case is different from the perfectly normal democratic adoption of immigration laws, because these become effective only after a “foreign” subject has “voluntarily” (that is, in ways other than through the discretion of some domestic authority) declared his/her intent to become part of the domestic citizenry. 8 Cf. Habermas 1996, pp. 139 f. 9 Kymlicka 1996, p. 11. 10 It helps if at least one of the units to be separated is an island, as in the separation of Singapore and Malaysia.

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decision of the constituency of one state, but a matter of an international treaty between two states whereby one or both of them renounce sovereignty. Incidentally, an attempt to “conquer” the territory of another state by unilateral “democratic” decision would be a blatantly self-contradictory act as it would be based on the claim that the people of state A have the right to decide that the people of state B have no right to decide whether or not B-land should become an integral part of A-land. This logic would clearly amount to denying prospective fellowcitizens equal political rights. Finally, the citizenry of a democracy cannot decide on the issues the citizens are to decide on. This is the problem of democratic agenda-setting. The role of the citizens in a democracy is to answer questions, not to formulate and ask the questions that are to be answered by the people. The latter task resides with elites (such as political parties nominating candidates and proposing alternative policy platforms) or, for that matter, with nascent counter-elites (such as the activists of social movements introducing hitherto ignored issues into the arena of politics) or elites of other institutional sectors (such as science, the arts or religion). One may consider this problem to be mitigated by the fact that (at least part of the) elites involved in agenda-setting have themselves been elected and thus given a mandate to ask questions and propose alternatives. But these elites, before being confirmed in their elite role through a democratic vote, have themselves been nominated and promoted to the role of candidacy through forces that are not democratically accountable. Note that this problem cannot be made to disappear through any dose of plebiscitary or “direct democratic” procedural innovations, which in turn would strengthen rather than weaken the role of elite agenda-setters and issue-raisers. To be sure, a strong public sphere within civil society can impose moral pressures upon elite members which they cannot afford, for the sake of maintaining their elite status. to ignore or escape. But even given such pressures, nominating candidates and proposing platforms is not a matter of popular (but at best a matter of intra-party) democracy. Nor can the people decide upon when the people should decide: that (often highly consequential) decision must be made through either elite initiative or a “procedural clock” (such as the statutory periodicity of elections). I have highlighted these four impossibilities and apparent deficiencies of the democratic regime form – the things that democracies cannot do – not in order to cast doubt upon the value and virtue of democracy but, rather, in order to derive the following thesis. The democratic regime form is a viable arrangement (and a promising vehicle for the four accomplishments stated at the beginning) only if, and only as long as, the four things that democracies cannot accomplish do not need to be accomplished. As long as democracies can live and prosper with their inherent deficiencies and incapabilities, these are at best of theoretical concern

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and without widely perceived practical significance. That is to say, we need not be concerned with the viability of the democratic regime form as long as: ■■ the regime form, in spite of its two non-democratic birth defects and its incapacity to effectively foreclose alternative regime forms, is widely accepted and unchallenged; and ■■ the people of a political community recognize each other as legitimately belonging to that political community without any relevant desire to exclude or unilaterally include anyone beyond the existing citizenship and the rights of political participation defined by it; and ■■ borders are accepted as given and lasting, recognized from within as well as by neighbors and the wider international community;11 and ■■ the right and competence of political elites to ask the “right” questions at institutionally determined points in time, to integrate different cleavages into reasonably coherent platforms and to respond to agenda innovations originating with counter-elites remain unchallenged. The viability of democracy is all the more secure if, in addition, that regime form demonstrably excels in doing what it supposedly is uniquely capable of doing, namely, simultaneously promoting liberty, the non-violent resolution of conflict (both domestic and international), social justice and republican virtue. A political community within which all of these positive conditions and none of the negative conditions are fulfilled can be called a “stable” constitutional democracy. Its stability rests on the reflexive homogeneity of the political community.12 It is homogeneous, or synonymously “politically integrated,” because all (or at any rate the vast majority) of the people share a commitment to the state and its democratic regime form, they are tied to their fellow citizens through an understanding of the communality of their fate and the recognition of equal liberties, and they rank these commitments and loyalties higher than the various cleavages that divide the national society.

11 Or changes of borders are pursued within the procedural limitations prescribed by international law. 12 The empirical test of homogeneity is behavioral: Will those defeated in the democratic political process, in particular “structural” minorities, still prefer to stay part of that community ? Or do they show tendencies of escaping or seceding from that community or of abandoning their role and obligations within it ?

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Sources and symptoms of heterogeneity

Needless to say, however, there do exist such cleavages and differences, all of which can potentially undermine the coherence and integration of the political community. In fact, there are three different kinds of differences: interest-based, ideology-based and identity-based (the three “i”s). The “valued things” that are contested in these conflicts can be categorized, respectively, in terms of three “r”s: resources, rights and recognition (or respect). These types of difference and conflict can be ranked according to the ease with which conflict can be resolved and civilized.13 Pure interest-driven conflicts concerning the control over and distribution of resources are more traditionally known as “class conflict,” carried out among representative collective actors under the governance of mutually agreed-upon procedures. Such conflicts are most easily resolved – provided, of course, that the procedures are in fact recognized by all sides as impartial (failing that, the conflict of interest is nested within a conflict of ideas or ideology). Why should a pure conflict of interest be so easy to resolve ? Because in the conduct of conflicts of interest the people involved (workers versus employers, manufacturers versus consumers, landlords versus tenant, and so on) learn that they depend upon those on the other side of the interest divide with whom they are, at the same time, in conflict. Their awareness of this interdependence provides a strong incentive to compromise, to “split the difference” in some proportion to the power of either side, and thus to prevent the situation from spiraling into a negative-sum game. Ideological conflict, in contrast, is more difficult to resolve. Ideologies are comprehensive doctrines concerning the proper and desirable pattern of rights and duties pertaining to the polity, society and economy. Their proponents often insist upon rooting out the “wrong” ideas of opposing ideologies, which are branded as hostile, dangerous or pernicious. Moreover, in an ideologically polarized field it often is next to impossible for the proponents to agree upon a method of conflict settlement and reconciliation, as any procedural rule (such as free and contested elections) will be suspected of being biased and unfair. It is exactly these procedures to which the conflict pertains, and any argument advanced by one side is denounced by the other side as being an argument not for a point of view but from a point of view. Thus, people are seen to be tainted by “bad” ideas, and these ideas must be rooted out or prevented from circulating through repression. Yet in spite of this dynamic of polarization, there is often a forum available in which the conflict can be moderated through argument and debate.

13 Hirschman 1994.

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Finally, identity conflict poses the most difficult type of conflict, in that the bearers and proponents of one identity make the absence or isolation of the bearers of other identities the benchmark of their well-being (as in “ethnic cleansing”) or else they demand the full assimilation of (linguistic, religious, ethnic) minorities to their own identity. If the targets of such politics of identity discrimination refuse to go away, to assimilate or to hide – and in particular if they respond by using their political rights for the assertion of cultural, ethnic and linguistic difference and the struggle for its public recognition – the universe of the political community itself is put into question, without recognized procedures being easily available to reconcile mobilized groups involved in the politics of identity and difference. Typical demands in identity conflicts are claims for collective rights attached to the bearers of certain identities that serve to express their “distinctiveness” and secure its recognition. The holders of other identities often respond to such claims by aggressively denying the recognition, toleration and ultimately the right to exist of a group as a “different” group. And both sides tend to insist on both the non-negotiable as well as the non-arguable (that is, the absence of the possibility of inter-group rational debates) nature of their respective claims, whereas proponents of ideological conflict try (at least in their rhetoric) to convince others and pretend to be themselves open to rational argument.14 The rough typology of differences (of interest, ideology, identity) that can give rise to conflict (over resources and their control, over rights, over recognition), and the suggested hierarchy of potential disruptiveness of the dynamics of conflict (increasing from interest to ideological to identity conflicts), can also help us understand the dynamics of the transformation of conflict and the energies that drive it. Let me discuss in passing three hypotheses concerning the dynamic interconnectedness of the three levels.15 First, the satisfaction of interests through ongoing compromises within a robust positive-sum game will reduce the significance of ideological causes and identity antagonisms. Identity conflicts will be most effectively dissolved if they are superseded by economic conflict and competition, more specifically by the effects of successful industrialization, urbanization and secularization, all of which tend to emphasize categories of “having” while deemphasizing and reducing to virtual insignificance those of “believing” or “being” and “belonging”. These are the optimistic messages of the modernization theory of the 1950s, with their visions of the “end of ideology” and the “melting pot.”

14 For a strong feminist critique of universalist citizenship and its opposition to identity group representation, see Young 1989. 15 Cf. Connor 1994; Gitlin 1995.

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A second hypothesis concerns a displacement of the energies of conflict in the opposite direction. Losers move “one level up.” The failure to acquire what is considered a fair share in the fruits of economic output gives rise, among the losers, to the resort to militant ideological mobilization. Similarly, the breakdown of the ideological hegemony of state socialism is followed by the resurgence of violent forms of ethnic nationalism in the region where state socialism once prevailed. In other regions, the failure of industrial modernization generates fundamentalist theocratic backlashes. Similarly, within the OECD world the failure of political elites to come up with economic and social policies that have a credible chance of accomplishing both economic efficiency and social cohesion under the new competitive conditions of the global economy leads those elites to replace political and economic issues with moral and religious ones and often leads masses to resort to xenophobic excesses. Inversely, societies in which identity conflicts have become dominant are not likely to experience the dynamism of economic and political modernization. Instead, they lock themselves into the vicious cycle of fundamentalist backwardness. Third, identity politics can also be strategically put in the service of winning or defending rights and resources. The drumming up of sub-nationalist secessionist threats can be a powerful device to extract subsidies from the center or to enforce – from Katanga to “Padania” – the protection of (regional or other) economic privilege. The instrumental use of identity symbols and claims can also be a device to protect regional political elites from post-communist purges, as the secession of Slovakia suggests. The mobilization along lines of ethnicity, gender and “race” can be used as an instrument to acquire access and improve group-specific protection in increasingly precarious labor markets. It can also be employed to promote the acquisition of rights and the exemption from duties.16 In this sense, the instrumental use of identity politics can be seen as a device for the protection and promotion of the interests of latecomers or prospective losers in the race for the blessings of modernity. Whether identity politics is the residual of failed economic and political modernization and an expressive response to the frustrations over this failure (hypothesis 2), or whether it is (in part, inauthentically) employed as a pretext for strategies of acquisition and protection (hypothesis 3), the promises of modern16 Much of the legal and philosophical discussion of the issue of group exemption from the duties of citizenship is of course focused on the Old Order Amish and the decision of the US Supreme Court in Wisconsin V. Yoder, 406 US 205 (1972). The question, again, is whether the permission granted to one group to (partially: cf. Spinner 1994) drop out of citizenship generates second-order effects of undermining civic commitments more broadly and/ or of punishing the beneficiaries of exemption with hostile (though informal) exclusionary responses.

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ization theory and the universalist implications of modernization (hypothesis 1) have evidently not come true. Instead, the politics of identity-based difference is an increasingly prominent feature of increasing segments of the contemporary world, developed and developing alike. How can a democracy cope with these potentially disruptive politics of difference ? To be sure, all types of conflicts, not just identity conflicts, harbor the potential for tearing up the political community. But democracies are not defenseless. Through the allocation of rights and resources they can contain the explosive potential of conflict, thereby reconciling the divided citizenship and strengthening the foundations of a liberal political community based upon individual and equal rights (recognized in spite of the vast variety of individual life plans and preferences), as well as promoting the republican self-recognition of the political community and the commitment of its members to the principles of fairness embodied in the constitution. In other words, the democratic legislative process can yield results which have the potential of homogenizing and reconciling the citizenry, thus validating the conditions of democracy in a circular process of democratic self-consolidation, fostering democracy by democratic means. The basic idea here is one of equalizing status rights and opportunities, so that no party involved in any of the three types of conflict is left with rational reasons to disrupt the political community or disregard the rules on which it is based. More specifically, there are three measures by which such self-consolidation can be accomplished and a “requisite” level of homogeneity achieved. While citizenship accords one single legal status of equal liberty for all, it does not effectively reconcile conflict but rather sets the stage on which socio-economic, political/ ideological and identity conflicts are carried out. Three types of rights, corresponding to the three types of difference and conflict, have been suggested – and at least in part also implemented – by which these discrepancies between formal-legal equality and actual social inequality can be mitigated or reconciled in the service of democratic self-consolidation and on the basis of equal citizenship. This challenge is most easily coped with in the case of interest-based cleavages which divide socioeconomic groups. The formula that has been adopted in order to foreclose this source of political disintegration is social rights – both substantive social rights and social policies (devoted to workers’ protection, social security and full employment, but also family allowances, farm subsidies and the protection of small businesses) and procedural social rights (such as codetermination and collective wage bargaining between trade unions and employers’ associations). The net result of these policies is to involve the economically less powerful categories of society in a game of either a positive sum (“we are all going to gain in the long run”) or a petite bourgeoisie (“we have nothing to gain, but we certainly do have something to lose”) variety. In either scenario, defection is rendered irra-

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tional, and hence widely shared support for and recognition of the political community and its order enhanced. Less easily contained is ideological conflict. At any rate, the clash of Christian, libertarian, communist, nationalist, conservative and socialist ideas about how a well-ordered society must be run and organized can only be mitigated through the granting and meticulously fair implementation of political rights, including the freedom of expression, communication, association and participation. That may not be enough, as the very idea of procedural fairness is one that sometimes turns out to be impossible to agree upon among ideologically conflicting parties. If, however, such agreement and its robust implementation are both feasible, the resulting game places a premium on either of two centripetal and integrative mechanisms. First, self-blame and learning: if the rules must be recognized as unobjectionably neutral, fair and unbiased, and if “we” still do not win the elections, a revision of “our” ideological stance may be called for. Second, accommodation: if marginal ideological concessions are called for in order to win representation or governing power, quid pro quo considerations speak in favor of actually making those concessions, given the opportunity costs of intransigence and ideological purity. In both cases, fairness of the ground rules according to which ideological conflict is carried out, as well as the presence of space for argument and debate, renders ideological intransigence costly and promotes convergence and is conducive to political integration. Finally, there are identity conflicts. These are the most intractable of all. Nevertheless, the antidote that constitutional democracies have available in order to cope with this type of conflict is group rights. These come, as far as political life is concerned, in three varieties: rights to self-government, polyethnic rights, and special representation rights.17 The logic behind the granting of such group rights to religious, linguistic, racial, ethnic, gender, regional and other categories of people is clear enough: Members of these groups are to be assured, through tangible guarantees and concessions, of their full inclusion into the citizenship; and feelings of alienation, inferiority, resentment and hostility are thus to be overcome or prevented from emerging in the first place. It is to these rights – political, as opposed to social and economic; group, as opposed to individual – that I now turn in order to evaluate them as an instrument to enhance the homogeneity and integration of the political community that democratic theory and its core standard of a unified citizenship must presuppose. 17 In disregard here and in the following those social and economic group-specific rights that are designed to compensate members of specific groups for the consequences of past and present discrimination at school, in neighborhoods, in the media, and particularly in the job market.

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III

Group rights and identity conflicts

Let us consider these various political group rights in turn. Rights to limited self-government via devolution apply only to multinational societies. But their potential use is also limited. First, they are clearly applicable in case the (ethnic, linguistic, religious) groups in question settle in – and also hold, by virtue of the territorial concentration of their members – regional “structural” majorities in distinctive sub-territories. The mechanism of self-government does not work in diaspora situations, nor does it work in situations where the unity of the regional group is easily drawn into question, or where several minorities of roughly equal size settle in the same sub-territory. An attractive alternative to rights attached to settled groups is rights attached to geographical territories, with the intended effect being that people who consider this territory their “homeland” will move in and minorities will move out. Second, there must also be mutually recognized substantive demarcation lines concerning the policy areas for which self-government is to apply. If the policy area for which autonomy is granted is “education,” for instance, self-government should not be allowed to shade from there into research, taxation, labor-market or fiscal policies, to say nothing about border regimes or military forces. As long as these two conditions are securely satisfied (and a jurisdictional power settling likely disputes is firmly in place), the instrument of limited self-government is a potentially powerful device of democratic self-consolidation through power-sharing. The result would be a subnationally based “bottom-up-federalism” (of the kind attempted in Spain, Belgium and Canada). Its use can however easily conflict with another instrument, namely social rights: for leaving “too much” to regional self-government is bound to constrain the resources that the nation state has available for the promotion of social security and distributional justice. Federalism can also conflict with notions of political equality, just as second chambers do not normally assign the number of seats according to the actual size of states or other regional units, but rather accord disproportionate advantages to small units. Let me next discuss together polyethnic rights (applying to immigrant communities) and special representation rights (applying to non-territorial minorities). Both apply to groups which cannot be defined in territorial terms. Polyethnic rights are special legal entitlements and policy programs, including public funding, aimed at recognizing and promoting ethnic, religious, linguistic and other groups and the contribution that they make to the life of the political community. Such official recognition can take the form of the promotion of minority languages, public support for particular cultural practices, representation of minority cultures in the curricula of public schools, the funding of libraries, museums, research projects and so on. Special representation rights, in contrast, relate to group

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identity more indirectly. Here the issue is not what substantive ideas and cultural traditions should be given special status (as in the case of polyethnic rights) but, rather, who should do the representing or whose chances of winning elected office should be selectively improved – on the assumption that the more people of category X are represented in parliament or political parties, the more forcefully the specific ideas and traditions of group X will be promoted. The issue of group rights raises at least four normative questions.18 First, what are normative arguments that can motivate a majority of citizens to grant such rights to groups and tolerate the exercise of these rights, even though they violate the principle of numerical equality ? Second, is it actually in the best interests of members of groups to claim and use collective rights ? Third, what qualifies a “group” as a collectivity worthy and deserving of such rights ? And fourth, what determines and justifies the extent of rights accorded to the group(s) in question ? In what follows, I focus principally upon the latter two questions, addressing the former just in passing. What is a group ? Before entering into a discussion of these normative-cum-sociological issues, we need a reasonably robust concept of the phenomenon in question. How do we recognize a group if we see it, either from within (the demanding side of group rights) or from the outside (the granting side) ? The question is less easily answered than it might appear. Group rights, as discussed here, are minority rights.19 Note, however, that not all kinds of minorities are (nor conceivably should be) protected by collective minority rights. For instance, employers are typically a tiny minority compared to employees. Yet their interests are not protected by “minority rights,” but by individual (property and other) rights that provide them with considerable leverage in the defense of their interests. Similarly, no one would think of minority rights applying to the universe of those citizens who have voted for the party that lost the last elections. Again, the legitimate concerns and interests of this political minority is normally thought to be taken care of through individual rights of political participation, communication and association which, taken together, may be 18 Bauböck 1998. 19 Kymlicka 1995. But upon closer inspection, not even that turns out to be true. There are a number of cases in post-Communist Central East Europe where majorities of the respective titular nation assign to themselves, constitutionally and through their citizenship laws, a privileged status so as to prevent the alleged danger of “contamination” of the majority’s identity with “alien” linguistic, ethnic and religious influences coming from internal minorities. Cases in point are Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia and Bulgaria. See further Elster, Offe, Preuss et al. 1997, Ch. 7.

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seen as providing a fair chance that the minority becomes the majority in the next elections. What we mean by a “minority”, that is, a candidate for group rights, is instead a “structural minority” – a minority which, by virtue of its constitutive characteristics and the shared identity resulting therefrom, is bound to remain a minority even after its members have used their individual rights to a maximum extent. But the minority, in order to make a plausible moral claim to special rights, must also be seen as an (unjustly)20 “oppressed” group, a group threatened by discrimination – a group, in other words, that therefore “deserves” fuller recognition than it can achieve through its own structurally limited means, whether for the sake of the full self-realization of its members or (in addition) for the sake of its potential of “enriching” the political community as a whole with its distinctive contributions.21 So far, the result is that group rights are rights claimed by or granted to unjustly oppressed structural minorities. But of what is the minority a minority ? Minorities may be minorities relative to the entire population resident in a territory, or they may be minorities relative to segments of that population.22 While women are, at least in Western society, almost nowhere minorities in the first sense, they are almost everywhere minorities in the second sense – if we focus, for instance, upon the subset of people holding political and other elite positions. Similarly, Albanians are a vast majority in Kosovo but a minority in Serbia as a whole. “Structural” minorities are groups whose members share essential characteristics that can neither be acquired nor given up quickly and easily. Structural minorities are thus “locked into” a set of properties which are considered significant (or constitutive of a collective “identity”) either by themselves and/or by others and which can neither be acquired nor given up. These properties of individuals are normally acquired through birth (such as identity of the parents and their ethnicity and “race”; gender; age; location; nationality) or shortly after, during primary socialization (language, religious affiliation; and, according to some theories, also sexual orientation). Some features that people are born with, such as left-handedness, 20 There are also structural minorities which are justly oppressed: most people would probably consider drug dealers or child molesters as cases in point. 21 Groups might also claim group rights even if they are in no way “oppressed” or unfairly deprived of the recognition of their identity. In fact, they may be ruling minorities. But that can only happen under non-democratic regime forms, such as South Africa under apartheid. Thus, a full account of all types of beneficiaries of group rights would have to include: ruling or otherwise privileged minorities, oppressed minorities, and majorities (such as members of the “titular” nation). 22 A dramatically extreme case is that of the Black population in South Africa. While constituting a vast majority in the general population, Blacks were until recently denied full citizen rights and, as a consequence, access to political, economic and other elite positions.

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are not significantly identity-forming; some identity-shaping properties, such as religious affiliation, can be (but normally are not) given up and exchanged for others. Some identity-forming properties come in grades and shades (such as “racial” phenotypes or age), others are entirely subject to an either/or logic (such as, for all practical purposes, gender). The significance of such markers does not only result from the fact that those belonging to the minority base their own sense of identity and belonging on these markers, what we might term “internal identity building.” It also, and often to a greater extent, results from the attitudes of the majority of those who do not share the property in question, and the way in which they ascribe to the property and persons possessing it legitimate access to, or exclusion from, social esteem and other valued resources. The logic of this “external” construction of social identities is of the form: Property X conditions legitimate access to good Y and/or exclusion from good Z, in the eyes of the non-holders of property X. It is an empirical matter to what extent internal and external identity building interact according to a logic of mutual intensification, but many examples demonstrate that this is a likely event. (For instance, the immigrant Turkish minority in Germany, perhaps in response to the majority’s practices of ethnic labeling and discrimination, is said to identify more strongly with the religious and other traditions of their country of origin than they would have done had they remained in that country or had their labeling been less pronounced). This case indicates how the “identity” that makes up a “group” is not just “structural” (in the sense that it is typically not easily acquired or abandoned), but also to varying degrees “voluntaristic,” individually chosen as a focus of identification and emphasis in self-presentation. For instance, a descendant of an Irish mother and an Italian father living in the US can identify with neither of the two ethnic origins, or with both of them, or with either of them, or alternate between these identities. Moreover, choices made from an individual’s “identity portfolio” will be conditioned by perceived (dis)advantages associated with identifications, with strong anticipations of discrimination possibly leading to an active dissimulation or “betrayal” of a person’s “true” group identity. This voluntaristic element of “belonging” to a group sheds further light on the complexities of the practice of looking at societies as being composed of “groups”, and of coding individuals as unequivocally “belonging” to groups. But highlighting such complexities is not denying the intensity of feelings of injustice, and of conflicts emerging from such feelings, which emerge from the perceived discrimination of groups and those identifying with them. Remedial action consists in providing minorities with group rights in order to compensate for the perceived injustices of exclusion and denial of recognition. Why, then, are individual rights such as they are enjoyed by everyone else deemed insufficient ? In what sense are group rights different from individual rights ? First, they do not

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apply to all citizens, but just to members of targeted groups. Second, members of the target groups are categorically and authoritatively made the beneficiary in question, without being able to individually “opt out” of the reach of the benefits attached,23 and without being able to give up the (by definition, ascriptive and “unchangeable”) characteristics that make up group membership. Group rights involve a strong quasi-corporatist status order: individuals are locked into group membership (whether they want it or not), and the group as a collective body becomes the target of privilege.24 Such granting of collective privilege may appear entirely beneficial and unproblematic. Who, after all, would object to being legally entitled to partaking in group benefits ?25 Problems arise however when we consider two possible, and in fact common, implications of the granting of group rights. One implication is that groups, who then become the bearers of rights, must first be designated in an act of political decision that turns some alleged “group in itself ” into a legally recognized and, as it were, accredited group. Such a political definition of group status may err – and subsequently become controversial – in either of two ways. First, the authoritative assignment of group quality to a collectivity may be overly encompassing, forcibly tying together into a common membership status people who had never thought of themselves as belonging to one and the same group or,

23 This collective form of the attribution of rights is not to be confused with other forms of group privileges, such as, for instance, tax privileges granted in some countries to the publishers of academic books. While in this example no publisher is able to opt out of the privilege that is categorically accorded to the industry, s/he may well individually opt out of the industry itself – unless we deal with an authoritarian state-corporatist regime which excludes exactly this option. 24 It is worth bearing in mind the nominal nature of that “privilege.” For, first, preferential treatment of group members can give rise to second-order effects of retaliatory discrimination and hostility from the majority or from competing groups, against which the group’s members may be entirely defenseless (see below). Second, status rights for minorities can be openly double-edged, an example being provisions that used to be in force in British institutions of higher education guaranteeing, but also limiting, the percentage of Jews among the student body. 25 The question is not quite as rhetorical as it sounds. An example is the “gendering” of the German language that was adopted as an administrative practice in a number of states and institutional sectors during the 1980s. The result is that all nominally male forms in legal texts must be complemented by the female form (like in actor/actress), for which the German language provides abundant opportunities. It is far from evident that this grammatical advancement of the status of women must naturally be desired by all women. Objections include the adverse effect this linguistic regime has on the readability of the text of legal documents and journalistic prose for both women and men, as more than half of all nouns are subject to such gendering duplication. Another objection is that the grammatical status advancement of women is just symbolic, not real.

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for that matter, to any group at all.26 The other way in which group incorporation can become contested is when the groups which are made the target of privilege are too narrowly defined.27 This happens if some groups are granted group rights in order to compensate for their past unfair discrimination, but other groups who feel equally discriminated are left out, with the consequence that they feel discriminated against by their being excluded from the benefits of anti-discriminatory policies. Every act of recognition of a group as the bearer of group rights is bound to divide the world into three segments: those who do not need group rights, because they do not belong to an unjustly oppressed minority; those who do belong to such a minority and are henceforth recognized as such; and those who aspire to such recognition but fail to win it, at least for the time being.28 It might appear that, in order to find out whether a group “is” in fact a group, deserving a privileged legal status which compensates its members for unjust discrimination suffered in the past, we may want to consult history books. This is not a consistently promising way out of our definitional dilemmas. First, history books are written “now”; and even though they are based upon historical documents, these are being “discovered” now and interpreted now. All of which is to say that groups can “invent” and establish themselves and their claims to group rights by invoking a history that is being written and disseminated for the purpose of group formation and collective status politics. Second, even in cases where such doubts clearly do not apply, the analytical and normative issues of inter-temporal justice need to be settled. For instance, to what extent can the present level of life chances and recognition enjoyed (and experienced as unfair disadvantages) by members of group X be causally attributed to the fact that the ancestors of those members, say, four generations back were, by the standards of today, unjustly deprived of rights and resources ? And even if we could make those attributions, for how long can “we,” the non-minority, be held morally responsible for compensating for the wrongdoing of our ancestors and for the irreparable damage they have 26 The policy of German local governments of forming “Ausländerbeiräte” (foreigners’ councils) as consultative bodies is a case in point. People represented by such councils often belong to half a dozen or more different nationalities. It would never occur to them having their identity cast in terms of being “foreigners,” an identity label that is entirely shaped by the perceptions and preferences of the domestic majority population. 27 Glazer 1983, pp. 254 – ​73. 28 Soysal (1996, p. 8) provides the example of the Netherlands, where the ethnic minority policy “officializes” a number of ethnic immigrant groups but leaves out the Chinese and the Pakistani for the reason (as she quotes one official explaining) that “they are assumed to have no problems with their participation in Dutch society.” That obviously raises the question: whose problems ? What pretends to be respect for the “truly deserving” minorities may also be read as an arbitrary administrative coding practice driven by opportunistic considerations.

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inflicted upon the minority’s ancestors as well as on the descendants of those ancestors ? There is, after all, no such thing as the legal entity “Afro-Americans Inc.”, the accounts of which would have to be balanced. Instead, there are ties of historical causation on the one hand and ties of recollective identification on the other, both of which can be either weaker or stronger. Another complication with the “oppressed minority” criterion of groups claiming rights is that every group can be easily subdivided into a virtually endless number of component groups, if a tactical interest arises for doing so.29 What is the right level of aggregation here ? Why stop at the level of “African Americans” rather than further disaggregating this “group” into male and female, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, Christian and Muslim African Americans ? In the other direction, the contours of the “oppressed minority” are also easily blurred, as the vast majority (“everyone but relatively well-off, relatively young, able-bodied, heterosexual white males”30) can arguably be included, or in good conscience include him/herself, into a giant rainbow coalition of oppressed minorities.31 Under the umbrella of such an alliance, and given the potential for sub-division of every group, the potential for the proliferation of group rights claimed (as well as group rights granted or group privileges attached) becomes evident. The results of that will hardly contribute to what group rights were originally meant to achieve, which is the integration of the political community. Note that that still leaves unanswered our initial question: “What is a group worthy of special substantive and/or representation rights ?” One is tempted to despair about the feasibility of a normatively meaningful answer and to resort to sociological realism, with the result being something like this: A group enjoying special rights is a collectivity, the elites of which have, in spite of the minority position of its constituency, managed to mobilize a sufficient amount of political re29 To illustrate, let me take an example from social and economic rights and a case in which I have been involved. German universities have instituted “women’s promotion plans” that provide special grants for which women at advanced stages of their academic career can apply. When applying for such a grant, one female colleague was told by administrators of the program that, although being highly qualified on the basis of her academic record, she still could not be considered eligible as her files showed that she is, although a woman, not a mother. This indicates how flexibly and opportunistically criteria of group membership can be handled. 30 Kymlicka 1995, p. 145. 31 If the group code is so widely applied, what happens to those who do not identify with any of the groups ? Is there a residual “group” of all those lacking group markers ? To assume this would be following the logic of American Protestant sects who divide the universe into two major sects: their own sect of “true Christians” and the: opposing sect of “secular humanists.” Such sectarian social ontology is also evident in some feminist writings. As all women are seen as united and self-identified as women, there must also be a dominant conspiracy of “malehood.”

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sources in order to extract from the majority special concessions and privileges collectively assigned to the group’s members. If that were right, however, it would make no sense anymore to describe such groups as “oppressed” and “powerless”; on the contrary, the very acquisition of group rights testifies to the group’s significant control of social and political power, whereas truly disadvantaged groups, such as the European Gypsies, have hardly the organizational and political resources at their disposal that are needed in order to raise the issue of their discrimination and marginalization. As an alternative to sociological “realism,” and in order to stem the danger of the proliferation of ever further “groups,” one might also try to establish criteria which a group must meet in order to qualify for special collective status rights. Three such criteria are conceivable, and they would probably have to apply cumulatively. First, the group must be “relevant” in quantitative terms. For instance, groups that make up less than one per cent of the population would not qualify for any special rights. Second, the group must be “authentic.” That is to say, there must be clear indications of a distinctive life form and the serious and lasting allegiance of most nominal members to it, without an excessive measure of fragmentation of the group into sub-groups and sub-sub-groups. Third, and perhaps most controversial, there must be a measure of “affinity and compatibility” between the group’s life form and the life form of the majority. Taken together, this set of criteria would amount to the restriction of group rights to relatively large, internally closely integrated and easily compatible minorities that share many, though certainly not all, values and cultural patterns with the majority.32 The reader is invited to conduct a thought experiment: how many, if any, “groups” within her/his society qualify for “groupness” according to these criteria ? What are rights ? Having pinpointed a few of the problems associated with the deceptively simple issue of “groups” and their cognitive as well as moral and legal recognition, let us now examine the analogous problems that emerge as we look at “rights.”33 Probably the most general thing one can say about rights is that the more rights a person has the better for him or her, as rights provide the freedom to conduct one’s life in preferred ways. It is far from certain, however, that group rights actually perform this freedom-enhancing function for group members. One of the troubles with 32 Note, however, that the relationship between (relative) group size and the ease with which the group obtains collective rights may be U-shaped. Very small ethnic minorities can be granted rights by the majority because the risk that the disruptive mechanisms of escalation or proliferation will set in as a consequence is deemed negligible by the majority. 33 An elaborate classification of the very different kinds of group rights that are to be found in practice is provided by Levy (1997).

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group rights is that the benefits involved may not be entirely unqualified but must be paid for by (some) group members in terms of corresponding losses and sacrifices. This applies to cases where the privilege which is granted to group members is not valued as such by individuals within the group (because, for example, their commitment to the religion, language or other bases of collective identity is not very intense), or where members see their civil liberties being violated by the group-rights regime subjecting them to regimentation by the group’s authorities. Kymlicka illustrates the possible antagonism between group rights and individual rights by reference to the rather distant case of the millet system in the Ottoman empire: “while the Muslims did not try to suppress the Jews, or vice versa, they did suppress heretics within their own community.”34 The mode in which group rights operate can be of either (or both) of two kinds: a plus in terms of rights enjoyed by group members (relative to the individual rights of everyone else outside the group) or a minus in terms of duties. Thus, an ethnic minority may be endowed with publicly funded support for its specific cultural practices, say, a folk-dance academy. Alternatively, or in addition, group rights can consist in the exemption from duties that everyone else must comply with, an example being the permission granted to members of religious groups to have their female children not participate in otherwise obligatory gym classes in high school, or exemption from military service for reasons of belonging to a religious faith. It appears that the two – legal privilege and exemption from duties – are not strictly symmetric, as they differ in the scope of the externalities they inflict upon the larger society and its cohesion. The right to be taught minority language X at school may be considered harmless from this point of view, as the vast majority is neither capable of speaking nor interested in learning that language. When it comes to exemption from duties, however, the situation changes, as such exemption may be polemically depicted as “free-riding” which, if visibly permitted, undermines the general bindingness of the law and invites others to invent reasons for claiming exemption (from military service, for example) as well. Political group rights can be intended to be a temporary measure or a permanent one. In the first case, the justification is analogous to protective tariffs: A “weak” group must be encouraged to develop resources, competence and self-confidence in order to become capable of eventually competing on the basis of its own resources; until it is able to do so, special preferential conditions are granted to its members. For this effect to be accomplished, an expiration clause or review procedure would have to apply. In this sense, quota rules for women concerning leadership positions in political parties (as adopted so far by the Green and Social Democratic parties in Germany) could be justified as an anti-discriminatory polit34 Kymlicka 1996, p. 8.

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ical head-start program that generates the conditions of its legitimate abolition at a later point. But expiration (or even review) clauses are typically missing in such arrangements. Group rights are granted as permanent rights. This suggests a different justification of these rights, namely, the justification of enriching the life of the community (or party, as well as enhancing its electoral prospects) by the guaranteed special representation of supposedly group-specific styles, values and concerns of women. Another, supposedly “liberal” argument for group rights is proposed by Kym­ licka for immigrant minorities in polyethnic societies: “If we demand that immigrants integrate into the institutions [of the country they migrate to], we must ensure that their religious holidays, dietary requirements and dress codes are respected.”35 The argument is based on a quid pro quo logic. But the argument raises more questions than it explicitly addresses. Why “must” we do so, given the fact that the immigrants knew or could know what was awaiting them in terms of cultural adjustment requirements, and also given the fact that new (mixed, assimilated or diasporic) cultural patterns will inevitably develop in the second and third generation ? How much quid for how much quo ? Why not let the general freedom of religion, diet and dress that is (supposedly) guaranteed in the host country do the job of facilitating integration ? Will the purposive legal engineering aiming at “integration” actually generate “respect” ? Where is the line to be drawn between “benign multiculturalism,” based upon civic respect, and institutionalized identities protected by and frozen into group rights ?36 We do not need to consult books on Ottoman history to encounter the antagonism between group and individual rights. Group rights granted to religious groups imply that spiritual leaders or parents are permitted to impose rules on members, monitor their compliance and constrain their civil liberties. An extreme example is the religious belief that modern medicine is evil, and the ensuing practice of denying members access to medical emergency services. Such imposition may be motivated by the group leaders’ desire to prevent assimilation, with the rational fear in mind that assimilation may undermine the power and privilege of their leadership status. “To prevent religious or cultural assimilation, the minority must pre-commit itself in ways that reduce the freedom of its individual members.”37 The granting of group rights is often justified as a necessary condition of preserving the group’s distinctive identity. This, again, raises the question why such identity cannot be preserved on the basis of the rights of equal citizenship alone, including of course the right to form associations and communities 35 Ibid, p. 10. 36 Joppke 1996. 37 Elster 1996, p. 53.

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within which religious beliefs and cultural traditions can be cultivated and propagated. Even if we were to agree in a slightly paternalist perspective (reminiscent of the protection of endangered species) that the preservation of identities must be assisted by special legal provisions (rather than through generally available liberties), we would still have to come to terms with the thorny question of what exactly the “substance” is that is to be protected and whether such benevolent protection does not interfere with spontaneous and perhaps even desirable processes of cultural change. Given that there is no clear-cut measure as to what kind of rights and how many of them are required for exactly that purpose to be achieved and given that the elites of groups (such as ethnic artists and intellectuals, movement entrepreneurs, regional politicians and religious leaders) have obvious vested interests to expand these rights, the escalation of special rights, including representation rights, is an inherent dynamic element in the situation. This dynamic of escalation is enforced by two factors. One is inter-minority rivalry following a “me too” logic. The more groups are endowed with group rights, the more rights they may feel they need in order to preserve their identity and make their voices heard. The other is the use of group rights for the purpose of acquiring additional rights: for example, minority language rights, once granted, are used for mobilizing more far-reaching demands, such as minority language radio stations or minority-language teacher colleges. Once a minority culture is institutionalized through a set of protective rights, there is no obvious saturation point. On the contrary, the more rights are granted, the easier it becomes for the group’s leadership to mobilize demand for even more rights. In principle, and from a liberal and individualistic point of view, there are two normative yardsticks by which to evaluate these group rights and the built-in dynamic of their expansion. They can be formulated in the questions of: (a) whether or not group rights do actually benefit, or serve the best interest of, the members of the group; and (b) whether the non-members can be justly expected to pay for the costs of group privilege. We can refer to these as an “internal” and as an “external” justification of group rights respectively. As to the first, increments in the rights of minorities can well go hand-in-hand with a decrease of the rights and actual life-chances of minority members, even if such sacrifice is not imposed by the group’s leaders in the interest of maintaining their power and privilege. Language acquisition is a case in point. The opportunity costs that are involved in studying a minority language at school are often equivalent to the non-acquisition of foreign language skills that may be of far greater practical use. Another case in point is political affirmative action or preferential representation rights. As in ordinary quota and affirmative action practices, chances are that a vengeful majority of white males will tend to discredit and stigmatize resulting advantages as undeserved and illegitimate, thereby reversing

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the intended effects of “reverse discrimination” without any enforceable rule being available to control such second-order hostile responses.38 This raises the question of the extent to which recognition and respect can be mandated and enforced by formal law, as opposed to the insistence upon informal standards of common decency and civility which may or may not be strengthened by the law and the mechanisms of its enforcement. At any rate, group rights of minorities must be honored and redeemed by majorities, and honored as a recognized “duty,” not just as a statutory rule.39 Motivating recognition: Group rights and majorities Turning to the second of the above criteria – the sacrifices the majority can legitimately be expected to make in favor of minority rights – it is sometimes said that such costs are not a sacrifice but an investment that society makes into its own multiculturalism, thereby enriching, as it were, its cultural genetic pool.40 In other words, it is not just the majority’s moral duty but at the same time in its long term collective self-interest to honor group rights. Now, arguments according to which self-interest and moral duty coincide are always suspicious. At any rate, the alleged collective advantage of diversity must be balanced against the collective disadvantage of increased transaction costs of communication and of the ongoing adjudication of polyethnic rights, as well as the conflicts over the limits of those rights, which is to say, the costs of such “investment” in diversity. Given these costs, and due to the awareness of these costs, the consequentialist argument that diversity is enriching is hard to buy in the abstract. Proponents of this argument usually refer to some specific group or group practice (such as an art form or ethnic cuisine) which they happen to consider as enriching with typically less sanguine emphasis on the potential contribution of 38 A blatant, though not singular, example of “secondary discrimination on the grounds of reverse discrimination” is this. In German state universities, candidates for full professorships are short-listed and ranked by the university and appointed by the Land Ministry of Higher Education. As universities know that Ministries are committed to increasing the (still incredibly low) proportion of women in the professorate, they can be virtually certain that a single female name, should it appear on the short list, will very likely be chosen for appointment, and the preference order of the list will be overruled. As a consequence, hiring committees (irrespective of their gender composition) have a rational interest to keep any female applicant (unless she is ranked first) off the short list in order to preserve the university’s “autonomy” to express priorities and its chance to have its priorities respected. 39 As a shorthand for “recognized duty,” we may think of the following subtraction formula: duty is the amount of operative bindingness of social norms that remains in force of its nominal bindingness after (a) all opportunities for unsanctioned violation have been eliminated, and (b) all excuses for noncompliance have been invalidated. 40 Kymlicka 1995, pp. 122 – ​3.

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others. Nor can such implicit ranking be avoided. If that is true, then by implication there are also groups and cultural practices which do not enjoy the reputation of being “enriching” but are instead considered alien, unworthy, dangerous and potentially hostile – and therefore not deserving any sacrifice or toleration on the part of the majority. Hence “enrichment-oriented multiculturalism” may turn out not to be color-blind but rather, in effect, strongly discriminating. On the other hand, if the argument for toleration does not start from desirable contributions and enrichment coming from the group in question, it must start from the desired consequence of enhancing democratic homogeneity by eliminating reasons for justified complaint about non-admittance to a homogeneous citizenship status. But that could also be achieved, and in collectively less costly ways, through stricter provision and enforcement of universal citizen rights and equal opportunities which, after all, include the opportunity to pursue a great diversity of values, styles and identities (but which would then have to be relegated to a “sub-political” realm of the personal conduct of life). Consideration of consequences does not seem to yield a conclusive argument concerning costs and sacrifices the majority can be required to make. Alternatively, one can (and, in fact, must) rely on the “justice argument” that it is the duty, whatever the costs involved, of the majority to eliminate the minority’s suffering that would result from inadequate opportunities to practice its inherited life form and cultural tradition. The Achilles heel of this argument from justice is that it is so difficult to assess the amount of such suffering in unobtrusive ways. Revealed preferences for the preservation of “identity” values must always be suspected of being tainted, in either negative or positive ways, by strategic considerations. Moreover, some cultural life forms, including languages, have disappeared as a living cultural practice even in the absence of any trace of discrimination, and perhaps even painlessly so; they have simply fallen victim to the forces of cultural change, resistance to which can hardly be postulated to be a moral duty. At any rate, any indicator as to how strongly the minority actually values and needs for its collective self-realization the protection of its life form is unlikely to be strategy-proof. Certainly, the strongest moral reason for recognizing group rights is the majority’s awareness of past injustices inflicted upon a group by its predecessors. Accordingly, minorities will find it easier to extract concessions from majorities if they can invoke the logic of a fair compensation for such injustices. This applies to the cases of Afro-Americans, ex-colonial populations resident in France, Britain or the Netherlands, aboriginal peoples in Canada, Australia or the US, the Basques in Spain, to say nothing about Jews and other Holocaust victims in Germany. Feminists have made analogous arguments in view of the injustices inflicted upon women by millennia of patriarchy. But even in these cases, and with the

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passing of the generations of both the immediate victims and the immediate perpetrators, it is an open question as to when it is appropriate to switch from a backward-looking logic of compensation to a forward-looking logic of color-blind fairness and equal opportunity. As “equal opportunity” involves issues of sharing and redistribution as opposed to the symbolic practice of recognition, the former is likely to be morally more, not less, demanding (as well as more honest) than the ambiguous and often backfiring practices of attaching a “positive stigma” to groups through “reverse discrimination.”41 So far, we have discussed two classes of objections to group rights. First, given hostile reactions to and opportunity costs of such rights, they may not really be in the best interest of the members of the group that is seemingly favored by such rights. This is also the case because group rights will typically empower group leaders who can use these rights in order to infringe upon individual rights or discriminate against internal heretics or others whom they consider less “worthy” members of the group they claim to represent. Second, the damage caused by group rights affects everyone in the political community, whether through the transaction costs caused by multilingualism or through the dynamic of demand escalation and group proliferation that is set in motion once the first group rights are adopted. It is unclear and cannot be discussed here whether, third, there is also a class of objections based upon the legitimate interests of the majority not to have their (linguistic, religious and so on) form of life disturbed and threatened by overly generous concessions to minorities, particularly if the majority fails to appreciate the legally enforced polyethnicity as an unqualified “enrichment” of their social life and national culture (as most Estonians do not so regard the Russian minority in that country, for example). A final objection to group rights must be mentioned. There cannot be any doubt that ascriptive groups whose members attach great value and significance to the practice and preservation of group identity exist in modern societies. Neither can there be any doubt that members of groups often suffer severe disadvantages due to the fact that they belong to and identify with the group. The denial of the right to express and practice their identity, and the attachment of negative sanctions and deprivations to bearers of the marks of ascribed identity are injus41 Bauböck (1998) argues the following with respect to ethnic groups who have been subject to past deprivation of economic and political rights and “second class citizenship”: “These effects are so pervasive that equal individual rights are clearly insufficient. Group-differentiated programmes of community development and affirmative action are needed to overcome them.” I disagree on both counts. If individual rights (including “positive” rights) are deemed to be “insufficient,” they need to be augmented, in courts and legislatures, rather than supplemented – particularly as group rights are unlikely to do the job except under the most favorable of circumstances (under which they appear least needed).

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tices that stand in the way of the consolidation of a homogeneous citizenship status – which is, in turn, an essential precondition for democratic stability. For if the belonging to the political community and the equal liberty it guarantees is put in question, then there arises a type of conflict with which the highly precarious regime form of liberal democracy cannot easily cope. What does not, however, follow from this set of considerations is the proposition that the integration of groups into civil society is best served by granting them group rights, as opposed to individual rights (such as the standard rights of religious and cultural freedom and the right to form voluntary associations, and various other social rights enjoyed by individual citizens). These skeptical considerations apply all the more, as there is an obvious intergroup difference in the chances of groups to acquire group rights. The willingness of majorities to grant group rights to minorities is contingent upon both properties of the minority in question and properties, perceptions and considerations of the majority. As far as minorities are concerned, their struggle for rights will succeed more easily the larger the group is and the more political resources it has at its disposal due to its size and visibility. If the group in question is an ethnic group, it will also benefit from the presence of nearby patron states of the same ethnicity. Similarly, in the case of religious groups, international religious organization (such as the Roman Catholic Church or Islamic theocracies) will mobilize effective support. Moreover, international examples, policy moves and role models can both encourage minorities and discourage their opponents in the struggle for group rights, as is indicated by the advances of feminist movements that have been a distinctively international phenomenon throughout the OECD world and beyond in the 1970s and 1980s. Conversely, the acquisition of minority rights will be a vastly more difficult matter if the group is relatively small or highly dispersed, if it is poorly organized, does not enjoy the patronage of transnational forces or movements, and if it does not enjoy the moral advantage of being able to trace its plight back to previous acts of unfairness, now recognized as such, committed by the majority’s state (all of which disadvantages apply to the Romani in East Central Europe). Finally, it is likely that those minorities who are most similar and show the greatest affinity with the majority in terms of cultural (phenotypic, ethnic, linguistic and religious) traits will be given priority in the granting of group rights.42

42 Note, however, that “similarity” is itself a social construct that would have to be validated by both sides involved. For instance, for the outside observer Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy may not appear a matter of significant divergence of religious identities. That, however, is not the view taken by either the Serbs or the Croats.

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From the point of view of the majority which is called upon to grant group rights, all depends upon how strongly it values “diversity.” The belief that “interaction with different cultures, belief systems and presumptions makes us smarter” is typically not shared by everyone in the majority, nor does it apply to every minority.43 By the same logic, some groups may be branded as having little or no potential for “making us smarter.” Beyond the appreciation of diversity, two additional points play a role in motivating recognition.44 First, group rights will be conceded more easily if there is no fear of proliferation – no expectation that group rights, once granted to one group, will soon be demanded by other groups as well. That is to say, the group to which rights are conceded must be in some plausible sense singular, so as to preclude proliferation of demands for rights with its incalculable implications. Second, the majority that is to grant the rights will be more forthcoming in doing so if it has reasons to expect that, once these rights are granted, a durable balance will be reached. That is to say, demands for group rights should not be seen as potentially instrumental for the acquisition of further group rights, and thus as the initial step in a process of escalation eventually leading to the break-up of the political community.45 Thus, the hypothesis is that majorities 43 The quoted proposition comes from an Op-Ed comment in the New York Times, April 2, 1996. But Bauböck (1998) persuasively asks the question: “What could convince a true believer that it is better for her to live in a society together with people of other faiths, agnostics and atheists rather than in a society where her religion is shared by all ?” Only religiously unaffiliated actors are likely to develop a preference for institutionalized religious diversity through group rights, if only for the (slightly cynical) reason that that arrangement would maximize her/his chance to be left alone by any of them. A more respectable argument for the intrinsic value of diversity is that it affords “the reflexivity that results from experiencing other cultures” (ibid.) and, supposedly, the opportunity for self-scrutinizing the limitations of one’s own culture; but it is not evident that this opportunity, so ubiquitous in modern society, should be contingent upon the presence of group rights. 44 In a brief filed with the US Supreme Court in August 1997, the Clinton Administration elaborated an argument as to why adherence to affirmative action does not only make “us” smarter, but, more specifically, the police more effective. “Local law enforcement agencies can demonstrate a compelling need for a diverse work force that justifies the carefully tailored use of race in employment decisions. For instance, if an undercover officer’ is needed to infiltrate a racially homogeneous gang, a law enforcement agency must have the flexibility to assign an officer of the same race to that task” (New York Times, August 23, 1997). It is, however, in no way evident that such flexibility could not equally well – or better – be achieved within a framework of equal opportunity (as opposed to preferential) hiring practices. 45 This fear of escalation explains the stubbornness with which governments in Central East Europe have resisted the demands for ethnic minority group rights, particularly so in Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The anticipation on the part of the majority is that, once we grant the first step, we are bound to be sliding down a slippery slope: from cultural rights to language rights, from language rights to an autonomous educational and media regime, from there to successful mobilization for territorial self-government, and from there to secession or fusion with some “historically hostile” neighboring state, with either international or civil

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tend to grant group rights most readily to those minorities which cause the least concern that the granting of such rights will trigger the dynamics of proliferation or escalation.

Conclusion Of the four principal strategies that democracies have available to consolidate a homogeneous demos and to implement the ideal of citizenship – civil, social, political and “identity group” rights – the last one is less promising in its effects than those belonging to the previous three “generations.” Equalizing citizenship rights by granting special group rights to minorities is at best an ambiguous formula, because both the questions of what constitutes a “group” and what is the adequate and sufficient amount of “rights” remain contested and tend to give rise to the dynamics of proliferation and escalation. Group issues are susceptible to tribalistic political entrepreneurship precisely because the number of groups, the groups’ identity, the strength of the sense of group allegiance on the part of members, the durability of such allegiance, and the alleged suffering resulting from the state’s policy of “color-blindness” do not lend themselves to easy and unobtrusive measurement. In consequence, group rights (other than subterritorial rights to self-government at the municipal or state level) have a strong potential for further dividing rather than unifying the encompassing political community, and of weakening civic republican loyalties and commitments. This is also the case because any recognition of political groups and their rights elevates the status of the collective recipient of these rights relative to those potential groups that are not, or not yet, considered worthy of being granted such rights, with new acts of unfairness being implied by the very method of compensating for unfairness. Individual civic, political and social rights, including the rights to form civic as well as religious associations and to mobilize for support through fair access to the media, appear fully sufficient to voice the concerns of “ascriptive” groups.46 That applies, of course, with the proviso that governments are effectively hindered war as the necessary by-product. These seemingly obsessive fears are often not entirely irrational, as both sides to the conflict know, and know that the other side knows, that the region has a history of imperial control, with the present minority being just a remaining residue of some former imperial power – as are the Turks in Bulgaria, Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania, or Russians in Estonia. The result is that constitutions of these post-communist countries are not only weak on minority rights, but often strongly proclaim the cultural and ethnic majority rights of the respective titular nation (Preuss 1995; Elster, Offe and Preuss et al. 1997, Ch. 7). 46 Kukathas 1991; 1997; Tamir 1993.

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(if need be, through the supervisory role performed by international juridical institutions) from curtailing the individual rights of categories of their citizens for the sake of fostering “national unity.” Moreover, social rights that can be claimed equally by all citizens will effectively compensate for categorical disadvantages suffered by groups. In fact, the implementation of social rights – to education, health, housing, labor market access and social protection – that would redeem the liberal promise of equal opportunity are both a more demanding and more effective way to accommodate group conflict, compared to the symbolic politics of “recognizing” groups through the costless politics of assigning them collective rights. There is neither a demonstrable need for nor an innocuous way to create and administer a fourth generation of rights in response to identity conflicts.

References Bauböck, Rainer. 1998. Liberal Justifications for Group Rights. In Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (eds), Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, Allen. 1991. Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Connor, Walker. 1994. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. Elster, Jon, 1996. Ulysses Unbound. Studies in Rationality and Precommitment. New York: Columbia University. Elster, Jon, Claus Offe, Ulrich Preuss et al. 1997. Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gitlin, Todd. 1995. The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars. New York: Holt. Glazer, Nathan. 1983. Ethnic Dilemmas: 1964 – ​1982. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hirschman, Albert O. 1994. Social conflicts as pillars of democratic market societies. Political Theory, 22, 203 – ​18. Joppke, Christian. 1996. Multiculturalism and immigration: a comparison of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Theory and Society, 25, 449 – ​500. Kukathas, Chandran. 1991. The Fraternal Conceit: Liberal vs. Collectivist Ideas of Community. Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies. Kukathas, Chandran. 1997, Survey article; Multiculturalism as Fairness: Will Kym­ licka’s Multicultural Citizenship, Journal of Political Philosophy, 5, 406 – ​27. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1996. Interpreting group rights. The Good Society, 6, no. 2, 8 – ​11. Kymlicka, Will and Ian Shapiro, eds. 1997. Nomos XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights. New York: New York University Press.

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Levy, Jacob T. 1997. Classifying cultural rights. In Kymlicka and Shapiro 1997, pp. 22 – ​ 66. Linz, Juan J. 1996. Democratization and types of democracies: new tasks for comparativists. Mimeo, Yale University. Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Offe, Claus. 1996. Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience. Oxford: Polity. Preuß, Ulrich K. 1995. Patterns of constitutional evolution and change in Eastern Europe. In J. J. Hesse and N. Johnson (eds), Constitutional Change in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 95 – ​128 Schmitter, Philippe C. and Terry Lynn Karl. 1991. What democracy is … and is not. Journal of Democracy, 3, no. 3, 75 – ​88. Soysal, Yasemin N. 1996. Boundaries and identity: immigrants in Europe. EUI Working Paper No. 3. Spinner, Jeff 1994. The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1989. “Polity and group difference: a critique of the ideal of universal citizenship”. Ethics, 99, 250 – ​74.

Teil II Legitimationen

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Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources (1991) (with Ulrich K. Preuss)

Modes of production versus modes of participation It has been observed that ‘democracy’ has become a universal formula of legitimation for a broad range of radically different societies and their respective modes of governance and political participation. By the mid-1970s, there was virtually no regime between Chile and China that did not rest its claim to legitimacy upon being ‘democratic’ in some sense, or at least upon its being in the process of some transition to some version of democracy. Thus, the term ‘democracy’ seemed to have lost its distinctiveness: it failed to highlight significant differences between socio-political arrangements. To be sure, one still used to add qualifiers such as ‘liberal’, ‘authoritarian’, or ‘people’s’ democracy in order to distinguish specific types and structural particularities of governments; but these, important as they may be, were often considered to be of minor significance compared with other dimensions of comparative analysis. It has become common in the twentieth century to characterize societies with respect to their socio-economic system and, particularly, to the economic and technological rank they have achieved within the world economy. It has become even more common and respectable to divide the world conceptually into the ‘First’, ‘Second’, ‘Third’ and sometimes ‘Fourth’ worlds than to divide it into its ‘democratic’ and its ‘non-democratic’ parts, as the latter categorization basically presupposes an authoritative definition of the contested notion of ‘democracy’. Differences concerning various forms of government, and particularly specific variants of democracy’, seemed to belong to the superstructure of societies – and to the arsenal of ideological weapons in the worldwide conflict between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’. What tended to be considered objectively distinctive – and the most basic dimension of which political variables were merely derivatives – were socio-economic and technological characteristics, or ‘modes of production’. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_6

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Evidently, or so we wish to argue, this conventional and convenient ‘materialist’ way of portraying societies is currently losing much of its plausibility. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the notion that national societies can be unequivocally tied as a whole to some clear-cut ‘mode of production’ or ‘stage of development’ is clearly obsolete. There are as many and as diverse varieties of ‘capitalism’ (ranging from Austria to Singapore) as there are of ‘socialism’ (ranging from Norway to North Korea); as far as ‘underdevelopment’ as an umbrella category is concerned, the analogous point has been made by Brazilian intellectuals who refer to their country as ‘Belgindia’, meaning ‘Belgium within India’. It appears to us to be of great and not yet fully perceived significance that it is precisely the ‘socialist’ (Comecon) countries, i. e. those in which Marxist-Leninist party doctrines form the basis of the official self-identification, which now are in the process of undertaking major reforms starting with fundamental changes in the political organization of their societies – an approach which, in terms of the hitherto official party doctrine of these countries, amounts to putting the cart before the horse. President Gorbachev has started the reform of the Soviet economy with a substantial reform of the constitution. Poland strives for a way out of its chronic economic decay by organizing a new social contract in the literal sense of this term, the most important stipulations of which aim at the establishment of democratic representation and of a more responsive government. Hungary has become the first state socialist country to introduce a multi-party system, with elections free by the standards of the liberal democracies, and to abolish the ‘socialist’ character of the country as it is laid down in the constitution. And these changes seem indeed to be experienced by the people of these countries as decisive and liberating ones – much in the same way as the people of Greece, Portugal and Spain (to say nothing of those of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) perceived their respective ‘transitions to democracy’ as constituting profound change both more significant than even a major step towards economic development and as a sign of hope that such steps might take place in the future. Clearly, the demand for political democracy is undergoing an unexpected renaissance. Quite at variance with most versions of Marxist doctrine, it is no longer the ‘autonomous’ development of the forces of production which gives rise to new institutions and new forms of popular government; on the contrary, democratic institutions and procedures are being discovered as liberating and ‘productive’ forces sui generis, considered capable, apart from their political aspects, of energizing the economic system and paving the road towards social and economic progress. Now it is again the political and constitutional axis along which societies are seen – and see themselves – to differ most significantly (both from other societies and from their own past), and not primarily the axis of the forces and/

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or relations of production. Moreover, the latter are increasingly perceived as being derivative of the former, instead of vice versa. All this should not be mistaken for the final triumph of the Western model of liberal democracy – whatever that may be, given the widely divergent manifestations of democratic regimes even among the Western countries. After the Second World War the European countries had a fair degree of success in mitigating and taming class conflicts by making capitalism and democratic mass politics compatible with each other through the establishment of the Keynesian welfare state. However, the paradigm by which democratic capitalism reconciles individual and collective rationalities wears thin. Within this paradigm, military strength, security achieved through bureaucratic control, instrumental knowledge and economic growth are all considered essential factors in the comprehensive progress of society and in the solution of all major social problems. The rationality of action will eventually contribute to the perfection of the ‘system’. This equation has evidently lost its persuasiveness. It is rightly questioned whether the more that actors – be they states, be they individuals – accomplish according to the standards of these sectoral rationalities, the more they will promote their collective wellbeing (whether or not the ‘relations of production’ happen to be socialist). What is called for under this condition is, as we shall argue, a design of adequate or ‘appropriate’ institutions1 that modifies the rationality of action in ways which make it more compatible with and conducive to the requirements of collective well-being. One might suspect that the relatively comfortable and so far, generally successful experience that the West European democracies have had with the constitutional arrangements adopted after the Second World War is now tending to put them in a comparatively disadvantageous position, as the ‘learning pressure’ to renovate institutional arrangements in the face of new conflicts and cleavages2 has subsided much more than has been the case with many of the ‘newly democratizing countries’. As a consequence of some of the structural changes taking place within modern societies, the ideal of ‘progress’ – technological, economic, military, social and cultural – which was the underlying and powerfully energizing force for the demJ. G. March and J. P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, New York, Free Press, 1989. 2 ‘What we have in mind, but cannot elaborate here, are (a) new patterns of cleavage and conflict resulting from a growing ‘individualistic fragmentation’ of social structures which amounts sometimes to a large-scale defection from those collective practices and collective actions that are rooted in the social division of labour and (b) the formation of new’ collectivities based upon ‘ascriptive’ or ‘naturalistic’ categories (such as gender, age, ethnicity, region, family or health status). The politics of ‘new’ social movements seem to be related to both of these structural trends.

1

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ocratic optimism of the nineteenth and, notwithstanding the barbarous regression of fascism, also of the twentieth century, has faded away. The ‘limits of growth’ refer primarily to physical problems such as ecological damage, changes of climate or overpopulation; but their implication is basically a social and political one. They challenge the inherent rationale of our industrial civilization and its political institutions, throwing their basic assumptions and their almost religious certitude into fundamental doubt. The basically ‘modern’ vision that the use individuals make of their rational capabilities will, if mediated through the right kind of economic and political institutions, contribute to their collective progress and wellbeing, is being contested. At the very least, those political institutions and procedures which supposedly serve the purpose of mediating the rationality of actors and the desirability of outcomes are increasingly open to question.

The theological foundation of modern political theory ‘Democracy’ is arguably the only formula in the modern world which is able to legitimize all kinds of political regimes. Theorists as different as Carl Schmitt and Joseph A. Schumpeter were probably right in pointing out that the modern creed of democracy is to be understood as a secularized version of the most elementary tenets of Christian theology.’3 According to them, the democratic omnipotence of the people and of the legislator has become the substitute for the Almighty Will of God, whose commands are the ultimate sources of order in this world, and the equal value of each and every individual in modern democracy reflects the Christian belief that ‘the Redeemer died for all: He did not differentiate between individuals of different social status’.4 In view of current political conflicts in Ireland, Poland, Latin America, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, the Soviet Union and many other countries, it is plausible to assume that the intimate connection between religion and politics is not an exclusive property of the Christian world and that the striving for political order bears many attributes of a sacred cause throughout the world.5 C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, 3rd edn, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1979, pp. 49 f.; J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 4th edn, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, p. 265; see also J. Taubes (ed.), Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, 2nd edn, München/Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink/Schöningh, 1983; P. H. Merkl and N. Smart (eds). Religion and Politics in the Modern World, New York and London: New York University Press, 1985. 4 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 265. 5 R. Panikkar, ‘Religion or politics: the Western dilemma’, in Merkl and Smart (eds), Religion and Politics in the Modern World, p. 53.

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If we realize that the conception of the common good is the secularized version of the ‘divine order’ and hence itself a religious idea, we can understand why the political principle to which it has the closest affinity is democracy: religion is dedicated to the realization of the plenitude of human life by linking it with the divine order, and politics in its most demanding version is committed to making man the creator of his destiny in this world. It is therefore not surprising that the sole alternative to the democratic legitimation of power is the theocratic one. Despite many deep and irreconcilable differences, both theocracy and democracy make the claim that the destiny of mankind requires justification through the will of a creator that binds humankind in a ‘good’ order, whether divine or secular. This reference to the concept of political theology (or, as it were, to the idea of an ‘immanent transcendence’) may help us to understand the tension between the claim of the political order to be ‘good’ and ‘just’ and the omnipotence of its sovereign – a tension which can only arise where we cannot resort to the authority of any external norms and principles of justice. If we ourselves are the creator of the just order, on behalf of what principle could we conceivably oppose it ? The history of Christian theology gives much evidence for manifold doubts as to whether the Will of God must be regarded as omnipotent because it is inherently just or, conversely, that it cannot but be considered inherently just, because it is omnipotent. The Rights of Man could not really protect the individual in his or her natural nakedness; they were rather the expression of isolation than its remedy, because they did not tell individuals to which community they belonged. Nor could the people’s sovereignty per se save them from the uncertainties of their new status as an atomistic master of him- or herself, because the individual’s participation in the omnipotence of the sovereign does not tell that individual what is right. Hence from the very beginning of democratic theory, theorists had to deal with the question how to secure not only the omnipotence of the new ‘mortal God’ – this could be deduced from the autonomy of individuals and their natural freedom and equality – but at the same time its wisdom and justice. In other words, how can we assure that, since people are not gods, although they have replaced divine commands with their own, their commands are not only the expression of a sovereign will but also of the common good ? It was a difficult task to justify popular sovereignty and self-government as the consequence of individual freedom and equality; it is far more difficult – probably impossible – to justify popular selfgovernment if it is known to be prone to fall prey to the inherent weakness and wickedness of humans.

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Interests, checks and the general will In the history of democracy, we find appeals to a variety of moral capabilities in citizens which are deemed to motivate them to fulfill their civic obligations visà-vis the body politic and their fellow-citizens. The most prominent among these moral capabilities are virtue, reason and self-interest. However, the framers of the American constitution did not, in the last analysis, put the decisive weight on either virtue or reason as the solid foundation of the republic.6 And they were positively skeptical about reason as a power to rule the common will of the people. Madison himself was suspicious about the very notion of a common will: he believed it impossible that such a will could freely emanate from within a united civil society, and that it could only be espoused by a hereditary or self-appointed government. Nor did he deplore the inability of civil society to generate a united will from within, but rather saw in that fragmented and disunited nature a guarantee of the preservation of individual freedom. In other words, he relied on the fact that ‘different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens’ and that/whilst all authority … will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.’7 Thus the American democratic model relieved the sovereign people from the heavy burden of a nearly sacred task to define and implement the common good. Instead, the model restricted itself to the task of devising institutions (such as the natural right to private property and the division of powers) which (a) allowed the individuals to pursue their diverse interests and their particular notions of happiness, thereby at the same time (b) avoiding the danger of an omnipotent government imposing its notion of collective happiness upon the people. Instead of ‘unifying’ the people on the basis of some collective will, it seemed more promising to the framers to move in the opposite direction of promoting the diversity and fragmentation of interests. In a way, these institutions were designed to play the role of ‘congealed’ or ‘sedimented’ virtue, which thus made the actual practice of these virtues, such as truthfulness, wisdom, reason, virtue, justice and all kinds of exceptional moral qualities, to some extent dispensable – on the part of both the rulers and the ruled. This ingenious machinery is evidently far less demanding in moral terms than what 6 Cf. T. Pangle, ‘Civic virtue: the founders’ conception and the traditional conception’, in G. C. Bryner and N. B. Reynolds (eds), Constitutionalism and Rights, Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1987. 7 The Federalist Papers: Hamilton, Madison, Jay, intr. Clinton Rossiter, New York, New American Library, 1961, 51, pp. 323, 324.

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would be required of citizens in a different type of democracy, one which comes close to aspiring to the secular redemption of the people through a more or less permanent revolutionizing of those social conditions which expose the people to social and economic conditions of suffering, poverty, oppression, humiliation, dependence, ignorance and superstition. This latter kind of aspiration was in fact what inspired the French Revolution. Above all, it was a sequence of social revolutions – successively the revolutions of the nobility, of the bourgeoisie, of the urban masses, and of the peasants8 – in which the fate of each individual was seen to be inescapably tied to the fate and action of every other individual. It is no accident that this revolution took place in a Catholic country; the conviction that every soul is equal before God, that salvation is not earned through personal excellence and superiority but is the expression of God’s mercy towards the miserable and the unfortunate, if secularized, nourishes the idea of collective liberation through social revolution. (The impact of a political theology which is energized by the concept of social revolution, i. e. of collective emancipation, is particularly vigorous in Catholic countries of the so-called Third World, especially in Latin America.) Hence the notion of popular sovereignty was from the very beginning associated with the indivisible will-power of a collective body, be it the nation, the republic or the united people, while institutional mediations and machineries were considered to be of minor importance. ‘No matter how a nation will, it is sufficient that she will; all forms are good and her will is always the supreme law’ proclaimed Abbe’ Sieyes, a Catholic theologian, on the eve of the French Revolution. Undoubtedly Sieyes made the implication that the will-power of the nation is inherently reasonable, because it was inconceivable – particularly in the age of Enlightenment – that an arbitrary will could become the law. No more than God could have an erroneous will could the people err; by virtue of the fact of being the will of the people, this will was ‘reasonable’, ‘right’, ‘just’, ‘virtuous’. This equation was evidently informed by Rousseau’s Social Contract and his construction of the general will (volonté generate). When Rousseau stated that ‘the general will is always right and aims always at the common good’9 he did not imply, as some commentators have argued, any inherent goodness or substantive morality in the empirical will of the people. Actually, he had a better argument, namely a more procedural one. For he radicalized – by inverting it – a prescription that Montesquieu had devised to assure the reasonableness of the law. According to Montesquieu, law-givers in a democracy should always be subjected to their own laws. Rousseau turned this principle around: instead of saying “the author of the laws 8 9

G. Lefebvre, Quatre-vingt-neuf, Paris: Editions sociales, 1970. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, bk 2, Ch. 3.

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must be subjected to them’ he reversed the sentence stating that ‘the people that is subject to the law must be its author’.10 What is the implication of this inversion, and what is its significance ? According to both of these rules, the law is general in that it applies to both the ruled and the ruler. But Montesquieu’s rule does not preclude the possibility that a ruler who is – for instance due to idiosyncratic (masochistic) characteristics or a privileged economic position – incapable of being negatively affected by the content of the law, might impose unjust suffering upon the ruled. Although the law applies to this ruler, it does so with consequences that differ from the way in which it applies to everyone else. This problematic result could only be avoided if the economic conditions, interests, needs, feelings and preferences of the law-giver and the subjects of the law were sufficiently similar so as to affect all of them in substantively equal terms. This is precisely the point of Rousseau’s rule. As the subject of the law is made its author, as the subject and hence the author are the popular classes, and as each participant in the process of law-making will, in the process of deliberating the content of the law, give primary consideration to the likes of him- or herself (and hence pay little attention to economic or other kinds of ‘exceptional’ conditions in which the law might also apply), the social impact of the law will tend to be of a highly egalitarian nature as a result of the very procedure of law-making.11 This, in fact, is not just the psychological inclination of ordinary law-makers, but also the normative condition of a substantively just (or “democratic”) and hence of an effectively binding law. We have dealt with Rousseau and the American conception of popular sovereignty at some length in order to explain not only that the relationship between sovereignty and reason has quite distinct roots in the different traditions of the American and the French Revolutions but that its contemporary features are still vigorously affected by this tradition. At a first glance it is surprising that precisely that theory of democracy which presupposed the utmost equality of all citizens was to nourish the revolution in a country suffering from extreme inequalities, whereas in the American colonies, where social and economic inequalities were rather limited, a theory of popular sovereignty prevailed which bluntly denied the possibility of a common will and interest which would unite the people. Yet this paradox is plausibly explained by the fundamentally different characters of the two revolutions: the French was a social revolution, whereas the American Revolution, apart from being a struggle for national independence, was a purely constitutional revolution which in its socio-economic aspects was explicitly conservative. A social revolution determines the fate of the people as a whole and 10 Ibid., bk 2, Ch. 6. 11 Rousseau, however, as is well known, displayed no certitude as to the actual achievability of this egalitarian vision (see Social Contract, bk 2, Chs. 3, 6).

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hence ties the individual strictly to the destiny of his social category. When Rousseau stated that nobody could work for himself without working for others, he was not only presenting a secularized version of the Christian command to love one’s fellow-creature as oneself but was unconsciously foreshadowing the social dimension of reciprocity and solidarity. This notion of democracy and the concept of social revolution were mutually reinforcing, because the perception of the people as a united, corporate body underscored the collective character of their destiny and hence their genuine equality, which at the same time directed their hopes towards social emancipation, because this image of a “multitude […] united in one body and driven by one will was an exact description of what they actually were, for what urged them on was the quest for bread, and the cry for bread will always be uttered with one voice”.12

The American and French traditions in democratic theory: Balancing individual interests and the common good The American tradition views democratic politics and popular power not as an unequivocal ideal, but as something potentially dangerous. Passions must be checked – both the passions of the people (and the irreconcilable ‘factions’ that will of necessity emerge within the people as a whole) and the passions of the political elites who always are tempted to exploit the powers of government for their own profit and advantage. The constitutional construct that is designed to tame the dangers of passions, despotism and factions is basically one that places strong emphasis on checks and controls. First, interests check interests within a market society based on legal guarantees of private property and the freedom of contract. Second, interests check governmental powers through a dense net of democratic rights, most importantly elections and the freedom of the press. Third, power checks power, i. e. the holders of democratic power check each other through complicated relations of rights and powers extending between the various political institutions such as the states, the federal government, the Presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court and the armed forces. As a result, a polity emerges that is built around the ideal of the free pursuit of the individual’s notion of happiness. Whatever collective notions of happiness, salvation, or the realization of any particular group’s destiny or potential may prevail, they are neither defined nor implemented through the political process, but through associative action within civil society. The common good is no more than the secure enjoyment of his or her individual good by each and every citizen. Such 12 H. Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking, 1963, p. 89.

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a model of democratic politics does evidently not make strong or optimistic assumptions concerning the moral qualities that citizens are capable of displaying in the act of democratic participation – although it can by no means do without any moral requirements and presuppositions, as citizens must be considered willing and able to respect the common interest in the preservation of civilized and constitutional rules, rather than to engage in an unregulated individualistic struggle of interest. Concerning moral capabilities, the American tradition – and most liberal political thought in general – relies on a realist and empiricist (as opposed to an idealist-rationalist) assumption. This assumption is based on something like the following syllogism: if men have morally ‘bad’ intentions, as must be realis­tically assumed, the highest priority is to check the potentially dangerous impact of these intentions upon the process of democratic government. If, however, these intentions turn out to be morally desirable, ample room must be left for the manifestation of these intentions within the communities and associations of civil society; hence the political order itself can afford to be morally undemanding. Consequently, and in order to be on the safe side, it is neither tolerable nor desirable to commit democratic government to any notion of republican virtue or the common good. In contrast, the French tradition of democratic theory is firmly tied to a collectivist notion of secular salvation through social progress, with the constitution being considered as a machinery for promoting this encompassing vision of the common good. Starting with this premise, the design problem for those engaged in politique politisante is the inverse one from the American case. Theirs is not the problem of how to check and neutralize the dangers of faction, but how to enable citizens to be ‘good’ citizens – i. e. citizens committed to the common good. Given the fallibility of the will of the popular sovereign, the task of the constitution becomes one of overcoming this fallibility, and also of securing the progress that has already been made. As shown in the previous section, Rousseau was fully aware of the extraordinary difficulty of this task. The Social Contract can be read as a relentless effort to specify the conditions under which the empirical will of the people can be approximated to the reasonable will of the people, the volonté générale. And in an almost tragic case of circular reasoning Rousseau seems to conclude that a reliable commitment of each and every citizen to the realization of the common good can be expected to prevail only if the revolutionary task of realizing the common good is already accomplished ! Not only does Rousseau fail, as a result of the unavailability of any notion of class conflict and class formation, to sketch the outlines of an objective dynamic of revolutionary processes that would bring people to converge upon a shared conception of what would constitute their common good (a gap later to be filled by Marx’s theory of historical materialism); he also failed, probably as a result of his romanticist and anti-intellectual inclinations, to

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elaborate a cognitive method by which the transformation of the ‘crude’ into the ‘refined’ version of the will of the people could possibly be accomplished (a gap that today Habermas’ theory of communicative action aspires to fill).13 Nevertheless, Rousseau’s clear notion of the fallibility of the will of the people is of great importance. As ‘God’, or the divine order of public life, is replaced by ‘the people’, and ‘human reason’ becomes the ultimate foundation of social order, the result was the paradox of a ‘mortal god’. Hobbes was probably alone in remaining able to ignore the problem implied in this substitution, as he believed that this new secular authority could be construed more geometrico, i. e. by logically compelling deductive reasoning alone and without any reliance upon fallible or contested normative presuppositions. The idea of a ‘bad government’ would have been an oxymoron to him, as he clearly saw that the frightening alternative of society’s falling back into the state of nature made any government better than no government, and hence the question of the moral qualities of the government utterly irrelevant. But this rationalist-contractarian confidence in the desirability of government per se did not last for long among his successors in the history of political ideas. The insight dawned upon them that ‘peace’ (such as was supposedly accomplished by the Leviathan) was not enough; the problem was to determine a just peace. With Rousseau, writing three generations later, the hiatus between the liberal solution (i. e. the authoritatively safeguarded co-existence of divergent interests within the multitude of individuals) and the republican solution (i. e. the autonomous recognition of the collective interest of all and by all) had appeared on center stage. This alternative still exhausts the range of conceivable designs in modern political theory. On the one hand, the proponents of the former solution rest content with the unalterable diversity of the many notions of justice that ineradicably prevail among the members of even the most civilized societies; what remained to be resolved in this case was the problem of how to organize, by the means of constitutional government and the state’s authority, the peaceful co-existence of the forces and factions that made up this plurality. That, according to liberal theory, is all that can be achieved on the universalist basis of a unanimous consent of the many to refrain from the use of violence in the pursuit of their interests. The portion of the freedom they give up is meant not to serve the common good, but to secure the safe enjoyment of their private goods. On the other hand, this conclusion of liberal democratic theory is contradicted by the ‘republican’ tradition (later developing in the revolutionary democratic 13 ‘Rousseau considers politics to be essentially a simple matter. That is why the process of the formation of the will, individual as well as collective, does not concern him’ (B. Manin, ‘On legitimacy and deliberation’, Political Theory, 15 (1987), p. 347).

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direction) that originated in French political thought. Within this tradition, two objections, one negative, one positive, are raised against the liberal version of democratic theory. The negative objection, later to be elaborated in the classical writings of historical materialism, rests its case upon the compelling observation that, given the original and unequal endowment of individuals with means and resources to engage in their pursuit of happiness, the nominal universalism of the liberal arrangement turns into a de facto particularism. Equal rights (e. g. in property) are not paralleled by the equal distribution of the resources necessary actually to enjoy these rights. Hence the constitutional universalism must be extended into a socioeconomic one within a process of revolutionary social transformation. The second, positive counter-argument posits that this is not only necessary, but also possible, as men have the ‘natural’ interest, desire and capability to pursue a shared vision of the common good – if only they can become masters of the economic and social conditions of their life. As a consequence of these two objections, radical political thought had to secularize the notion of salvation as well. As God was replaced by the people as the ultimate source of order and authority, so the promise of divine justice had to be complemented or replaced by the inner-worldly project of a revolutionary transformation. This alternative seemed to involve a much greater task: the task of bringing about not just peace, but an unequivocally just peace. The revolutionary project requires for its redemption not just the peaceful aggregation of the will of the many, but a rational cognitive process which determines what must rationally be willed by all14 and what course the process of human and societal perfection must take as a consequence. In this case, what is required of the citizen is not just rational consent to the ground rules of a peaceful order, but the much greater effort to purify and transcend his or her supposedly selfish and myopic preferences and opinions so as to arrive at a generalizable version of his or her will. The 14 This distinction is nicely symbolized by political rituals. No parliamentary speaker in any Western democracy would ever join in the applause offered at the end of his or her own speech by those sharing the demands and opinions expressed. In contrast, it is common (or at least, it has been common until recently) for Communist Party chairmen to applaud themselves after the entire party convention has risen to deliver a standing ovation. This symbolic practice is not the act of self-congratulatory arrogance that it must appear to many Western observers; rather, its meaning rests on the assumption that what has been expressed in the speech and is now being celebrated by all is not the speaker’s personal or partisan opinion, but a true insight, the achievement of which is highlighted by the ritual in which the speaker himself, being simply the mouthpiece of a collective cognitive process rather than the author of his words, is therefore entitled to join. The symmetrical opposite of this ritual, of course, is to be seen in the practices of auto-criticism and brain-washing, both of which can only be defended under the assumption that they consist in the cure to a strictly cognitive error, rather than in crippling a person’s integrity and identity.

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distance that must be travelled in order to accomplish the latter is evidently much greater than that involved in the former. In order to be a rational consenter to the ground rules of a strictly liberal version of democracy, I need to show little more than the prudent pursuit of my interest, whereas to share in some collective will I need to ‘launder’ my preferences much more fundamentally, as the fallibility of my judgement is always in danger not just of obstructing my well-considered selfinterest, but of missing the volonté générale itself. The tension between the empirical will and the will to have a ‘true and reasonable’ will is clearly recognized by both Montesquieu and Rousseau.15 So, in either case, the case of the peaceful pursuit of individual interests as well as in the case of the generalizable will, some moral effort is required – albeit, as we have just argued, a much greater one in the latter case than in the former. Perhaps it is not entirely obvious why liberal theory, too, can be said to require a minimum of moral commitment Although, according to this theory, the social contract originates in pure self-interest, its duration in time cannot be accounted for in terms of interest alone. For the longer the social contract lasts, the greater the temptation either to break it for one’s own self-interest (thus freeriding upon the conformity of others) or to break it first in order to pre-empt others. Thus, the validity of the axiom pacta sunt servanda cannot be explained in terms of self-interest alone, but only with reference to some morally founded commitment and self-restraint. Thus, both of our theories imply a difference between immediate (or interestguided) and morally refined preferences. In neither case will my immediate and unrefined impulses and inclinations suffice. From an ex ante perspective, the distance between the two sorts of preferences is defined through the active use of practical reason: from an ex post perspective, through the passive experience of regret. In either version of our two accounts of democracy, the quality of democratic institutions depends on the extent to which they are capable of activating and cultivating the practice of the former, thus minimizing the experience of the latter. One might even claim that designing institutional arrangements that favor the refinement of political preferences is the only theoretical problem that the two democratic traditions have in common. How is the ‘raw material’ of the will of the 15 ‘And it is fortunate for men to be in a situation in which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so’ (C.-L. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Chicago: William Benton, 1952, bk 21, Ch. 20); ‘Although one wishes always one’s best, one does not always recognize it’ (Rousseau, Social Contract, bk 2, Ch. 3); ‘People […] are often deceived, and it is […] then that they seem to wish for what is bad’ (ibid.); ‘The common will is always right, but the judgement which leads it is not always enlightened)’ (ibid., bk 2, Ch. 6). All of these quotations (which are amended translations in Rousseau’s case) can be read as illustrations and examples of the category of ‘democratic regret’.

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people, with all its blindness, selfishness and short-sightedness, to be transformed into reasonable and non-regrettable outcomes ? There are several aspects of this thorny problem. First, if we inquire into what we mean by a ‘rational’ or ‘enlightened’ political will, we will hit upon three qualitative criteria. Such a will would ideally have to be at the same time ‘fact-regarding’ (as opposed to ignorant or doctrinaire), ‘future-regarding’ (as opposed to myopic) and ‘other-regarding’ (as opposed to selfish). To be sure, it is hard to determine when and how this ideal is to be satisfied to an optimal extent. But it suffices here to postulate that whenever ‘regret’ is experienced concerning an earlier expression of individual and collective will, it can be traced back to deficiencies in one or more of these three dimensions. A further dimension of the ‘reasonable will’ problem becomes apparent if we realize that the will of the people plays a significant role at two places in the democratic political process, namely at its origin (where the ‘inputs’ of voters or participants occur) and at its end (where laws and other acts of the democratically constituted authority are executed and compliance is required). Thus, the quality of the will of the people is a problem that can be split into two sub-problems: the quality of the will that is being actively expressed and the quality of the will that leads people to comply passively with – or, alternatively, to violate or resist – the law of which they are, at the same time, the collective authors and subjects. It is of course tempting to postulate that the two aspects stand in close interrelation (in that a law deriving from an unanimously expressed preference carries strong obligatory power and perhaps also that ‘input’-preferences will easily converge on collective choices that are anticipated to be easily enforceable); but nonetheless, the two aspects deserve to be treated as analytically distinct, namely as those of rational preference formation and rationally motivated compliance. The rather schematic way in which we have opposed the two democratic traditions – the liberal and the revolutionary – is intended to highlight one underlying analytical dimension of political theory which was first formulated by the French and American political theorists of the second half of the eighteenth century and which still constitutes the arena of the debate at the end of the twentieth century. The polar cases of a pure regime of checks and balances and a pure regime of republican virtue are of little practical significance. But they are of the greatest theoretical significance because they delimit the space within which democratic theorists try to define synthetic solutions which in their turn are also of practical and political significance. Any such synthetic solution consists in a reasoned trade-off within the unavoidable dilemma of democratic theory and its task of designing new institutions or justifying existing ones. The dilemma is this: should democratic institutions or constitutions be built around the ‘empirical’ or the ‘reasonable’ will of the people ? Should constitutional rules and procedures be seen primarily as a mechanism of checks, balances, self-binding or self-paternalist ar-

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rangements that impose constraints upon governing elites and citizens alike, or should they be seen as constitutive, self-founding, developmental, formative and enabling mechanisms which are designed to alter and ‘de-nature’ the empirical will of the people and to approximate it towards some notion of a reasonable will ? Is it the objective of constitutions to establish a political order (which supposedly has its value in itself) or do they aim (and to what extent justifiably ?) at instrumentally transforming the social and economic order so as to promote some substantive notion of justice and the common good ? Is it the values of freedom and liberty or those of equality, solidarity and justice that provide the ultimate justification for a democratic polity ? Is it the people as an existing multitude of individuals that forms the basis and reference-point of a democratic polity, or is it the ultimatelyto-be-achieved people as a corporate body with a common history and destiny ? Is it the principle of legality that endows a democratic regime with legitimacy, or must legality itself be submitted to some substantive legitimacy test ? Is it the institutions (as the ‘congealed’ outcome of experience, reflection and deliberation) which make up a democratic regime, or is it the actual capability of the citizens, as practiced by them, to pursue the common good ? None of these questions – all of which upon closer inspection turn out to be just variants of the single problem originally posed by the contrast of the American and the French traditions – can be answered today in an either-or fashion. Rather, they must be answered through a laborious synthetic effort aiming at a provisionally valid reconciliation of the opposites. Let us look at some examples of how these problems have been dealt with by democratic theorists in the twentieth century.

Hybrid solutions to the problem of democratic theory The problem of the Rousseauist version of democracy is that it inevitably presupposes highly demanding conditions for the consonance of the people’s will and the common good, whereas the democratic theory which places itself in the American tradition may turn out to be too undemanding in reducing the concept of the common good to little more than an aggregation of individual preferences. But even in that less demanding case it is necessary that the way in which the individual citizen pursues his or her interests and values be ‘civilized’, that is, firmly tied to the rules, disciplines and procedures that permit the pursuit of interest by all to remain fair, equitable and peaceful. Thus, in either of the two traditions, though to widely varying degrees, institutions must be provided that serve the purpose of purifying and refining the ‘raw’ and uncivilized inclinations of actors. In its more demanding version, the aim is to condition citizens to be ‘good’ citizens, that is, citizens able to be active authors of the common will. In the less demanding ver-

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sion, the aim is to bind citizens to respect the law and the constitution in the process of their pursuit of interest. In the history of modern democracy, we have seen different institutional strategies designed to achieve this aim of civilizing citizens. The actual institutions and practices of modern liberal democracies do not correspond to either the French or the American tradition. Rather than solving the problem of how to refine the empirical will of the people, the dominant strategy has been to bracket and ignore the problem and to bypass the solutions that were envisaged by either version of classical democratic theory. This, at least, is what we want to argue in the following discussion of two of the key institutional features of contemporary democracies: the franchise and the welfare state. Voting rights and representation It is a truism that the universal right to vote is the decisive and distinctive quality of democratic regimes. There are three different justifications of the right to vote. The most fundamental and the earliest consists in the notion that, as Rousseau argued, the force of the law is conditional upon the universal franchise. The general will must originate ‘in all citizens in order to apply to all citizens’.16 But, secondly, the influential early American theory of virtual representation claimed that the binding force of the law does not necessarily rest on every citizen’s right to vote, but can be achieved through ‘just’ representation; on the basis of this concession, a different argument for the universalization of the franchise is required, namely, one that highlights the value that this right confers on the individual. According to this theory, the right to vote constitutes full citizenship status and defines who counts in the community.17 Thirdly, there has always been current a more or less implicit notion in terms of which the right to vote is justified and defended by reference to the quality of the outcome of the political process. According to this version, the franchise is justified by the fact that it presumably tends to make citizens more aware of their responsibilities towards the common good. Rousseau contended that the general will is directed towards the common good because ‘everybody necessarily submits himself to the aim conditions which he imposes on others’;18 in consequence of this mutuality, nobody will be tempted to impose unfair duties and sacrifices upon others which these others then will predictably reciprocate upon him – unless such duties are strictly and intelligibly called for by the common good. 16 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk 2, Ch. 4. 17 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949, p. 92; L. H. Tribe, Constitutional Choices, Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 14; R. E. Goodin, Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 83 ff. 18 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk 2, Ch. 4.

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Of course, a glance at the historical reality of democratic developments shows quite clearly that the reverse assumption has prevailed in practice. Rather than relying on the risky hypothesis that the extension of the right to participate would by itself and quasi-automatically elevate the individual to the status of an enlightened and responsible citizen, nineteenth-century proponents of democracy held fast to the somewhat safer hypothesis that only those who have been demonstrated to be responsible citizens in the first place (through paying taxes, achieving high educational or professional status, etc.) should be entitled to participation. Accordingly, it was only after the First World War that the universalization of the right to vote was deemed appropriate in most West European democracies. Apart from these ambiguities in the justification of the right to vote, a wellknown dialectic ensues from the extension of this right. The broader the entitlement to participate becomes, the more it becomes dependent upon the insertion of representative intermediaries (which were anathema to Rousseau), such as political parties and legislative bodies. This insertion has been justified in the theory of party competition and parliamentary representation not just as flowing from the necessities of coping with large quantities of participating citizens dispersed over the territory of national states, but also as assuring a higher degree of comprehensiveness and far-sightedness, or, in a word, of political rationality to be employed in the decision-making process. State intervention and the regulation of production and distribution The secular process of the extension of the right to political participation – and at the same time of the increasing indirectness and mediation of the forms through which this right could be utilized – has been one of two cumulative structural developments in the historical practice of democracy. The other development has taken place not in the social, but in the substantive dimension: after more and more categories of people were admitted to active citizenship in the first of the two processes, the second consisted in subjecting more and more aspects of the life of civil society, particularly as it affects issues of production and distribution, to the collective political will. The French Constitution of 1791 excluded wage workers and all other categories of dependent individuals from the suffrage because poverty and dependency were thought to be obstacles to the possession of a reasonable will, and hence to participation in the formation of the nation’s reasonable collective will. Consequently, the goal of democratization came to include the abolition of material dependency and poverty through the realization of social and economic equality, whether by the introduction of schemes of co-determination and ‘industrial democracy’ or through state regulation, welfare policies and ‘economic democracy’.

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One assumption underlying the extension of democracy into the economic and distributional as well as the educational spheres was that this would help to improve the outcomes of the political process by fostering the rational qualities, the sense of material security, the freedom from anxieties and fears, and the self-confidence of citizens enjoying the right to participate not just in properly political but also, through social and economic state policies, in economic affairs. This second extension of democracy was held to follow a logic strictly analogous to that discussed earlier, namely the logic of using ‘more democracy’ for the purpose of making ‘better citizens’. Unfortunately, however, ‘the evidence is by no means conclusive that increased participation per se will trigger a new renaissance in human development’ or that it ‘leads to consistent and desirable political outcomes.’19 In fact, during the course of the development of the welfare state, distributive policies came to be less and less a means to an end – the qualification of all individuals for responsible citizenship – and came rather to be valued in themselves. The welfare state and its policies of social security and redistribution can even come into conflict with the democratic ideal of civic reason if the scheme of income redistribution is uncoupled from the universalistic principle of the promotion of the common good and if it is instead guided by group strategies to appropriate portions of the gross national product at the expense of others. Moreover, the institutions of the welfare state have been rightly criticized for their tendency to foster dependency and clientilistic attitudes on the part of citizens. The over-optimistic hypothesis that the extended participation of citizens must somehow naturally entail an improvement in the moral and cognitive quality of their decision-making capabilities might even be disputed by the opposite contention: namely that participation (and the chances of collective appropriation of material values that go with it) may actually corrupt citizens by appealing to their selfishness. From this strongly pessimistic assumption the reverse suggestion would follow: only the evidence that individuals are responsible citizens would entail and justify their extended participation. The first alternative would presume that Rousseau’s doctrine is still valid: the more and the more thoroughly the interests of the individuals are politicized by transferring them to the popular sovereign, the less are they vulnerable to particularistic inclinations and the more responsible are the volitions which form the collective will.20 The other alternative would be a Lockean one; it would claim that only the force of strong individual interests in one’s own private affairs can nurture – and maintain over time – a person’s sense of responsibility; and that, conversely, the more the sphere of public 19 D. Held, Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity, in association with Blackwell, 1987, pp. 280, 281. 20 Rousseau, Social Contract, bk 1, Ch. 6.

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policies and regulations is extended, the more impoverished the individual’s rational civic capacities and virtues will tend to become.21 As in the case of a more universal and egalitarian distribution of the legal right to participate in politics, so also in the case of a more egalitarian distribution of economic rights and resources, the question must be asked whether or not (and if so, as a result of which causal mechanisms) more equality among individual citizens will give rise to the development of their moral and rational capabilities and thus, eventually, to the improvement of the outcomes of collective decision making. Raising this question does not, of course, deny the justifiability of egalitarian social and economic policies on other grounds outside democratic theory proper, such as the abolition of misery and poverty. But from the point of view of democratic theory, careful and sober consideration should be given to the question why – and under what conditions – equality among individuals can be assumed to be a necessary precondition of collective rationality.

Problems of democratic solutions The conundrum of generating what are assumed to be collectively rational decisions in democratic ways without first generating citizens who are inspired by the desire for promoting the common good (or the common interest in observing the legal framework regulating of the pursuit of private interests) can be compared to the task of generating a desired effect in the absence of its necessary cause. In the absence of ‘reasonable’ citizens, the aggregate outcomes of their individual acts of participation must still be justified as ‘reasonable’. As we have just argued, in the development of modern liberal democracy and its theoretical interpretations, there are two major ways, consecutively adopted, in which this conundrum is presumably solved. One is representation, the other is the welfare state. In the theory of representation, the condition is relaxed that in order for reasonable decisions to be made, the ultimate authors of the decision must themselves be reasonable,22 and that there exists a necessary convergence between the will of 21 Cf. D. F. Thompson, Political Ethics and Public Office, Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 44 ff. 22 This realist revision of the claims for universal suffrage and representative governments asserted itself only after these major democratic accomplishments were reached in most of Western Europe after the end of the First World War. Before this stage, socialists in particular held the greatest hopes concerning the civilizing, mobilizing and, eventually, progressive impact that the right to vote was to have – not only for the external conditions of production and distribution, but equally for the moral and political formation and the development of the consciousness of the working class.

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the people and the common good; henceforth it suffices that the members of representative legislative bodies, if properly constituted, proclaim reason on behalf of the people, in the vast majority of which any degree of reasonableness cannot be assumed. A tradition in democratic theory ever more vociferous in the interwar period began to denounce the hopes, voiced by the classical tradition from Rousseau to Mill, concerning the enlightening and civilizing impact of the right to vote, as void and naive. As the citizen was basically considered incapable of autonomously refining his will, some vicarious preference-refining mechanism had to be put in place. Conversely, representative mechanisms were seen as barriers serving to prevent unreasonable inputs from interfering with the quality of decision outputs. Robert Michels, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Joseph Schumpeter, in spite of their vastly different philosophical and political orientations, all converged upon an increasingly disillusioned and often manifestly cynical view of the potential of democratic institutions to transform the empirical will of the people into something more reasonable and enlightened, taking this will instead as something inherently irrational which at best could serve as the sounding-board of charismatic leaders, an object of ‘caesaristic’ manipulation, or a contentless selection mechanism for political entrepreneurs. A parallel argument applies to the actual implementation of collectively binding decisions: as it cannot be assumed that citizens will normally feel obliged to comply with the decisions that have been made not by them but in their name, so the threat of negative sanctions must be applied in order to force them to do what the law requires them to do. Thus, the empirical will of the citizens is bracketed and neutralized by means of the insertion of representative mechanisms and the state’s monopoly of force, which apply, respectively, to the empirical will in its active (participatory) and its passive (compliance) versions. The stronger the independent force of these two mechanisms, the lesser the requirements that must be made upon the civic spirit, virtue and insight of citizens, while at the same time the potentially dangerous impact of their ‘passions’ remains under effective control. The same perspective can be applied to the welfare state, defined as the provision of legal entitlement-based social security for employees and their dependents. Nowhere was the welfare state designed to produce competent citizens by improving individuals’ capacity to form responsible and considered judgements and to transcend the immediacy of their social and economic interests. On the contrary, it was designed to condition workers to rationally accept existing social and economic arrangements and hence to comply, as workers and as citizens, with its daily routines; once they were given a stake in the system and its continued operation, there was within it much more for them to lose than merely their ‘shackles’. In contrast to any revolutionary transformation of the social and economic order along the lines initiated by Rousseau, the welfare state aimed at generating not citizens

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capable of the autonomous consideration of the common good, but dependable workers. Nor do other institutional patterns aim at or contribute to the development of the moral capacities of the citizens. The institutions and procedures of liberal democracies can be criticized for involving three cumulative mechanisms of ‘political alienation’. By political alienation we mean the difference and distance that intervene between the subjectivity, motives and intentions of those who are involved in the decision-making process (and in whose name the decisions’ validity and legitimacy are vindicated) on the one hand, and the decision outcomes, on the other. One important consequence of political alienation is the depletion of the moral resources of citizens. Political alienation can be said to occur in the temporal, social and substantive dimensions. First, political alienation in the temporal dimension results from the tension between elections and decisions. The mandate that voters give to legislative bodies and governments extends over a period within which decisions on issues will be made, the nature and content of which are entirely unknown at the moment of voting, and in which for this reason voters can play no role; this problem is exacerbated through the ‘loss of collective memory’ that is conditioned by the media and modern PR strategies. Secondly, in the social dimension, the alienation mechanism results from the apparent paradox that as rights to political participation are extended to broader and more heterogeneous categories of the population, the political class of professional legislators, policy-makers and administrators becomes more homogeneous by training and social background, thus giving rise to a growing separation between people and politicians. Third, and in close connection to the other two modes of political alienation, there is a growing distance between the everyday knowledge, values and experience of ordinary citizens and the expertise of political professionals. These various forms and aspects of political alienation imply two equally probable effects: either short-sighted, myopic and opportunistic modes of action on the part of political elites who are no longer effectively called upon to comply to demanding standards of political rationality and responsibility; a moral and political ‘de-skilling’ of the electorate and the spread of cynical attitudes about public affairs and the notion of a public good. It is easy to see how these two effects, those affecting elites and those affecting the masses, can feed upon each other. From our brief and critical discussion of the failures of the major institutional components of modern liberal democracy, namely representation and the welfare state, we wish to draw two conclusions which might help to throw new light upon current challenges to democratic theory and democratic practice. (1) Legislation through representative bodies plus authoritative enforcement of the law are indispensable, but at the same time insufficient mechanisms to cope with collective decision-making problems: for instance, in the areas of environ-

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mental protection, resource use, gender relations, health-related behavior, intergenerational behavior and a large number of other public policy issues. What are needed for effective implementation of policies, in addition to legal regulation, are enlightened, principled and refined preferences on the part of citizens. Moreover, there is no built-in guarantee that the decisions of representative bodies will be superior, more responsible or more reasonable than the micro-decisions of enlightened individual actors; on the contrary, most of the new issues and problems concerning the ‘common good’ (ranging from questions of gender relations, the Third World and peace to the natural and the built environment) have been brought up during the 1970s and 1980s not by parties and parliaments, but by new social movements working outside the formally constituted political system, while the representative institutions have often been more myopic and future-discounting, less other-regarding and fact-regarding, than parts of their constituencies. Nor is there any guarantee that even the most enlightened and reasonable legislation can be brought to bear, through the authoritative means of law enforcement and legal regulation alone, upon the day-to-day action of the less enlightened citizenry. What this amounts to, is the diagnosis of an increasing powerlessness of constituted political powers in both their legislative and executive capacities.23 As a result, the role of actors within civil society, both collective and individual, assumes increasing strategic significance for the solution of societal problems. As justice is no longer something that can be implemented through legislation alone, the rule of law must be complemented at the micro-level of the principled action of conscientious citizens.24 (2) While many critics of the practices of liberal democracy, particularly on the political left, have tended to believe that the obvious cure for unreasonable and unjust outcomes of government action is the broadening of democratic participation and co-determination, first across categories of the population (women, adolescents, foreign workers, etc.) and then across substantive areas (local governments, industrial enterprises, professional services, schools, universities, etc.), this view has lost much of its compelling power. The difficulties with this general idea are threefold. First, the approximation of the ideal that ‘all’ should be entitled to participate in a collectively binding decision becomes implausible as soon as the appropriate definition of what we mean 23 To the extent our assumption is warranted, it can be said to be increasingly the case that collective decision problems of the type that cannot easily and effectively be dealt with by formal-legal methods of governance do in fact make up an increasing portion of our public agenda. 24 The booming interest, both academic and non-academic, in the field of applied ethics may be interpreted as a reflection of this shifting balance between legal and statist modes of control on the one hand, and moral and societal ones on the other.

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by ‘all’ is called into question. Take the case of an airport construction project: is the universe of those affected by the decision, and for that reason the universe of those entitled to participation in making it, ‘all’ inhabitants of the nearby villages, or is it ‘all’ airlines and their clients who qualify as potential users of the new facility ? As regionalist and gender issues illustrate, the thorny problem of defining the appropriate universe cannot be resolved by broadening participation; more often, the problem is felt by political activists to be how to keep ‘outsiders’ out. Secondly, and in a similar way, the rationality of broadening the social range of participation becomes manifestly dubious when the issue is, as in fact it is in all questions concerning human and citizen rights, not to ‘win majorities’, but to protect rights from being overruled by even the strongest majorities. Thirdly, and most important in the present context, what we have to confront is the disappointing possibility that the quality of outcomes is not always demonstrably improved through broadening the range of rights to participation and co-determination. Such rights, far from educating actors to make well-considered decisions (which therefore would turn out to be non-regrettable from an ex post perspective), may well work out in the opposite direction by generating a lower level of reasonableness of collective outcomes than that which might be achieved on the level of individual action. In such cases, the whole appears to be less (in quality) than its parts. The reason for the emergence of such sub-optimal outcomes (as viewed by the participants themselves) might be that the temptation to use the powers of co-determination and participation for short-sighted and particularist purposes is too great to be easily resisted. Many authors seem to shy away from seriously considering this disappointing possibility, as it appears to imply a suggestion of a return to predemocratic, elitist, authoritarian or paternalist modes of making collectively binding decisions. Such implications, however, are not the only conceivable way out of the dilemma. It is also possible, as we wish to suggest in conclusion, to respond to the realistic recognition of the fact that there is no positive linear relationship between participation and reasonableness by proposing a radicalization of the principle of democratic participation. This radicalization would amount to a third step to follow the two that have already been taken by previous waves of democratic movements and democratic reforms, namely (1) the generalization of the categories of persons that are entitled to participate and (2) the generalization of the substantive areas and institutional sectors to which the right to participate is extended. A further step along this line would consist in (3) enfranchising, as it were, the various preferences that exist within individual citizens/voters so as to organize an orderly social conflict not just between majorities and minorities (or, for that matter, between workers and managers in the case of ‘economic democracy’), but, in addition, an ‘inner conflict’ between what the individuals themselves experience as their more desirable and their less desirable desires. Such a radicalization of the

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democratic principle would aim at stimulating deliberation; it would amount to the introduction of procedures that put a premium upon the formulation of carefully considered, consistent, situationally abstract, socially validated and justifiable preferences. ‘It is … necessary to alter radically the perspective common to both liberal theories and democratic thought: the source of legitimacy is not the predetermined will of individuals, but rather the process of its formation, that is, deliberation itself.’25 This proposal to bid farewell to the notion of fixed preferences implies a learning process that aims not at some preconceived standard of substantive rationality, but at an open-ended and continuous learning process in which the roles of both ‘teacher’ and ‘curriculum’ are missing. In other words, what is to be learned is a matter that we must settle in the process of learning itself. It appears to be a largely novel task to think about institutional arrangements and procedures which could generate a selective pressure in favor of this type of reflective and open preference-learning, as opposed to fixed preferences that are entirely derivative from situational determinants, rigid beliefs or self-deception. According to the intuition that we have identified in Montesquieu and Rousseau, all of us prefer to have preferences that enjoy the respect of even our political opponents, which have been refined through the careful consideration of all relevant information and which are reliable and identity-supporting in the sense that they are capable of surviving the passage of time and changes in situational context. It is not well understood, however, which institutions and arrangements might help in the development of such preferable preferences, and in screening out the less preferable ones. Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ is more a thought experiment than a constitutional arrangement. Habermas’ reliance upon the rationality standards that must, in principle, be redeemed in any speech act is all too easily frustrated by the presence of a situational context which relieves the speaker from the rationalizing force of speech, thus letting him or her get away with less than well-considered preferences and propositions. What positive conclusions, if any, are suggested by the two negative propositions we have just tried to defend ? The way in which the problematic of democratic theory has shifted seems obvious. First, there is the shift from the macro-democracy of representative and authoritative political institutions to the micro-level of the formation of the collectively relevant will within the various contexts of civil society, many of which are by their very nature outside the range of operation and control of state institutions, state supervision and state intervention. Secondly, there is a shift from quantity to quality in the sense that in order to produce more

25 Manin, ‘On legitimacy and deliberation’, pp. 351 ff.

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reasonable outcomes it often no longer makes sense to ask for broader participation, but instead to look for a more refined, more deliberative and more reflective formation of the motives and demands that enter the process of mass participation already in place. Neither the liberal-individualist nor the republican-collectivist version of democratic theory appears to be capable today of addressing typical major collective decision problems of modern society. This verdict applies to liberal theory in that it takes insufficient cognizance of the independent and ‘social’ (‘vergesell­ schaftet’) nature of individual action: the individual pursuit of interest generally takes place in the form of strategic, not parametric rationality, and thus it does not permit, if it is to be successful, of abstraction from what others are doing. At the same time, the collectivist search for encompassing visions of what the common good might consist in typically does not sufficiently take into account the degree of social differentiation that modern societies have reached – a differentiation that debases notions such as the ‘collective’ (or even ‘class’) interest. Much of recent sociological research has highlighted the fragmented and ‘individualized’ nature of modern social structures that permits at best highly complex and abstract definitions of identity, as well as the prevalence of multiple cleavages in view of which any use of binary codes (such as labor vs. capital, males vs. females, sector vs. sector, domestic vs. foreign, ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ etc.) appears hopelessly inadequate and misleading if employed as a guide to political preference formation. No set of values and no particular point of view can lay claim to correctness and validity by itself, but at best only after it looks upon itself from the outside, thus relativizing it through the insights that are to be gained by taking the ‘point of view of the other’ (or the generalized ‘moral point of view’). In our view, what remains after both the individualistic and the solidaristic visions have lost much of their persuasiveness is the conclusion that the institutional designs of modern democracy must be based upon the principle of reciprocity. This principle would require that democratic theorists – as well as the everyday practitioners of democracy – place greater emphasis upon the institutional settings and procedures of preference formation and preference learning within civil society. But existing institutions and political practices impose little pressure upon us as citizens actually to engage in such effort and to adopt a multi-perspectival mode of forming, defending and thereby refining our preferences. The social and political world within which we live is much more complex than the attitudes and value-judgements that it still permits us to get away with. This imbalance amounts to our being morally ‘de-skilled’ in our capacity as citizens, and it conditions us into being less intelligent and responsible citizens than we might wish to be – or than the risks and dangers of a highly interdependent mode of life in advanced industrial societies do indeed objectively and urgently require us to be.

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Constitutional designs that might help to balance this discrepancy are not easy to come by. It is obvious that one might wish the family, the media, the institutions of formal education and training, etc. to perform a better job than they often actually do in strengthening the underpinnings of a civilized civic culture. It is equally obvious that the organization of production (as well as the organization of distribution through social policies and social services, including the spatial organization of social life) can do a great deal either to discourage or to encourage reflexive and deliberative modes of preference learning and preference revision. On the other hand, however, the potential contribution to the formation of ‘good citizens’ of ‘good schools’ or egalitarian industrial relations within an arrangement of ‘economic democracy’ seems limited unless it is complemented by new constitutional procedures which will help to improve the quality of citizens’ involvement in the democratic process.26 The design of structurally and functionally ‘adequate’ constitutional procedures is not the task that we have set for ourselves within the confines of this essay. A slightly easier task than describing and justifying what institutions should look like is that of defining what they ideally should be able to accomplish. They should upgrade the quality of citizenship by putting a premium on refined and reflective preferences, rather than ‘spontaneous’ and context-contingent ones. By reflective preferences we mean preferences that are the outcome of a conscious confrontation of one’s own point of view with an opposing point of view, or of the multiplicity of viewpoints that the citizen, upon reflection, is likely to discover within his or her own self. Such reflectiveness may be facilitated by arrangements that overcome the monological seclusion of the act of voting in the voting booth by complementing this necessary mode of participation with more dialogical forms of making one’s voice heard. It may also be facilitated by introducing a time structure into the practice of political participation that makes preference learning and the revision of one’s own previous preferences more affordable and more visible. It may be helped by inserting elements of statistical representation into the established forms of representation mediated through party competition and party bureaucracies. Finally, it may be facilitated by the introduction of mechanisms into the practice of participation that encourage citizens to make better use of available information and theoretical knowledge, instead of relying upon ad hoc evidence and experience. All of these accomplishments should be achieved within a framework of liberty, within which paternalism is replaced by autonomously adopted self-paternalism, and technocratic elitism by the competent and self-conscious judgement of 26 Cf., for example, B. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 261 – ​311.

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citizens. To describe these demanding accomplishments as an ‘ideal’ is indeed justified in view of the enormous efforts that are evidently required to achieve them; on the other hand, they might as well be described as the realistic minimum requirement for the preservation of a civilized democratic polity (as well as of a more open and reflective notion of social and economic progress), as the obsolescence of vicarious’ practices of political reason assigns a decisive role to the reason that each and every citizen is capable to develop for himself or herself.

7

Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization (1983)

I

Introduction

If we compare 19th century liberal political theory on the one side and classical Marxism on the other, we see that there is one major point of agreement of the two. Both Marx and his liberal contemporaries, such as J. S. Mill or de Tocqueville, are convinced that, in their contemporary societies, capitalism and full democracy (based on equal and universal suffrage) do not mix. Obviously, this analytical convergence was arrived at from diametrically opposed points of view: the classical liberal writers believed that freedom and liberty were the most valuable accomplishments of societal development which deserved to be protected, under all circumstances, from the egalitarian threats of mass society and democratic mass politics, which, in their view, would lead, by necessity, to tyranny and “class legislation” by the propertyless as well as uneducated majority1. Marx, on the other side, analyzed the French democratic constitution of 1848 as a political form that would exacerbate societal contradictions by withdrawing political guarantees from the holder of social power while giving political power to subordinate classes; consequently, he argued, democratic conditions could bring the proletarian class to victory and put into question the foundations of bourgeois society2. From the 20th century experience of capitalist societies, there is a lot of evidence against this 19th century hypothesis concerning the incompatibility of mass democracy (defined as universal and equal suffrage plus parliamentary or presi1 2

For instance, J: S. Mill’s argument on the necessary limits of the extension of equal voting rights as developed in Ch. 8 of his Considerations of Representative Government. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975 [1861]. This idea is stated in all three of Marx’ major political writings on France, namely Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich von 1848 – ​1850 (1850), Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1852) und Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich (1871).

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_7

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dential form of government) and bourgeois freedom (defined as production based on private property and “free” wage labor). The coexistence of the two is known as liberal democracy. To be sure, the emergence of fascist regimes in some of the core capitalist countries testifies to the continued existence of tensions and contradictions that prevail between the two models of economic organization and political organization, and to the possibility of the outbreak of such tensions under the impact of economic crises. But it is also true that most advanced capitalist countries have also been liberal democratic states throughout most of the 20th century and that “all major advanced bourgeois states are today democracies”3. In view of this evidence and experience, ours is in some way a problematique that is the reverse of what the classical writers of both liberalism and Marxism concerned themselves with. While they prognosticized the incompatibility, we have to explain the coexistence of the two partial principles of societal organization. More precisely, we want to know (a) which institutional arrangements and mechanisms can be held responsible for the pattern of coexistence that proved to be solid beyond all 19th century expectations and (b) what, if any, the limits of such arrangements are. These limits, or failures of the working of mediating mechanisms, would be defined analytically as those points at which either capitalist societies turn non-democratic or democratic regimes turn non-capitalist. It is these two questions with which I will be concerned in this article. To put it schematically, the course of the argument starts from the problem of how we explain the compatibility4 of the structural components of “mass polity” and “market economy,” and then goes on to focus, on the level of each of these two structures, on the factors contributing to as well as those putting into question such compatibility. This is done in the sequence of boxes (1) – (4) of the following schema: Factors maintaining stability

Factors paralyzing stability

Mode of democratic mass participation

(1)

(2)

Mode of economic steering (KWS)

(3)

(4)

3 4

G. Therborn (1977). “The rule of capital and the rise of democracy,” New Left Review 103: 28. This procedure is followed on the basis of the rather trivial, if not uncontroversial, idea that compatibility, stability, continuity or “self-reproductiveness” of any social system is not sufficiently accounted for in terms of its “inertia” or its presupposed “adaptive capacity,” but can and must be explained as a process of reproduction in which integrative tendencies outweigh those of change or disruption. Cf. C. S. Maier (1981). “The two postwar eras and the conditions for stability in twentieth century Western Europe,” The American Historical Review 86: 321 – ​352.

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To pose this question at all is to presuppose, in accordance with both Marx and Mill, that there is some real tension between the two respective organizing principles of social power and political power, market society and political democracy, a tension that must be (and possibly cannot indefinitely be) bridged, mediated and stabilized. This is by no means an undisputed assumption. For instance, Lenin and the Leninist tradition deny that there is such tension. They assume, instead, that there is a pre-stabilized harmony of the rule of capital and bourgeois democratic forms, the latter mainly serving as a means of deception of the masses. Consequently, it does not make sense whatsoever to ask the question of what makes democracy compatible with capitalism and what the limits of such compatibility might be, because democracy is simply seen to be the most effective and reliable arrangement of capitalist class dominance. “What is central to Lenin’s position is the claim that the very organizational form of the parliamentary democratic state is essentially inimical to the interests of the working class,” as one recent commentator has succinctly stated5. Plausible and convincing as this view can be taken to be if based on the constitutional practice of Russia between 1905 and 1917, its generalization to the present would have, among other and still worse political consequences, the effect of grossly distorting and obscuring the very problematique which we want to discuss6. The reciprocal distortion is the one promulgated by some ideologists of pluralist elitist democratic theory. They claim (or, more precisely, they used to claim in the fifties and early sixties) that the tension between the principles governing capitalist market society and political democratic forms had finally been eliminated in the American political system. According to this doctrine, the class struggle on the level of bourgeois society has been replaced by what Lipset calls “the democratic class struggle” which is seen to make all social arrangements, including the mode of production and the distribution of economic resources, contingent upon the outcomes of democratic mass politics. The underlying logic of this analysis 5 B. Hindess, “Marxism and parliamentary democracy,” in A. Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980. 6 Lenin writes in State and Revolution: “The democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and therefore capital, once in possession […] of this very best shell, establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, of institutions, or of parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.” Having in mind the Leninist tradition of thinking of the state as a mere reflection of socioeconomic power structures – and the corresponding theorem of the eventual withering away of the state after the revolution – the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio has rightly asked the question whether there is at all something like a “Marxist theory of the state” which would be conceptually equipped to grasp the “specificity of the political.” Cf. N. Bobbio’s contributions to Marxismo e lo Stato, Roma: Mondo Operaio Edizioni Avanti, 1976; quoted after the German translation Sozialisten, Kommunisten und der Staat, Hamburg: VSA, 1977, pp. 15 – ​61.

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can be summarized in an argument like this: “If people actually wanted things to be different, they simply would elect someone other into office. The fact that they don’t, consequently, is proof that people are satisfied with the socio-political order as it exists.” Hence, we get something like the inverse of the Leninist doctrine: democracy is not tied to capitalism, but capitalism to democracy. Both of these perspectives deny major tensions or incompatibilities between mass democracy and the market economy. Thus, both the Leninist and the pluralist-elitist conceptions of democracy are missing the point that interests us here. The one dogmatically postulates total dependence of democratic forms and procedures upon class power, while the other equally dogmatically postulates total independence of class and democratically constituted political power. The question that is at the same time more modest and more promising in leading to insights of both intellectual and practical significance is, however, this: which institutions and mechanism regulate the extent to which the two can become incongruent in a given society, and what are the limits of such potential incongruity, – limits, that is, which would constrain the range of potential variance of class power and democratically constituted political authority ? Marketization of Politics and Politicization of the Private Economy In what follows, I will argue that the continued compatibility of capitalism and democracy that was so inconceivable to both classical liberalism and classical Marxism (including Kautsky and the Second International) has historically emerged due to the appearance and gradual developments of two mediating principles, (a) political mass parties and party competition and (b) the Keynesian welfare state (KWS). In other words, it is a specific version of democracy, political equality and mass participation that is compatible with the capitalist market economy. And, correspondingly, it is a specific type of capitalism that is able to coexist with democracy. What interests us here are those specificities of the political and economic structures, the way in which their mutual “fit” is to be explained by the functions each of them performs, and furthermore the strains and tensions that affect those conditions of “fit.” Historically, each of those two structural components of “democratic capitalism” has largely taken shape in Europe either during or in the aftermath of the two World Wars; democracy through party competition after World War I and the Keynesian welfare state after World War II. Each of these two principles follow a pattern of “mixing” the logic of authority and the logic of the market, of “voice” and “exit” in Hirschman’s terminology. This is quite obvious in the case of the Keynesian welfare state for which the term “mixed economy” is often used as a synonym. But it is no less true for the political sphere of capitalist society which

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could well be described as a “mixed polity” and the dynamics of which are often, and to a certain extent appropriately, described as the “oligopolistic competition” of political elites or political “entrepreneurs” providing public “goods”7. The logic of capitalist democracy is one of mutual contamination: authority is infused into the economy by global demand management, transfers and regulations so that it loses more and more of its spontaneous and self-regulatory character; and market contingency is introduced into the state, thus compromising any notion of absolute authority or the absolute good. Neither the Smithian conception of the market nor the Rousseauian conception of politics have much of a counterpart in social reality. Thus, one of the ways in which compatibility is accomplished appears to be the infusion of some of the logic of one realm into the other, i. e., the notion of “competition” into politics and the idea of “authoritative allocation of values” into the economy. Let us now consider each of the two links, or mediating mechanisms, between state and civil society in turn. Following the problematique developed before, we will ask two questions in each case: First, in what way and by virtue of which structural characteristics do political parties and the Keynesian welfare state contribute to the compatibility of capitalism and democratic mass politics. Second, which observable trends and changes occur within the institutional framework of both the “mixed economy” and the “mixed polity” that threaten the viability of the coexistence of capitalism and democracy ?

II

Stabilization through Competitive Party Democracy

The widespread fear of the German bourgeoisie during the first decade of the 20th century was that once the full and equal franchise was introduced together with parliamentary government, the class power of the working class would, due to the numerical strength of this class, directly translate into a revolutionary transformation of the state. It was the same analysis, of course, that inspired the hopes and the political strategies of the leaders of the Second International. Max Weber had nothing but sarcastic contempt for both these neurotic anxieties and naive hopes. He was (together with Rosa Luxemburg and Robert Michels who conducted the same analysis with their own specific accents) among the first social theorists who understood (and welcomed) the fact that the transformation of class politics into competitive party politics implies not only a change of form, but a de7

It is only on the basis of real assimilation of the practices of political parties to market behavior that the “economic paradigm” in democratic theory (as formulated in the famous works of Schumpeter, Downs and Olson) could become so plausible and influential.

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cisive change of content. In 1917, he stated that “amongst us, organizations like the trade unions, but also like the social democratic party, are a very important counterweight against the typically real and irrational power of street mobs in purely plebiscitary nations”8. He expected that the bureaucratized political party together with the charismatic and demagogic political leader at its top would form a reliable bulwark to contain what he described as “blind mass rage” or “syndicalist insurrectionary tendencies.” Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the dynamic of political mass organization differs only in its inverse evaluative perspective, not its analytical content. In 1906, she observed the tendency of working class organizations (i. e., unions and the party) to follow specialized strategies according to a tacit division of labor and of the organizations’ leadership to dominate rather than serve the masses of the constituency. The tendency of the organizations’ bureaucratic staff consists, according to Luxemburg, in a “great trend of rendering itself independent”, “of specializing their methods of struggle and professional activity”, “of overestimating the organization which becomes transformed into an end in itself and the highest good”, “a need for rest”, “a loss of general view of the overall situation,” while at the same time “the mass of comrades are being degraded into a mass which is incapable of forming a judgment”9. Biographically, politically and intellectually, Robert Michels absorbs and integrates the ideas of both Luxemburg and Weber by formulating, in 1911, his famous “iron law of oligarchy” in which the observation of empirical tendencies of organizations is transformed in the proclamation of an inexorable historical necessity10. It is probably not too much to say that the 20th century theory of political organization has been formed on the basis of the experience and the theoretical interpretation of these three authors who, interestingly enough, arrived at widely divergent political positions at the end of their lives: Luxemburg died in 1919 as a revolutionary democratic socialist and victim of police murder, Weber in 1920 as a “liberal in despair,” and Michels in 1936 as an ardent admirer and ideological defender of Mussolini and Italian fascism. In spite of the extreme diversity of their political views and positions, there is a strong common element in their analysis. This element can be summarized in the following way: as soon as political mass participation is organized through large scale bureaucratic organization (a type of M. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, Tübingen: Mohr, 1958, p. 392. R. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften, Gesammelte Werke Vol. II, Berlin: Dietz, 1924, 163 – ​165. 10 Cf. R. Michels, Soziologie des Parteiwesens, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1981. W. J. Mommsen, “Max Weber and Robert Michels,” Arch. Eur. Soc. 22: 100 – ​116; D. Beetham, “From socialism to fascism: the relation between theory and practice in the work of Robert Michels,” Political Studies 25 (1977): 3 – ​24, 161 – ​181. 8 9

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organization, that is, which is presupposed and required by the model of electoral party competition and institutionalized collective bargaining), the very dynamic of this organizational form contains, perverts, and obstructs class interest and class politics in ways that are described as leading to opportunism (Luxemburg), oligarchy (Michels) and the inescapable plebiscitarian submission of the masses to the irrational impulses of the charismatic leader and his demagogic use of the bureaucratic party “machine” (Weber). According to the common insight underlying this analysis, as soon as the will of the people is expressed through the instrumentality of the competitive party striving for government office, what is expressed ceases to be the “authentic” will of the people and is instead transformed into an artefact of the form itself and the dynamics put into motion by the imperatives of political competition. More specifically, these dynamics have three major effects. First, the deradicalization of the ideology of the party: to be successful in elections and in its striving for government office, the party must orient its programmatic stance towards the expediencies of the political market11. This means two things: first, to maximize votes by appealing to the greatest possible number of voters and consequently to minimize those programmatic elements that could create antagonistic cleavages within the electorate. Second, vis-a-vis other parties, to be prepared to enter coalitions and to restrict the range of substantive policy proposals to those demands which can be expected to be negotiable to potential coalition partners. The combined effect of these two considerations is to dissolve any coherent political concept or aim into a “gradualist” temporal structure or sequence, giving priority to what can be implemented at any given point in time and with the presently available resources, while postponing and displacing presently unrealistic and pragmatically unfeasible demands and projects. Also, the fully developed competitive party is forced by the imperatives of competition to equip itself with a highly bureaucratized and centralized organizational structure. The objective of this organization is to be present continuously on the political market, just as the success of a business firm depends in part upon the size and continued presence of its marketing and sales organization. The bureaucratic organization of the modern political party performs the tasks of (a) collecting material and human resources (membership dues, other contributions and donations, members, candidates), (b) disseminating propaganda and information concerning the party’s position on a great number of diverse political issues and (c) exploring the political market, identifying new issues and monitoring public opinion and (d) managing internal conflict. All of these activities are normally executed by a professional staff of party officials 11 See the brilliant analysis of this problem by A. Przeworski, “Social democracy as a historical phenomenon,” New Left Review 122 (1980).

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who develop a corporate interest in the growth and stability of the apparatus that provides them with status and careers. This pattern of internal bureaucratization that can be found in parties of the right and the left alike, has two important traits. First, the social composition (as measured by class background, formal education, sex, occupation, age, etc.) of the party leadership, its officials, members of parliament, and government becomes more and more at variance both with the social composition of the population in general and the party’s electoral base in particular. And second, the professionalization of party politics leads to the political dominance of professional and managerial party personnel who typically come, by their training and professional experience, from such backgrounds as business administration, public administration, legal professions, higher education, the media, or interest associations. A second major consequence of this bureaucratic-professional pattern of political organization is the deactivation of ordinary members. The more the organization is geared toward the exploration of and adaptation to the external environment of the political market in what can be described as a virtually permanent electoral campaign, the less room remains for the determination of party policies by internal processes of democratic debate and conflict within the organization. The appearance of internal unanimity and consensus is what any competitive party must try to cultivate in order to become or remain attractive to voters, as a consequence of which internal division, factionalism and organized conflict of opinion and strategy are not only not encouraged, but rather kept under tight control or at least kept out of sight of the public in a constant effort to streamline the party’s image and, as it were, to standardize its product. (It is tempting to compare, in this respect, the practice of some social democratic parties to the theory of the Leninist party, and I suspect we would find some ironic similarities.) The highly unequal importance of external and internal environments frequently becomes evident when the results of public opinion surveys, which today are routinely commissioned by the party leadership, suggest positions and strategies which are in conflict with declared intentions of party members who then, in the interest of “winning the next elections,” are called upon to yield to political “reality.” The third characteristic of what Kirchheimer has called the modern “catchall-party” is the increasing structural and cultural heterogeneity of its supporters. This heterogeneity results from the fact that the modern political party relies on the principle of “product diversification” in the sense that it tries to appeal to a multitude of diverse demands and concerns. This is most obvious in the case of social democratic and communist parties who have often successfully tried to expand their base beyond the working class and to attract elements of the old and new middle classes, the intelligentsia and voters with strong religious affiliations. The advantage of this strategy is quite obvious, but so is its effect of dissolving a

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sense of collective identity which, in the early stages of both socialist and Catholic parties, was based on a cultural milieu of shared values and meaning. It is easy to see why and how these three consequences of the organizational form of the competitive political party that I have discussed so far – ideological deradicalization, deactivation of members, erosion of collective identity – contribute to the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. Each of these three outcomes helps to contain and limit the range of political aims and struggles, and thus provides a virtual guarantee that the structure of political power will not deviate so far from the structure of socio-economic power as to make the two distributions of power incompatible with each other. “The party system has been the means of reconciling universal equal franchise with the maintenance of an unequal society,” McPherson has remarked12. The inherent dynamic of the party as an organizational form which develops under and for political competition generates those constraints and imposes those “non-decisions” upon the political process which together make democracy safe for capitalism. Such “non-decisions” affect both the content of politics (i. e., what kinds of issues, claims, and demands are allowed to be put on the agenda) as well as the means by which political conflicts are carried out. The constraints imposed upon the possible content of politics are all the more effective since they are non-explicit, i. e., not based on formal mechanisms of exclusion (such as limitations of voting rights, or authoritarian bans on certain actors or issues), but rather constituted as artefacts and byproducts of the organizational forms of universal political inclusion. This conclusion, of course, is strongly supported by the fact that no competitive party system so far has ever resulted in a distribution of political power that would have been able to alter the logic of capital and the pattern of socio-economic power it generates. To avoid misunderstanding, I should emphasize that what I intend here is not a normative critique of the organizational form of the political party which would lead to the suggestion of an alternative form of political organization. Rather than speculating about the comparative desirability of anarchist, syndicalist, council-democratic, or Leninist models of either non-party or non-competitive party organization, let us now look at the future viability of this organizational form itself – its potential to construct and mediate, as it did in the post-war era, a type of political authority that does not interfere with the institutional premises of the capitalist economy. The question is, in other words, whether the institutional link that in most advanced capitalist countries has allowed capitalism and political democracy to coexist for most of the last 60 years is likely to continue to do so in the

12 C. V. McPherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. London: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 69.

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future. How solid and viable are the organizational forms that bring the “iron law” to bear upon the process of politics ? One way to answer this question in the negative would be to expect political parties to emerge which would be capable of abolishing the above-mentioned restrictions and constraints, thus leading to a challenge of class power through politically constituted power. I do not think that there are, in spite of Eurocommunist doctrines and strategies that have emerged in the Latin-European countries in the mid-seventies, and in spite of the recently (1981) elected socialist-communist government coalition in France, many promising indicators of such a development. The other possibility would be a disintegration of the political party as the dominant form of democratic mass participation and its gradual replacement by other forms which possibly are less likely than party competition to lead to “congruent” and “compatible” uses of state power. As we are concerned with the prospects of competitive party democracy in the eighties, it might be worthwhile to explore this possibility a little further. Causes of the Decline of the Party System as the Dominant Form of Mass Participation It is well possible today to argue that the form of mass participation in politics that is channeled through the party system (i. e., according to the principles of territorial representation, party competition and parliamentary representation) has exhausted much of its usefulness for reconciling capitalism and mass politics. This appears to be so because the political form of the party is increasingly bypassed and displaced by other practices and procedures of political participation and representation. It is highly doubtful, however, whether those new and additional practices that can be observed in operation in quite a number of capitalist states will exhibit the same potential of reconciling political legitimation with the imperatives of capital accumulation that has been, at least for a certain period, the accomplishment of the competitive party system. Again, three points – referring in an highly schematic fashion to new social movements, corporatism and repression as phenomena – tend to bypass, restrict, and subvert the party system and its political practices and their reconciling potential. First, in many capitalist countries, the new social movements which have emerged during the seventies are, for a number of reasons, very hard to absorb into the practices of competitive party politics. Such movements include ethnic and regionalist movements, various urban movements, ecological movements, feminist movements, peace movements, and youth movements. To a large extent, all of them share two characteristics. First, their projects and demands are based not on a collective contractual position on either goods or labor markets, as was the case, for instance, with traditional class parties and movements. Instead,

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their common denominator of organization and action is some sense of collective identity (often underlined by ascriptive and “naturalistic” conceptions of the collective “self ” in terms of age, gender, “nation” or “mankind”). Closely connected with this is a second characteristic: they do not demand representation (by which their market status could be improved or protected) but autonomy. In short, the underlying logic of these movements is the struggle for the defense of a physical and/or moral “territory,” the integrity of which is fundamentally non-negotiable to the activists of these movements. For the purpose of this defense, political representation and parliamentary politics are often considered unnecessary (because what is requested of the state, as can be illustrated in the issues of abortion or nuclear energy, is not to “do something” but to “stay out”, “desist from” and “give up”), or even dangerous, because the state is suspected of attempting to demobilize and disorganize the movement. To the extent such movements attract the attention and the political energies of people, not only individual political parties, but the traditional competitive party system as a whole will lose in function and credibility because it simply does not provide the arena within which such issues and concerns can possibly be processed. These “new” social movements are not concerned with what is to be created or accomplished through the use of politics and state power, but what should be saved from and defended against the state and its pursuit of rational control and “governance”, and the considerations governing the conduct of public policy. The three most obvious cases of such movements, the peace movement, the environmental movement and various movements centered on human rights (e. g., of women, of prisoners, of minorities, of tenants) all illustrate a “negative” conception of politics trying to protect a sphere of life against the intervention of state policy. What dominates the thought and action of these movements is not a “progressive” utopia of what desirable social arrangements must be achieved, but a conservative utopia of what non-negotiable essentials must not be threatened and sacrificed in the name of state-administered “progress.” Second, many observers in a number of capitalist states have analyzed an ongoing process of de-parliamentarization of public policy and the concomitant displacement of territorial forms of representation through functional ones. This is most evident in “corporatist” arrangements which combine the function of interest representation of collective actors with policy implementation vis-a-vis their respective constituencies13. The functional superiority of such corporatist arrangements, compared to both parliamentary-competitive forms of representation and 13 The most comprehensive account of recent theorizing and discussion on “corporatism” is P. C. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Toward Corporalist Intermediation, London: Sage, 1979.

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bureaucratic methods of implementation, resides in their informal, inconspicuous, and non-public procedures and the “voluntary” character of compliance that they are said to be able to mobilize. Although the dynamics and limits of corporatist forms of public policymaking, especially in the areas of economic and social policies, are not of interest to us here, what seems to be clear is that there has been a trend toward such arrangements, most of all in countries with strong social democratic parties (such as, in Europe, Sweden, the UK, Austria, and Germany) which has worked at the expense of parliament and the competitive party system. A number of Marxist and non-Marxist political scientists have even argued that “parliamentary representation on the basis of residence no longer adequately reflects the problems of economic management in a worldwide capitalist system,” and that “a system of functional representation is more suited to securing the conditions of accumulation”14. Third, a constant alternative to free party competition is political repression and the gradual transformation of democracy into some form of “soft” authoritarianism. In an analytical sense, what we mean by repression is exclusion from representation. Citizens are denied their civil liberties and freedoms, such as the right to organize, demonstrate, and express certain opinions in speech and writing. They are denied access to occupations in the public sector, and the like. The expansion of police apparatuses and the practice of virtually universal monitoring and surveillance of the activities of citizens that we observe in many countries are indications of the growing reliance of the state apparatus upon the means of preventive and corrective repression. More importantly, in our context of discussing the limits of competitive party democracy, is one other aspect of the exclusion from representation. It is the de facto and/or formal limitation of competitiveness within the party system: be it by strengthening of intra-party discipline and the sanctions applied against dissenters; be it in the election campaigns from which substantive alternatives concerning the conduct and programmatic content of public policy often seem to be absent; be it finally on the level of parliament and parliamentary government where the identity of individual (and only nominally “competing”) parties more and more often disappears behind what occasionally is called the “great coalition of the enlightened,” inspired by some vague “solidarity of all democratic forces”. Referring back to the economic metaphor used before, such phenomena and developments could well be described as the “cartelization” of political supply and the closure of market access. If I am correct in assuming that the displacement of the role and political function of the competitive party system, as indicated by the emergence of new social 14 B. Jessop, “The transformation of the state in post-war Britain,” in R. Scase (ed.) The State in Western Europe, London: Croom Helm, DD., 1980, pp. 23 – ​93.

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movements, increasing reliance on corporatist arrangements, and self-limitation of the competitiveness of party systems is a real process that could be illustrated by many examples in numerous advanced (and not so advanced) capitalist states; and if I am also correct in assuming that the organizational form of the competitive political party plays a crucial role in making democratic mass participation compatible with capitalism, then the decline of the party system is likely to lead to the rise of less constrained and regulated practices of political participation and conflict, the outcomes of which may then have the potential of effectively challenging and transcending the institutional premises of the capitalist form of social and economic organization. I have so far focused only on those limits of the “reconciling functions” of the organizational forms of mass democracy which consists in the weakening and more or less gradual displacement of the dominant role of political parties as mediators between the people and state power. But the picture remains incomplete and unbalanced as long as we concentrate exclusively on cases in which the “channel” of political participation that consists of party competition, elections and parliamentary representation is bypassed (and reduced in its legitimacy and credibility) by the protest politics of social movements or corporatist negotiations among powerful strategic actors, or where this channel is altogether reduced in significance by “repressive” mechanisms of exclusion. The other alternative, alluded to before, consists not in a process of displacement and loss of relevance of the organizational form of political parties, but in the successful strategy of “self-transcendence” of the party moving from “political” to “economic” democracy. All models and strategies of economic democratization (beginning in the mid-twenties in Austria and Germany and continuing through the current Swedish concepts of wage earner funds and the Meidner plan15) rely on the notion that the tension between the democratic principle of equal mass participation and the economic principle of unequal and private decision making power could be put to use by instituting, by the means of electoral success and parliamentary legislation, democratic bodies at the level of enterprises, sectors of industry, regions, and cities. The central assumption that inspires such strategies is that “democracy would explode capitalism (and) that the democratic state, because it could be made to represent the people, would compel entrepreneurs to proceed according to principles inimical to their own survival […] The working

15 Cf. for a detailed account of current Swedish debates on these plans and the debates surrounding them; U. Himmelstrand et al., Beyond Welfare Capitalism ? London: Heinemann, 1981, esp. pp. 255 – ​310.

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class, as the spokesmen for the great, non-capitalist majority, would enforce the primacy of politics throughout the economy, as well as in politics per se”16. Although this alternative course of suspending the compatibility of democracy and capitalism is part of the programmatic objectives of almost all social democratic/socialist (and, increasingly, communist) parties in Europe (and even of some forces in North America), it has nowhere been carried out to the point where the private character of decisions concerning the volume, kind, point in time and location of investment decisions would have effectively been transformed into a matter of democratic control. In the early eighties, the European Left seems rather to be divided as to the strategic alternatives of trying to overcome the constraints of political democracy and its oligarchic organizational dynamics, either by supporting those “new” social movements and engaging in their politics of autonomy and protest, or to stick to the older model of economic democratization. Both tendencies, however, provide sufficient reason to expect a weakening of these organizational and political characteristics which so far have made democratic mass participation safe for capitalism. The extent, however, to which it becomes likely that competitive party democracy is either displaced by social and political movements and corporatist arrangements or is complemented by “economic democracy” will probably depend on the stability, growth and prosperity the economy is able to provide. Let us, therefore, now turn to the question of the organization of production and distribution and the changes that have occurred since Andrew Shonfield’s classic Modern Capitalism came out in 196517.

III

The Keynesian Welfare State and Its Demise

Let me now try to apply the analogous argument, in an even more generalized and schematic fashion, to the second pillar upon which, according to my initial proposition, the coexistence of capitalism and democracy rests, namely the Keynesian welfare state (KWS). The bundle of state institutions and practices to which this concept refers has been developed in western capitalism since the Second World War. Until the decisive change of circumstances that occurred after the mid-seventies and that was marked by OPEC price policies, the end of detente, and the coming to power of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US (to mention just a few indicators of this change), the KWS has been adopted as the basic conception 16 D. Abraham, “‘Economic Democracy’ as a Labor Alternative to the ‘Growth Strategy’ in the Weimar Republic.” Unpublished manuscript, Princeton, 1982, 16 ff. 17 A. Shonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

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of the state and state practice in almost all western countries, irrespective of parties in government, and with only minor modifications and time lags. Most observers agree that its effect has been (a) an unprecedented and extended economic boom favoring all advanced capitalist economies and (b) the transformation of the pattern of industrial and class conflict in ways that increasingly depart from political and even revolutionary radicalism and lead to more economistic, distribution-centered and increasingly institutionalized class conflict. Underlying this development (that constitutes a formidable change if compared to the dynamics of the capitalist world system during the twenties and thirties) is a politically instituted class compromise or “accord” that Bowles has described as follows: “[The accord] represented, on the part of labor, the acceptance of the logic of profitability and markets as the guiding principles of resource allocation, international exchange, technological change, product development, and industrial location, in return for an assurance that minimal living standards, trade union rights, and liberal democratic rights would be protected, massive unemployment avoided, and real incomes would rise approximately in line with labor productivity, all through the intervention of the state, if necessary”18.

It is easy to see why and how the existence of this compact has contributed to the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. First, by accepting the terms of the accord, working class organizations (unions and political parties) reduced their demands and projects to a program that sharply differs from anything on the agenda of both the Third and the Second Internationals. After the physical, moral and organizational devastations the Second World War had left behind, and after the discredit the development of the Soviet Union had earned for communism, this change of perspective is not entirely incomprehensible. Moreover, the accord itself worked amazingly well, thus reinforcing a deeply depoliticized trust in what one leading German Social Democrat much later came somewhat arrogantly to call the “German Model” (Modell Deutschland)19: the mutual stimulation of economic growth and peaceful class relations. What was at issue in class conflicts was no longer the mode of production, but the volume of distribution, not control of investment but growth, and this type of conflict was particularly suited for being processed on the political plane through party competition, because it does not involve “either/or” questions, but questions of a “more or less” or “sooner 18 S. Bowles, “The Keynesian Welfare State and the Post-Keynesian Political Containment of the Working Class.” Unpublished manuscript, Paris, 1981, 12 ff. 19 This slogan has since become a technical term, in comparative politics; cf. A Markovits (ed.), The Political Economy of West Germany. Modell Deutschland. New York: Praeger, 1982.

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or later” nature. Overarching this limited type of conflict, there was a consensus concerning basic priorities, desirabilities and values of the political economy, namely economic growth and social (as well as military) security. This interclass, growth-security alliance does in fact have a theoretical basis in Keynes’ economic theory. As applied to practical purposes of economic policymaking, it teaches each class to “take the role of the other.” The capitalist economy, this is the lesson to be learnt from Keynesianism, is a positive-sum game. Therefore, playing like one would in a zero-sum game is against one’s own interest. That is to say, each class has to take the interests of the other class into consideration: the workers profitability, because only a sufficient level of profits and investment will secure future employment and income increases; and the capitalists wages and welfare state expenditures, because these will secure effective demand and a healthy, well-trained, and well-housed working class. The welfare state is defined as a set of legal entitlements providing citizens with claims to transfer payments from compulsory social security schemes as well as to state organized services (such as health and education) for a wide variety of defined cases of need and contingencies. The means by which the welfare state intervenes are thus bureaucratic rules and legal regulations, monetary transfers and professional expertise of teachers, doctors, and social workers. Its ideological origins are highly mixed and heterogeneous, ranging from socialist to Catholic-conservative sources; its character of resulting from ideological, political and economic interclass compromises is something the welfare state shares with the logic of Keynesian economic policy making. In both cases, there is no fast and easy answer to the zero-sum question of who wins and who loses. For, although the primary function of the welfare state is to cover those risks and uncertainties to which wage workers and their families are exposed in capitalist societies, there are some indirect effects which serve the capitalist class, too. This becomes evident if we look at what would be likely to happen in the absence of welfare state arrangements in a capitalist society. We would probably agree that the answer to this hypothetical question is this: first, there would be a much higher level of industrial conflict and a stronger tendency among the proletariat to avoid becoming wage workers. Thus, the welfare state can be said to partially dispel motives and reasons for social conflict and to make the existence of wage labor more acceptable by eliminating parts of the risk that result from the imposition of the commodity form upon labor.20 Second, this conflict would be 20 For a detailed formulation of this argument see G. Lenhardt, and C. Offe, “Staatstheorie und Sozialpolitik – politisch-soziologische Erklärungsansätze für Funktionen und Innovations­ prozesse der Sozialpolitik,” in: C. v. Ferber/F. X. Kaufmann (Hrsg.) Sonderheft 19, der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 1977, pp. 98 – ​127.

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much costlier in economic terms by its disruption of the increasingly complex and capital-intensive process of industrial production. Therefore, the welfare state performs the crucial function of taking part of the needs of the working class out of the class struggle and industrial conflict arenas, of providing the means to fulfill their needs more collectively and hence more efficiently, of making production more regular and predictable by relieving it of important issues and conflicts, and of providing, in addition, a built-in stabilizer for the economy by partly uncoupling changes in effective demand from changes in employment. So, as in the case of Keynesian doctrines of economic policy, the welfare state, too, can be seen to provide a measure of mutuality of interest between classes that virtually leaves no room for fundamental issues and conflicts over the nature of the political economy. The functional links between Keynesian economic policy, economic growth and the welfare state are fairly obvious and agreed upon by all “partners” and parties involved. An “active” economic policy stimulates and regularizes economic growth; the “tax dividend” resulting from that growth allows for the extension of welfare state programs; at the same time, continued economic growth limits the extent to which welfare state provisions (such as unemployment benefits) are actually claimed. And the issues and conflicts that remain to be resolved within the realm of formal politics (party competition and parliament) are of such a fragmented, non-polarizing, and non-fundamental nature (at least in the areas of economic and social policy) that they can be settled by the inconspicuous mechanisms of marginal adjustments, compromise and coalition-building. If all of this were still true, today’s ubiquitous critiques and political attacks directed at Keynesianism, the welfare state and, most of all, the combination of these two most successful political innovations of the post-war era, would be plainly incomprehensible. They are not. As in the case of competitive political parties, these innovations and their healthy effects seem to have reached their limits today. While the integrative functions of the party system have partly been displaced by alternative and less institutionalized forms of political participation, the Keynesian welfare state has come under attack by virtue of some of its less desirable side effects and its failure to correct some of the ills of an economic environment that has radically changed, compared to the conditions that prevailed prior to the mid-seventies. Let us look at some of the reasons why there are very few people remaining – be they in academia or politics, on the Left or the Right – who believe that the Keynesian welfare state continues to be a viable peace formula for democratic capitalism. My thesis, in brief, is this: while the KWS is an excellent and uniquely effective device to manage and control some socioeconomic and political problems of advanced capitalist societies, it does not solve all those problems. And the problems that can be successfully solved through the institutional means of the welfare state

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no longer constitute the most dominant and pressing ones. Moreover, this shift of the socioeconomic problematique is in part an unintended consequence of the operation of the KWS itself. The two types of problems to which I refer are the production/exploitation problem and the effective demand/realization problem. Between the two, a trade-off exists: the more effectively one of the two is solved, the more dominant and pressing the other one becomes. The KWS has indeed been able to solve, to a remarkable extent, the problem of macroeconomic demand stabilization. But, at the same time, it has also interfered with the ability of the capitalist economy to adapt to the production/exploitation problem as it has emerged ever more urgently since the mid-seventies. The KWS, so to speak, has operated on the basis of the false theory that the problems it is able to deal with are the only problems of the capitalist political economy, or at least the permanently dominant ones. This erroneous confidence is now in the politically and economically, equally painful process of being falsified and corrected. To the extent the demand problem is being solved, the supply problem becomes wide open. The economic situation has changed in a way that lends strong support to conservative and neo-laissez-faire economic theory. Far from stimulating production any longer, the governmental practice of deficit spending to combat unemployment contributes to even higher rates of unemployment, by driving up interest rates and making money capital scarce and costly. Also (and possibly even worse), the welfare state amounts to a partial disincentive to work. Its compulsory insurance schemes and legal entitlements provide such a strong institutional protection to the material interest of wage workers that labor becomes less prepared and/or can be less easily forced to adjust to the contingencies of structural, technological, locational, vocational and other changes of the economy. Not only wages are “sticky” and “downwardly inflexible,” but, in addition, the provisions of the welfare state have partly “decommodified” the interests of workers, replacing “status” for “contract,” or “citizen rights” for “property rights.” This change of industrial relations that the KWS has brought about has not only helped to increase and stabilize effective demand (as it was intended to do), but it also has made employment costlier and more rigid. Again, the central problem on the labor market is the supply problem, how to hire and fire the right people at the right place with the right skills and, most important, the right motivation and the right wage demand. Concerning this problem, the welfare state is justifiably seen by business not to be part of the solution, but part of the problem. As capital (small as well as big) has come to depend and rely on the stimulating and regularizing effects of interventionist policies executed on both the demand and supply sides, and as labor depends and relies on the welfare state, the parameters of incentives, motivations, and expectations of investors and workers alike have been affected in ways that alter and undermine the dynamics of pri-

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vate sector investment and economic growth. For capital and labor alike, pressures to adjust to changing market forces have been reduced due to the availability of state-provided resources that either help to avoid or delay adaptation or due to the expectation that a large part of the costs of adaptation must be subsidized by the state. Growth industries such as defense, civilian aircraft, nuclear energy, and telecommunications typically depend as much on markets created by the state (and often capital provided by the state) as stagnant industries (such as steel and textiles) depend on state protection and subsidized market shelters. Economic growth, where it occurs at all, has become a matter of political design rather than a matter of spontaneous market forces. The increasing claims that are made on the state budget both by labor and capital, and both by the growing and the stagnant sectors of the economy, cannot but lead to unprecedented levels of public debt and to constant efforts of governments to terminate or reduce welfare state programs. But economic growth does not only become costlier in terms of budgetary inputs that are required to promote it, it also becomes costlier in terms of political legitimation. The more economic growth becomes “growth by political design,” and the more it is perceived to be the result of explicit political decisions and strategies of an increasingly “disaggregated” nature (i. e., specified by product, industry, and location), the more governments and political parties are held accountable for the physical quality of products, processes and environmental effects resulting from such industrial policies. The widespread and apparently increasing concern with the physical quality of products and production, and the various “anti-productivist” and environmentalist political motives and demands that are spreading in many capitalist countries have so far mostly been interpreted in the social science literature either in objectivist terms (“environmental disruption”) or in subjectivist categories (“changing values and sensitivities”). In addition, I suggest, these phenomena must be analyzed in terms of the apparent political manageability of the physical shape and impact of industrial production and growth, a perceived area of political decision- and non-decision-making that gives rise to a new arena of “politics of production.” The outcomes of the conflicts in this arena, in turn, tend to cause additional impediments to industrial growth. The strategic intention of Keynesian economic policy is to promote growth and full employment, the strategic intention of the welfare state to protect those affected by the risks and contingencies of industrial society and to create a measure of social equality. The latter strategy becomes feasible only to the extent the first is successful, thus providing the resources necessary for welfare policies and limiting the extent to which claims are made on these resources. The combined effect of the two strategies, however, has been high rates of unemployment and inflation. At least, economic and social policies have not been

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able to check the simultaneous occurrence of unemployment and inflation. But one can safely say more than that. Plausible causal links between the KWS and today’s condition of “the worst of both worlds” are suggested not only by conservative economic policy ideologues advocating a return to some type of monetarist steering of a pure market economy. They are equally, if reluctantly, accepted by the practice and partly by the theories of the Left. The relevant arguments are: 1) The Keynesian welfare state is a victim of its success. By (partly) eliminating and smoothening crises, it has inhibited the positive function that crises used to perform in the capitalist process of “creative destruction.” 2) The Keynesian welfare state involves the unintended but undeniable consequence of undermining both the incentives to invest and the incentives to work. 3) There is no equilibrating mechanism or “stop-rule” that would allow us to adjust the extension of social policy so as to eliminate its self-contradictory consequences; the logic of democratic party competition and the social democratic alliance with unions remains undisciplined by “economic reason.” While the latter argument is probably still exclusively to be found in the writings of liberal-conservative authors21, the other two can hardly be contested by the Left. Let me quote just one example of an author who clearly thinks of himself as a social democratic theoretician: “It is unfortunate that those wish to defend the welfare state […] spend their energies persuading the public that the welfare state does not erode incentives, savings, authority or efficiency […]. What the Right has recognized much better than the Left is that the principles of the welfare state are directly incompatible with a capitalistic market system. […] The welfare state eats the very hand that feeds it. The main contradiction of the welfare state is the […] tension between the market and social policy”.22

21 See N. Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat, München: 1981; S. Huntington, “The United States,” in M. Crozier et al., The Crisis of Democracy, New York: NYU Press, 1975, pp.  59 – ​118; B. Cazes, “The welfare state: A double bind,” in OECD, 1981, pp. 151 – ​173. See also the powerful critique of the The Welfare State in Crisis, Paris: OECD, “economic reason vs. political irrationality’ argument by J. Goldthorpe, “The current inflation: Towards a sociological account,” in F. Hirsch, and J. Goldthorpe (eds.), The Political Economy of Inflation, London: Martin Robertson, 1978. 22 Quoted from a paper by G. Esping-Anderson, “The incompatibilities of the welfare state,” Working Papers for a New Society, Jan. 1982.

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It must not concern us here whether such blames and charges that today are ever more frequently directed against the KWS are entirely “true,” or, in addition, partly the result of paranoid exaggerations or a conscious tactical misrepresentation of reality on the part of capital and its political organizations. For what applies in this context is a special version of a law known to sociologists as the “Thomas theorem”: what is real in the minds and perceptions of people will be real in its consequences. The structural power position of the owners and managers and associational representatives of capital in a capitalist society is exactly their power to define reality in a highly consequential way, so that what is perceived as “real” by them is likely to have very real impacts for other classes and political actors. Without entering too far into the professional realm of the economist, let me suggest two aspects of a potentially useful (if partial) interpretation of this change. One is the idea that the Keynesian welfare state is a “victim of its success,” as one author has put it23: the side-effects of its successful practice of solving one type of macro-economic problems have led to the emergence of an entirely different problematique which is beyond the steering capacity of the KWS. The familiar arguments that favor and demand a shift of economic and social policymaking toward what has been named “supply-side economics” are these: the nonproductive public sector has become an intolerable burden upon the private sector, leading to a chronic shortage of investment capital; the work ethic is in the process of being undermined, and the independent middle class is being economically suffocated by high rates of taxation and inflation. The other set of arguments maintains that, even in the absence of those economic side effects, the political paradigm of the KWS presently is in the process of definitive exhaustion due to inherent causes. The relevant arguments, in brief, are two. First, state intervention works only as long as it is not expected by economic actors to be applied as a matter of routine, and therefore does not enter their rational calculations. As soon as this happens, however, investors will postpone investment because they can be reasonably sure that the state, if only they wait long enough, will intervene by special tax exemptions, depreciation allowances or demand measures. The spread of such (“rational”) expectations is fatal to Keynesianism, for to the extent it enters the calculations of economic actors, their strategic behavior will increase the problem load to which the state has to respond or at least will not contribute, in the way it had been naively anticipated, to resolving the unemployment (and fiscal) problems. This pathology of expectations, of course, is itself known to (and expected by) actors in the state apparatus. It forces them to react either by ever higher doses of intervention or, failing that possibili23 See J. Logue, “The welfare state victim of its success,” Daedalus 108, (1979) (4): 69 – ​87; also R. Klein, “The welfare state – a self-inflicted crisis ?” Political Quarterly 51, (1980) 24 – ​34.

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ty for fiscal reasons, to give up the interventionist practice that breeds those very problems that it was supposed to solve. This would lead us to conclude that state intervention is effective only to the extent it occurs as a “surprise” and exception, rather than as a matter of routine. A further inherent weakness of the KWS resides in the limits of the legalbureaucratic, monetarized and professional mode of intervention. These limits become particularly clear in the areas of personal services, or “people processing organizations,” such as schools, hospitals, universities, prisons and social work agencies. Again, the mode of intervention generates the problems it is supposed to deal with. The explanation of this paradox is well-known: the clients’ capacity for self-help – and, more generally, the system of knowledge and meaning generating such capacity – are subverted by the mode of intervention, and the suppliers of such services, especially professionals and higher level bureaucrats (who are in neo-conservative circles referred to as the “new class”), take a material interest in the persistence (rather than the solution) and in the continuous expansion and redefinition of the problems with which they are supposed to deal24. Thus, for reasons that have to do both with its external economic effects and the paradoxes of its internal model of operation, the KWS seems to have exhausted its potential and viability to a large extent. Moreover, this exhaustion is unlikely to turn out to be a conjunctural phenomenon that disappears with the next boom of economic growth. For this boom itself is far from certain. Why is this so ? First, because it cannot be expected to occur as the spontaneous result of market forces and the dynamics of technological innovation. Second, it apparently cannot be generated and manipulated either by the traditional tools of Keynesianism nor by its “monetarist” counterpart. Third, even to the extent it does occur either as an effect of spontaneous forces or state intervention, the question is whether it will be considered desirable and worthwhile in terms of the side-effects it inevitably will have for the “quality of life” in general and the ecology in particular. This question of the desirability of continued economic growth is also accentuated by what Fred Hirsch has called the “social limits to growth” and by which he means the decreasing desirability and “satisficing potential” of industrial output, the use-value of which declines in proportion to the number of people who consume it.

24 On this problem of the new “service class” and its (partially converging) critique from the Left and the Right, see I. Illich (ed.), Disabling Professions, London: Marion Boyars, 1977; a penetrating and influential economic analysis of the rise of “unproductive” service labor is R. Bacon and W. Eltis, Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers, London: Macmillan, 1976

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IV

Conclusion

We have seen that the two institutional mechanisms on which the compatibility of the private economy and political mass participation rests – namely the mechanism of competitive party democracy and the paradigm of the Keynesian welfare state – have come under stress and strain, the order of magnitude of which is unprecedented in the post-war era. Limitations of space do not allow me to explore in any detail the interactive and possibly mutually reinforcing dynamics that take place between the two structural developments that I have sketched here. One plausible hypothesis is that, as the political economy turns from a growth economy into a “zero-sum society”25, the institutional arrangements of conflict resolution will suffer from strains and tensions. These tensions are probably best described, using the conceptual paradigm of “organized capitalism” as a referent26, as threats of disorganization. Such threats are likely to occur at two levels: (a) on the level of interorganizational “rules of the game” and (b) at the level of the organization of collective actors. Under positive-sum conditions, it is not only a matter of legal obligation or traditional mutual recognition, but of the evident self-interest of each participant to stick to the established rules of interaction and negotiation. As long as one participates, one can be at least sure not to lose, to receive future rewards for present concessions, and to have one’s claims respected as legitimate, since the process of growth itself provides the resources necessary for such compensation. Stagnation, and even more recession or expected no-growth conditions, destroy the basis for cooperative relations among collective actors; confidence, mutual respect, and reciprocity are put in question, and coalitions, alliances, and routinized networks of cooperation tend to be seen as problematic and in need of revision by the organizational elites involved. Crucial as these “social contracts” – i. e., subtle “quasi-constitutional” relations of trust, loyalty, and recognition of the mutual spheres of interest and competence are in a complex political economy27 – the interorganizational relations that are required for the management of economic growth tend to break down under the impact of continued stagnation. This is illustrated by growing strains within party coalitions, between unions and parties, employers’ associations and governments, states and feder-

25 See L. Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society. Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change, New York: Basic Books, 1980. 26 See J. Kocka, “Organisierter Kapitalismus oder staatsmonopolistischer Kapitalismus. Begriff­ liche Vorbemerkungen,” in H. A. Winkler (ed.), Organisierter Kapitalismus, Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 1974. 27 Cf. E. W. Böckenförde, “Die politische Funktion wirtschaftlich-sozialer Verbände,” Der Staat 15 (1976): 457 – ​483.

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al governments, all of which find the principle of “sich auf die eigene Kraft verlassen” (i. e., to engage in uncooperative strategies either because nothing appears to be gained from sticking to the rules and/or because relevant others are anticipated to do the same) increasingly attractive in a number of Western European political systems, including the European Community itself. The second type of disorganization that follows from stagnation has to do with intraorganizational relations within collective actors such as trade unions, employers’ associations, and parties. Such organizations depend on the assumption shared by their members that gains achieved by collective action will be achieved at the expense of third parties, not at the expense of groups of members and in favor of other groups of members. As soon as this solidaristic expectation is frustrated, the representativeness of the organization is rendered questionable, and “syndicalist”, “corporativist” or otherwise particularistic modes of collective action suggest themselves. The consequences of this internal disorganization of collective actors include either increasing “factionalism” of political and economic interests within the organization and/or a shrinking of the social, temporal, and substantive range of representation the organization is able to maintain28. The political and economic variants of the interclass accord that have gradually developed in all advanced capitalist states since the First World War and that have helped to make capitalism and democracy compatible with each other are clearly disintegrating under the impact of these developments and paradoxes. Does that mean that we are back in a situation that supports the convergent views of Marx and Mill concerning the antagonism of political mass participation and (economic) freedom ? Yes and no. Yes, because we have numerous reasons to expect an increase of institutionally unmediated social and political conflict, the expression of which is not channeled through parties or other devices of representation, and the sources of which are no longer dried up by effective social and economic policies of the state. But no, because there are strict limits to the analogy between the dynamics of “late” and “early” capitalism. One important limit derives from the fact that the forces involved in such conflicts are extremely heterogeneous, both concerning their causes and socioeconomic composition. This pattern is remarkably different from a bipolar “class conflict” situation which involves two highly inclusive collective actors who are defined by the two sides of the labor market. But, in spite of this highly fragmented nature of modern political conflict, its outcomes may well involve fundamental changes of either the eco-

28 See, for the case of German and Italian unions, R. G. Heinze et al., “Einheitsprobleme der Einheitsgewerkschaft,” Soziale Welt 32 (1982), 19 – ​38; and M. Regini, “Repräsentationskrise und Klassenpolitik der Gewerkschaften,” Leviathan 10 (1982) (3), 376 – ​391.

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nomic or the political sphere of society, changes that have, for just a limited and short period of time, been inconceivable under the unchallenged reign of competitive party democracy and the Keynesian welfare state.

8

Politische Legitimation durch Mehrheitsentscheidung ? (1982)

Kollektiv bindende Entscheidungen können nicht getroffen werden, wenn nicht eine logisch vorgelagerte Entscheidung bereits getroffen ist. Diese vorgelagerte Entscheidung betrifft die Frage, nach welchem Verfahren entschieden werden soll. Wie sollen individuelle Präferenzen von Wählern und Abstimmenden zu einem Ergebnis aggregiert werden, das dann als der „Gesamtwille“ Geltung beanspruchen kann ? Das Mehrheitsprinzip ist ein Entscheidungsverfahren, nach dem in der Demokratie die „vom Volke ausgehende“ staatliche Gewalt konstituiert wird; „zu den fundamentalen Prinzipien der Demokratie gehört das Mehrheitsprinzip“ (BVerfG 29: 165). Normalerweise erübrigt es sich für die Akteure, die an einem politischen Entscheidungsprozess beteiligt sind, jene vorgelagerte Entscheidung über das Entscheidungsverfahren zu problematisieren oder gar selbst zu treffen. Denn diese Verfahrensentscheidung ist in Verfassungen, Satzungen, Geschäftsordnungen usw. festgelegt, die den Akteuren (a) bekannt und (b) ihrer Disposition entzogen sind, so dass sie als feststehende Prämisse in ihr Handeln eingehen. Diese Vorgegebenheit des Verfahrens im alltäglichen Entscheidungsprozess entzieht dieses freilich nicht völlig der Kontingenz. „Im Prinzip“ sind immer auch Möglichkeiten zur Abänderung der Verfahrensentscheidungen vorgesehen und zu bedenken. Der „pouvoir constitué“ wird dann im Extremfall vom „pouvoir constituant“ revidiert. Aber auch innerhalb konstituierter, d. h. verfassungsförmig institutionalisierter Verfahren werden Verfahrensentscheidungen notwendig und sind demgemäß vorgesehen. Ein Beispiel ist die verfahrensgemäße Entscheidung über die Verfahren, nach denen über Angelegenheiten ausländischer Arbeitnehmer im kommunalen politischen System entschieden werden soll: soll die ausländische Wohnbevölkerung über spezielle Beiräte repräsentiert werden oder soll sie im kommunalen Wahlrecht der einheimischen Wohnbevölkerung gleichgestellt werden ? Das Beispiel zeigt, dass für neu entstehende Politikfelder und neue entscheidungsbedürf© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_8

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tige Materien häufig nicht nur neue Entscheidungen (über Gesetze, Maßnahmen, Programme), sondern zudem Entscheidungen über neue Entscheidungsverfahren notwendig werden. Solche Verfahrensentscheidungen („political designs“, vgl. Anderson 1977) führen dann zur Konstruktion von politischen „Arenen“ (vgl. Kitschelt 1980, 12 – ​34), die auf Bearbeitung bestimmter Themen- und Interessenkomplexe spezialisiert sind und festlegen, wer in welcher Weise an der dort fälligen Produktion von Entscheidungen teilnehmen soll. Aber nicht nur in solchen Innovationsfällen werden Verfahrensentscheidungen erforderlich. Vielmehr besteht die eigentümliche Bindungskraft gerade der obersten Verfahrensentscheidungen, wie sie in der Regel in Verfassungen niedergelegt sind, nicht in ihrer Unumstößlichkeit als einer einmal geschaffenen und fortan unantastbaren Tatsache, sondern gerade umgekehrt darin, dass sie sich dem Test ihrer eigenen Rationalität und damit Stabilität aussetzen und ihn laufend bestehen. Das würde voraussetzen, dass der pouvoir constituant keineswegs wie ein Sekundenphänomen im pouvoir constitué auf- und untergeht, sondern dass diese kontinuierlich einer Kontrollgewalt ausgesetzt bleibt, deren Kriterien sie zu genügen hat. Die „Stabilität“ von obersten Verfahrensregeln ergäbe sich dann als Restsumme der gegen sie nicht in Anspruch genommenen, von ihnen aber sehr wohl eingeräumten Einspruchsmöglichkeiten. Eine solche Auffassung über die Gründe der Verbindlichkeitsgrade von („obersten“) Verfahrensnormen, die sich auf die Formel „Stabilität durch Reversibilität“ bringen lässt, steht im Übrigen mit der liberalen Auffassung eines J. S. Mill im Einklang, die davon ausgeht, dass sich „wahre“ Normen als solche einzig und allein durch die Haltbarkeit herausstellen, die sie in beständiger Rivalität mit „falschen“ Normen unter Beweis stellen. Das ist für die heutige staatsrechtliche Dogmatik offenkundig ein ungereimter, überdies politisch riskanter Gedanke (vgl. z. B. Kriele 1975: 224 ff.). Dennoch wird er durch zahlreiche sozialwissenschaftliche und politische (ein Beispiel für Dutzende: Hamm-Brücher 1981) Beiträge zumindest negativ insofern bestätigt, als dort (a) Zweifel daran artikuliert werden, ob jene Verfahrensentscheidungen, welche die Verfassung für den politischen Machterwerb und die Machtverwendung aufstellt, von der Masse der Bürger als die „richtigen“ und daher Legitimität verbürgenden anerkannt werden, und (b) als Ergebnis dieser Diskrepanz Bestandsrisi­ken für die Verfassungsordnung selbst prognostiziert werden. Dieser mit Stichworten wie Parteien-, Demokratie- und Staatsverdrossenheit gegenwärtig vielfältig variierte Gedanke besagt ja nichts anderes, als dass die Verfahrensregeln des politischen Entscheidens mit den kulturellen und ökonomischen Strukturen einer Gesellschaft „realsoziologisch“ kompatibel sein und von ihnen abgestützt werden müssen, wenn solche Verfahrensregeln überhaupt Bestand haben sollen. Das bedeutet, dass jene Regeln trotz noch so massiver juristisch-intellektueller und sonstiger Anstrengungen keineswegs imstande sind, als ein für alle Male getroffene Verfahrensentschei-

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dungen sich selbst zu verbürgen, sondern zusätzlich darauf angewiesen sind, kontinuierlich den Test ihrer realen Anerkennung zu bestehen. Selbst wenn es nicht, wie Varain (1969: 239) meint, „mangelnder Widerspruch“ sein sollte, der die Debatte um eine so fundamentale Verfahrensregel wie das Mehrheitsprinzip „ruhen läßt“, sondern die „fehlende Alternative“, kann die Verlegenheit, welche sich auf die Frage „Was sonst ?“ einstellt, diese Anerkennung kaum dauerhaft ersetzen. Die fundamentalen Verfahrensregeln kollektiven Entscheidens nehmen einen eigentümlichen Doppelstatus ein. Auf der einen Seite müssen sie, wo immer Entscheidungen getroffen werden sollen, als fraglos gültig vorausgesetzt werden können. Andererseits können sie aber nur in dem Maße als gültig vorausgesetzt werden, in dem ihr Geltungsanspruch einer kontinuierlichen Infragestellung standhält; denn woraus sonst sollten sie ihre institutionelle Stabilität beziehen, wenn nicht aus der empirischen Bewährung gegenüber Rechtfertigungsansprüchen, die sich nur aus dem disziplinär verengten Blickwinkel der juristischen Staatslehre als prinzipiell unerheblich und abweisbar ausnehmen ? Wir beenden deshalb diese Vorüberlegungen mit der Schlussfolgerung, dass nicht nur bei politischen Innovationsentscheidungen der oben genannten Art, sondern auch bei Routineentscheidungen das Dauerproblem (Offe 1976) im Hintergrund steht, dass Verfahrensentscheidungen, d. h. Entscheidungen des Typus „to choose how to choose“ (J. Elster) getroffen und begründet werden müssen. Solche Verfahrensentscheidungen folgen eigenen normativen Gütekriterien und empirischen Argumenten. Das gilt auch für die nur scheinbar so selbstverständliche und traditionsgefestigte „demokratische“ Entscheidungsregel des Mehrheitsprinzips, für deren Erörterung gewiss die Aufforderung zu beherzigen ist, „Grundsatzfragen rechtzeitig und regelmäßig neu ‚auf Vorrat‘ zu erörtern, um nicht von politischen Entwicklungen unvorbereitet überrollt zu werden.“ (Häberle 1977: 241)

I Wenn man die Auswahl zwischen definierten Handlungsalternativen (oder zwischen Personen, die jeweils ein Bündel zukünftiger Handlungsalternativen repräsentieren) nach der Mehrheitsregel trifft, so wählt man damit bereits eines von mehreren denkbaren und möglichen Entscheidungsverfahren. Dass man wählt bzw. abstimmt – und nicht entweder befiehlt oder bis zur völligen Übereinstimmung verhandelt (vgl. zu dieser Dreiteilung möglicher kollektiver Entscheidungsregeln schon Dahl und Lindblom 1953) –, das ist eine Verfahrensentscheidung, die ihrerseits begründet werden muss und kann. Drei Gründe sind es, die man zugunsten der Entscheidung anführen kann, Entscheidungen nach der Mehrheitsregel zu treffen.

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(1) Unter dem Gesichtspunkt der (vor allem: zeitlichen) Kosten der Entscheidungsproduktion ist zwar das Verfahren des einfachen Befehlens der Mehrheitsregel überlegen (und das Verfahren des Verhandelns-bis-zur-Einstimmigkeit der Mehrheitsregel unterlegen); das Problem bei der Verfahrensalternative „Befehlen“ besteht jedoch darin, dass nicht jederzeit als gewiss vorausgesetzt werden kann, wer befehlsberechtigt ist. Ebenso kann es vorkommen, dass bei Eindeutigkeit des Befehlsberechtigten dieser sich weigert, eine Entscheidung zu treffen, so dass der Entscheidungsprozess verzögert wird. In Anbetracht solcher Eventualitäten kommt der Mehrheitsregel der eindeutige Vorteil zu, jederzeit, kurzfristig und zuverlässig Entscheidungen produzieren zu können. Daher kann man sagen, dass die Mehrheitsregel ein Entscheidungsverfahren darstellt, welches insofern entscheidungstechnisch optimal ist, als es ein Maximum an Gewissheit darüber, dass überhaupt eine Entscheidung getroffen wird, mit relativ geringen Entscheidungskosten verknüpft. (2) An Entscheidungen interessiert uns aber normalerweise nicht nur, dass sie getroffen werden; mindestens ebenso sehr interessiert ihre Qualität. Im Hinblick auf die Qualität von Entscheidungen (ihre Richtigkeit, Akzeptanz oder „Rationalität“) lässt sich argumentieren, dass die Mehrheitsregel einen zweiten Vorteil aufweist, und zwar speziell unter gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen, unter denen die Unterscheidung von „pars maior“ und „pars sanior“ ihre Grundlage verloren hat und keine gesellschaftliche Gruppe mit Aussicht auf Anerkennung den Anspruch erheben kann, a priori über eine höhere Einsicht und Urteilsfähigkeit zu verfügen als irgendeine andere. (Die einzige Ausnahme von dieser Regel ist der „Vernunftvorsprung“, der Erwachsenen gegenüber Minderjährigen zugutegehalten wird.) Unter solchen egalitären Bedingungen und Prämissen könnte man dann zugunsten der Mehrheitsregel anführen, dass sie ein Maximum an heterogenen, aber eben nicht hierarchisierbaren Gütekriterien, die in den empirischen Personen der Abstimmungsbeteiligten repräsentiert sind, ins Spiel bringt, und insofern besser als jedes andere Verfahren geeignet ist, die „Richtigkeit“ der resultierenden Entscheidung zu gewährleisten. Dies kann insbesondere unter der Zusatzbedingung angenommen werden, dass der Mehrheitsentscheidung eine Debatte bzw. ein Wahlkampf vorausgeht, in dessen Verlauf die Entscheidungsbeteiligten ihre jeweiligen Gütekriterien, die sie an die Entscheidung anlegen, sich wechselseitig bekannt machen. Natürlich ist die überlegene Rationalität von Mehrheitsentscheidungen nur für solche Situationen anzunehmen, in denen der Maßstab der Entscheidungsrichtigkeit approximativ gehandhabt werden muss, das heißt, in denen es kein absolutes Maß für die Richtigkeit einer Entscheidung gibt. Inter­ essanterweise findet die Mehrheitsregel demgemäß auch in Kontexten Verwendung, in denen im Übrigen der Maßstab (wissenschaftlicher) Wahrheit ausschlaggebend ist (z. B. in Fakultäten, Gerichtshöfen und Kardinalskollegien), und zwar genau von dem Punkt des Entscheidungsprozesses an, an dem man mit wissen-

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schaftlicher Wahrheit als dem operativen Richtigkeitskriterium nicht mehr weiterkommt; so z. B. bei Personalentscheidungen. (3) Schließlich gibt es noch einen dritten Gesichtspunkt, der für die Anwendung der Mehrheitsregel spricht. Dieser ergibt sich daraus, dass Entscheidungen nicht nur zeitsparend getroffen werden und möglichst „richtig“ sein müssen, sondern dass sie auch als richtig anerkannt werden müssen. Das bedeutet, dass Entscheidungen dann „gut“ sind, wenn die Wahrscheinlichkeit maximiert wird, dass sie als bindende Prämissen für das künftige Handeln anderer anerkannt werden. Wenn dies der Fall ist, bezeichnen wir eine Entscheidung als anerkennungswürdig oder „legitim“. Im Hinblick auf dieses Legitimationsproblem wird nun der Mehrheitsregel ein doppelter Vorzug zugesprochen: einmal der Vorzug, dass sie – gleiches und geheimes Wahlrecht vorausgesetzt – die indirekte Wirkung von Abhängigkeits- und Beeinflussungsverhältnissen neutralisiert. Und zweitens deswegen, weil sie – allgemeines und direktes Wahlrecht vorausgesetzt – die Gesamtheit der Entscheidungsbetroffenen in unverfälschter Weise auch zu Entscheidungsbeteiligten macht. Schließlich ergibt sich ein Argument für die Legitimationskraft von Mehrheitsentscheidungen auch aus ihrer Periodizität: Wahlen und Abstimmungen produzieren Entscheidungen, die niemals „letztmalig“ getroffen werden, sondern an bestimmte Wahl- und Amtsperioden gebunden sind. Das bedeutet, dass der jeweiligen Minderheit der Gehorsam gegenüber der Mehrheitsentscheidung insofern erleichtert wird, als sie gewiss sein kann, eine „nächste Gelegenheit“ zu haben, bei der die Entscheidung erneut getroffen werden muss. Dieser „Vertröstungseffekt“ wird dadurch bestärkt, dass bei der öffentlichen Bekanntgabe von Wahl- und Abstimmungsergebnissen nicht nur die Entscheidung, sondern auch die verneinte Entscheidungsalternative (nicht nur der Sieger, sondern auch der Wahl- oder Abstimmungsverlierer und seine Stimmenstärke) durch förmliche Erwähnung respektiert wird. Ich werde mich im Folgenden ausschließlich mit dem dritten dieser Argumente für das Mehrheitsprinzip befassen, d. h. mit seiner angeblich über­legenen Legitimationsfunktion, und einige Bedingungen formulieren, unter denen ange­ nommen werden kann, dass Mehrheitsentscheidungen tatsächlich legitime, d. h. empirisch befolgte und theoretisch als verpflichtend begründbare Ent­scheidungen sind. Wir werden sehen, dass die Legitimationsfunktion des Mehrheitsprinzips in modernen kapitalistischen Demokratien durchaus problematisch und bestreitbar ist. Mit diesem Nachweis soll und kann jedoch noch keineswegs die unmittelbar anschließende Frage geklärt werden, welche alternativen Entscheidungsverfahren eventuell ein höheres Maß an Legitimationsfähigkeit aufweisen. Die Frage, mit der ich mich im Folgenden nicht aus rechts- und verfassungstheoretischer, sondern aus politologisch-sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive befassen möchte, lautet also: Unter welchen Bedingungen und mit welchen Gründen kann die Fügsam-

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keit der Minderheit gegenüber der Entscheidung der Mehrheit erwartet werden, – „erwartet“ sowohl im Sinne faktischer Voraussage wie im Sinne einer normativ begründeten Forderung ?

II In fast allen Ländern der westlichen Welt ist mit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges eine Periode ihrer verfassungsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung abgeschlossen, die als politischer Modernisierungs- bzw. Demokratisierungsprozess beschrieben werden kann (vgl. Therborn 1977). Die drei wichtigsten Resultate dieses Modernisierungsprozesses sind: a) die Durchsetzung des allgemeinen und gleichen Wahlrechts, d. h. die Aufhebung der Schranken vor allem des Eigentums (teilweise auch der Bildung, des Geschlechts, des Alters), die bis dahin der Verallgemeinerung politischer Beteiligungsrechte im Wege gestanden hatten; b) die Anerkennung der Organisationsfreiheit und Verhandlungslegitimation für politische Parteien, Verbände und insbesondere Gewerkschaften; c) in vielen Ländern die Parlamentarisierung der Regierung, d. h. die Erweiterung der verfassungsmäßigen Rechte der gewählten parlamentarischen Körperschaften um die entscheidende Befugnis, nicht nur über Haushalts- und andere Gesetze abstimmen, sondern zusätzlich die Regierung wählen bzw. abwählen zu können. Die vorherrschende Interpretation dieser verfassungspolitischen Errungenschaften läuft zweifellos auf die These hinaus, dass durch die Verallgemeinerung politischer Beteiligungs- und Organisationsrechte die Klassengesellschaft ihre innere Struktur verändert habe. Es sei eine neue Balance der Klassenkräfte zustande gekommen, weil das gesellschaftliche Machtdefizit der abhängig Beschäftigten durch einen politischen Macht-Vorsprung kompensiert worden sei. Markt und Staat, Ökonomie und Politik bilden dieser Interpretation zufolge (die insbesondere von Rudolf Hilferding und anderen Austro-Marxisten sowie später von der gesamten sozialdemokratischen Bewegung ausgearbeitet wurde) keine monolithische, von der Klassendominanz des Kapitals geprägte Einheit mehr, sondern es sei möglich geworden, die ökonomische Macht des Kapitals durch die neu institutionalisierte politische Macht der Mehrheit der Lohnabhängigen in ihren politischen Effekten großenteils zu neutralisieren. Zu dieser wohlbekannten und hier nicht weiter zu belegenden Interpretation steht eine andere im scharfen Gegensatz, – die These nämlich, dass die Institu-

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tionalisierung des Klassenkonflikts auf politischer Ebene und die Zuerkennung von politischen Beteiligungs- und Organisationsrechten an die Arbeiterklasse keineswegs deren reale gesellschaftliche Macht gesteigert, sondern gerade in hintergründiger Weise das revolutionäre Potential der Arbeiterbewegung gebrochen und in einer für den Fortbestand der Kapitaldominanz unschädlichen Weise integriert habe. Für diese, der demokratischen Republik und ihrer Verfassungsordnung kritisch gegenüberstehende Position finden sich in der Tradition der Arbeiterbewegung die Auffassungen Lenins (vor allem in „Staat und Revolution“) einerseits, die der Anarchisten andererseits. Aber auch die parteien- und organisationstheoretischen Schriften Max Webers („Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland“, 1917) und Robert Michels’ („Soziologie des Parteienwesens“, 1911) liefern eine Reihe von Anhaltspunkten für diese skeptische These. Deren Verfechter weisen – unter Berufung auf eine Fülle von politisch und analytisch recht heterogenen Argumenten und Befunden – im Ergebnis doch übereinstimmend darauf hin, dass die Anerkennung der „politischen Spielregeln“ der Parteienkonkurrenz einerseits, der gewerkschaftlichen Organisation andererseits die Ziele der Arbeiterbewegung erheblich beeinträchtigen müssten. Auch heute ist die Kontroverse zwischen diesen beiden Interpretationen keineswegs beigelegt, obwohl eine Betrachtung der herrschenden politikwissenschaftlichen und demokratietheoretischen Literatur, insbesondere soweit sie in der Nachfolge von Joseph Schumpeter (1942) steht, den Eindruck vermitteln mag, als sei die erstgenannte These heute generell akzeptiert. Der theoretische Gegensatz zwischen den beiden Positionen lässt sich mit dem Begriff „Herrschaft durch Exklusion“ versus „Herrschaft durch Inklusion“ charakterisieren. Die – vorwiegend sozialdemokratischen – Vorkämpfer für die Einführung des allgemeinen Wahlrechts wollten ein Herrschaftsverhältnis brechen, das ihrer Auffassung nach auf „Exklusion“, d. h. auf der Tatsache beruhte, dass der Mehrheit der Bevölkerung politisch-institutionelle und rechtliche Beteiligungsmöglichkeiten vorenthalten wurden; ihnen musste demgemäß die rechtliche Gleichstellung der Organisationen des Proletariats bzw. der einzelnen Angehörigen der Arbeiterklasse als ein wesentlicher Fortschritt erscheinen. Die zweitgenannte Position operiert demgegenüber mit einem Herrschaftskonzept, das auf „Inklusion“ beruht: gerade die Bändigung des revolutionären Kampfes, die bürokratisch-opportunistische Zerstörung des emanzipatorischen Impulses (etwa durch Robert Michels (1911) berühmtes „eherne Gesetz der Oligarchie“) wird als der objektive Sinn und die unausweichliche Folge jener „Errungenschaften“ beargwöhnt. Diese Problematik, die seither selten wieder so gründlich wie von Rosa Luxemburg durchdacht worden ist, liegt im Kern auch den modernen Kämpfen, etwa der Auseinandersetzung zwischen „parlamentarischen“ und „autonomen“ Strategien sowohl im Produktions- wie im Reproduktionsbereich zugrunde. Diese Kontroverse soll hier nicht

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weiterverfolgt oder gar entschieden werden, Es liegt aber auf der Hand, dass die Beurteilung der legitimitätsstiftenden Kraft der Mehrheitsregel, um die es uns hier geht, ganz entscheidend mitbestimmt sein wird von der Position, die man in dieser sehr viel umfassenderen Kontroverse bezieht und zu begründen vermag. Jedenfalls wäre es soziologisch naiv, ohne weiteres davon auszugehen, dass eine soziale Verallgemeinerung individueller oder kollektiver Partizipationsrechte irgendwie zwangsläufig auch zu einer gesteigerten sachlichen Verschiedenartigkeit (und damit Konfliktualität) der durch die Partizipationskanäle geleiteten Inhalte führen müsse. Vielmehr lässt sich an vielen Institutionen der Massendemokratie – an ihren Parteien, Parlamenten, Verbänden, Medien und Wahlkämpfen – studieren, wie – in nur scheinbar paradoxer Weise – die Öffnung der Eingänge („inputs“) gerade eine engere Auswahl der Inhalte, Resultate und „Ausgänge“ („outputs“) politischer Kommunikationen nach sich zieht und konditioniert. Von unmittelbarer politischer Relevanz ist das Problem „choosing how to choose“ z. B. in der Satzungskontroverse innerhalb der britischen Labour-Party gewesen, die maßgeblich zur Abspaltung der neuen Social Democratic Party (SDP) beigetragen hat. Hier geht es um die Frage, welches Gewicht der Parlamentsfraktion, den Gewerkschaften und den Parteitgliedern bei der Entscheidung über grundsätzliche Programm- und Personalfragen der Partei zukommen soll. Die Aktualität dieser Frage ist ersichtlich Resultat des – im britischen Fall ungelösten – Problems, ob die Partei sich als „Klassenpartei“ oder „Volkspartei“ versteht. Explizit tut die Labour Party beides: it „defined itself as the party of the working class, though in an essentially populist way.“ (Rustin 1981: 19). Aus dieser Doppelnatur der Partei ergab sich für die „rechte“, später als SDP abgespaltene Fraktion das Votum für die „Volkspartei“-Lösung, d. h. für ein partei-internes MehrheitsEntscheidungsverfahren bei weitgehend geschützter Autonomie der Parteielite und Parlamentsfraktion gegenüber der Basis: „decisions about the leadership, and by extension about candidates and policies, should be taken by the whole membership of the party, by secret ballot“ (a. a. O. 24). An dieser Lösung missfällt der „klassenpolitisch“ argumentierenden Parteilinken, dass die kollektive Erörterung der Entscheidungen umgangen und die „individualistische Stimmenaggregation“ mit übermäßigem Gewicht ausgestattet werde; zur Vermeidung der entsprechenden Verzerrungen des Entscheidungsprozesses müsse den Gewerkschaften ein quasi-ständisches Verfahrensprivileg im innerparteilichen Entscheidungsprozess eingeräumt werden; zumal nur auf diese Weise der Einfluss der bürgerlichen Medien und anderer Agenturen der politischen Sozialisation einigermaßen neutralisiert werden könnte, der bei individualistisch-mehrheitlichen Verfahren sonst voll zum Zuge käme. „By enfranchizing the least committed and the least knowledgeable, it is felt largely to enfranchise the hostile media. … Ballots would carry the risk of merely plebiscitary appeals to a membership influenced far more by

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mass media than by face-to-face discussion. It would reduce the automatic weight given to political activists merely by virtue of their commitment and participation.“ (a. a. O. 31 ff.). Das aus dieser Analyse folgende Plädoyer für ein föderales und korporatives Willensbildungsverfahren innerhalb der Labour Party setzt sich dann wiederum dem doppelten Einwand bzw. der Beweislast dafür aus, dass die Gewerkschaften und andere kollektive Akteure innerhalb der Partei tatsächlich die Ergebnisse eines lebendigen und durch kollektive Identität gestützten Diskus­ sionsprozesses in die Politik der Partei einbringen – und nicht nur die Präferenzen eines „oligarchischen“ Funktionärskörpers; sowie, zweitens, dass jene „different interests and social constituencies that can share spcialist goals“ (a. a. O. 39) sich tatsächlich als konsensfähig hinsichtlich der Bedeutung jener „socialist goals“ erweisen, um den Fortbestand einer föderal strukturierten sozialistischen Partei zu erlauben – und nicht nur den eines taktisch motivierten Parteienbündnisses. Wie immer diese Fragen im Kontext der britischen Labour Party – oder auch anderswo (vgl. Offe 1979, 1980) – zu beantworten sein mögen, das Beispiel dieses innerorganisatorischen Verfassungskonflikts illustriert, wie wenig selbstverständlich, wie bestreitbar und wie begründungsbedürftig die egalitär-universalistische Mehrheitsregel als Verfahrensgrundlage für kollektives Entscheiden gerade auf der politischen Linken auch heute noch ist. Gleichwohl stellt die Mehrheitsregel in den politischen Systemen mo­derner westlicher Industriegesellschaften sowohl auf der Ebene der Wahlentscheidung wie auf der Ebene der parlamentarischen Wahl bzw. Abstimmung die wich­tigste Entscheidungsregel zumindest in dem Sinne dar, dass sie als letzte Quelle demokratischer Legitimation in Anspruch genommen wird (vgl. Kielmansegg 1977: 249). Sowohl Wahlkämpfe wie parlamentarische Strategien stehen jedoch in einem organisatorischen Kontext, der Zweifel an dieser legitimitätsstiftenden Kraft der in ihnen angewandten Mehrheitsregel aufkommen lassen kann. Diese Zweifel ergeben sich aus der inneren organisatorischen Dynamik der Parteiapparate einerseits, der Regierungsbürokratien andererseits. Wenn es z. B. richtig ist – wie Max Weber und Robert Michels in ganz ähnlichen Formulierungen behaupten – dass die Organisationsdynamik von Massenparteien das einzelne Mitglied bzw. den einzelnen Wähler individualisiert, auf den Status eines passiven Konsumenten reduziert und seine politische Urteilskraft geradezu zwangsläufig einschränkt, während umgekehrt eine schmale und ihrer sozialstrukturellen Zusammensetzung nach durchaus unrepräsentative Führungsschicht in den Par­teien die zur Abstimmung gestellten personellen und sachlichen Alternativen nahezu uneingeschränkt kontrolliert; wenn es ferner zutrifft, dass die Dynamik der Parteienkonkurrenz auf dem „politischen Markt“ zur Annäherung an die politische „Mitte“, zur Kurzfristigkeit der strategischen Orientierung, ja zur Innova­tionsunfähigkeit der Parteiapparate führt; und wenn es schließlich zutrifft, dass von einer Unabhängigkeit

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der Mitglieder parlamentarischer Körperschaften weder gegenüber den Parteiapparaten, von denen sie dominiert werden, noch gegenüber den Regierungsbürokratien, von denen sie informiert (oder auch desinformiert) werden können, in irgendeinem ernsthaften Sinne die Rede sein kann, – dann ergeben sich bereits eine Reihe von Gesichtspunkten, unter denen man den empirischen Entscheidungen sowohl der Wähler- wie der Parlamentsmehrheiten ihre politische Autorität durchaus absprechen könnte. Zumindest wird deutlich, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip nicht als solches, sondern nur im Kontext der Organisationsstrukturen von kollektiven Akteuren beurteilt werden kann, die der Anwendung der Mehrheitsregel in Wahlen sozusagen vorgeschaltet sind. Von einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Analyse der Bedingungen der Geltung der Mehrheitsregel ist die prinzipielle politisch-philosophische Zurückweisung der Mehrheitsregel sorgfältig zu unterscheiden. Die konservative Variante dieser politisch-philosophischen Einwände gegen das Mehrheitsprinzip bedient sich der traditionellen Antithese von Gleichheit und Freiheit, indem sie erstens behauptet, dass die Verwendung der Mehrheitsregel immer in eine Diktatur der Mehrheit auch über die private Freiheitssphäre umschlagen könne (A. de Tocqueville) oder zur Unterdrückung „struktureller Minderheiten“ nationaler oder religiöser Art (G. Jellinek) führen müsse, und indem sie zweitens das der Mehrheitsregel zugrundeliegende Gleichheitspostulat („one man one vote“) mit der Behauptung angreift, dass die Fähigkeit zu „vernünftigen“ politischen Entscheidungen eben nicht als gleichverteilt unterstellt werden könne und infolgedessen Mehrheitsentscheidungen qualitativ immer gegenüber „aristokratischen“ Entscheidungsverfahren unterlegen sein müssten. Eine „radikale“ Entsprechung finden diese Einwände in den Prämissen der durch Rousseau begründeten Tradition der politischen Philosophie, insbesondere in der Unterscheidung von „volonté générale“ und „volonté de tous“, die ja die Vorstellung von einem kognitiv erfassbaren „wahren“ Gemeinwohl, das freilich nicht allen empirischen Bürgern gleichermaßen zugänglich ist, enthält (vgl. Kielmansegg 1977: 152 ff.). Politisch-philosophische Einwände dieser Art können heute zweifellos nicht mehr unmittelbar gegen die Geltung der Mehrheitsregel angeführt werden, wenn sie auch wichtige Bezugspunkte für die sozial­ wissenschaftliche Analyse der Geltungsbedingungen des Mehrheitsprinzips liefern können.

III a) Das gilt insbesondere für die erste der hier zu erörternden Bedingungen. Alle neuzeitlichen Kommentatoren stimmen darin überein, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip eine Entscheidungsregel ist, die für den „öffentlichen“ oder „politischen“ Bereich

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der menschlichen Angelegenheiten gilt, nicht jedoch für einen hiervon zu unterscheidenden Bereich „privater“ Disposition. Dabei ist die sachliche Beschränkung des Mehrheitsprinzips auf „öffentliche“ Angelegenheiten meist unter dem liberalen Gesichtspunkt des Schutzes von Freiheit und Eigentum gefordert worden, zum Teil interessanterweise aber auch unter dem reziproken Gesichtspunkt des Schutzes des Mehrheitsprinzips selbst: wollte man nämlich das Mehrheitsprinzip auch auf Zuteilungsentscheidungen für private Güter anwenden, dann würde dieses Prinzip laufend auf eine schlechterdings unbestehbare Probe gestellt, weil die berührten Interessen so intensiv und unmittelbar wären, dass von keiner (z. B. durch Mehrheitsbeschluss enteigneten) Minderheit erwartet werden könnte, einer auf ihre Kosten sich bereichernden Mehrheit Folge zu leisten (Usher 1983, 37 ff.). U.  Scheuner, der Verfasser der gründlichsten neueren deutschen Untersuchung zum Thema „Das Mehrheitsprinzip in der Demokratie“ (1973) spricht von einer „Begrenzung der Anwendung des Mehrheitsprinzips“, die in „seiner Nicht-Anwendung auf Fragen, die außerhalb der politischen Entscheidungszone liegen“, bestehe. Zugleich fügt er jedoch hinzu: „Wo freilich, etwa im Gebiet von Wirtschaft und Erziehung, die Grenzen (sc. des politischen Raumes) liegen, bleibt eine weitere schwere Frage, die nicht näher behandelt werden kann“. (61 f.) So verständlich der Verzicht auf die Behandlung dieser Frage in dem von Scheuner behandelten Kontext auch sein mag, so leichtfertig wäre andererseits doch die Unterstellung, dass die verfassungsmäßige Garantie der bürgerlichen Freiheitsrechte (insbesondere der Schutz des Eigentums, des Berufs, der Familien- und Erziehungssphäre, der Meinung und des religiösen Bekenntnisses usw.) für sich genommen schon ausreichen, um einer missbräuchlichen oder illegitimen Anwendung des Mehrheitsprinzips, d. h. „mehrheitlichen“ Übergriffen in die „eigentlich“ private Sphäre des Bürgers vorzubeugen (vgl. Häberle 1977: 243). Vielmehr müssen wir im modernen Sozial- und Interventionsstaat durchweg damit rechnen, dass es einen breiten Überschneidungsbereich zwischen der Sphäre gibt, welche die Bürger als Entfaltungsbereich ihrer privaten Autonomie reklamieren, und der Sphäre, die dem Bereich der „öffentlichen Angelegenheiten“ angehört. Die Tatsache, dass es solche Überschneidungen gibt, ja dass sogar vielfach (etwa im Wohnungswesen) die öffentliche Regelung Voraussetzung dafür ist, dass überhaupt von einer nicht bloß nominellen privaten Dispositionsfreiheit gesprochen werden kann, impliziert die Schwierigkeit, den sachlichen Geltungsbereich von Mehrheitsentscheidungen präzise zu definieren. Natürlich gibt es immer Ent­scheidungsgegenstände, bei denen die Mehrheitsregel in dieser Hinsicht unproblematisch ist (z. B. die Bestellung einer Regierung), wie auch solche „privater Natur“, bei denen sie uns als zweifelsfrei absurd erschiene (z. B. bei einer etwaigen Mehrheitsentscheidung über die Wahl der Farbe der Bekleidung). Zwischen diesen eindeutigen Extremfällen liegen aber eine Fülle von Entscheidungsmaterien, bei denen Freiheitsschutz und Mehr-

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heitsprinzip miteinander im Konflikt liegen. In diesen Fällen sind also Gründe für die Erwartung, dass die Minderheit sich einem förmlichen Mehrheitsbeschluss auch fügen werde, nicht leicht zu finden. Beispiele für die in diesem Überschneidungsbereich auftretenden Konflikte sind Beschlüsse über den Abriss bzw. die Sanierung städtischer Wohngebiete, über die Ansiedlung umweltschädlicher Industrien, die Frage der Freigabe bzw. Regulierung der Abtreibung, die Probleme des grundrechtlichen Freiheitsschutzes bei sozialen und gesundheitlichen Dienstleistungen, Probleme der polizeilichen Überwachung und Strafverfolgung, Fragen des Datenschutzes und ähnliche Problemlagen, bei denen typischerweise der Konflikt nicht der zwischen einer Minderheit und einer Mehrheit ist, sondern sich vielmehr um die vorgelagerte Frage dreht: ob das Entscheidungsthema überhaupt eines ist, das nach der Mehrheitsregel behandelt werden darf ? Solange und in dem Maße, wie diese Frage kontrovers ist, werden Minderheiten sich als berechtigt betrachten, den Mehrheitsentscheidungen Widerstand entgegenzusetzen. Probleme der Sphärentrennung zwischen „Öffentlichkeit“ und „Privatheit“, von deren Lösung die Anerkennung des Mehrheitsprinzips abhängt, verschärfen sich gerade auch im Kontext der wirtschaftspolitischen Strategien kapitalistischer Industriegesellschaften mit hohem Grad der Sättigung privater Konsum­bedürfnisse und (u. a. deswegen) ausgeprägten Stagnationstendenzen. Unabhängig von der Alternative von „keynesianischen“ oder „angebotsorientierten“ Strategien kommen in solchen politisch-ökonomischen Systemen nämlich nur Wachstumsstrategien in Betracht, die ihren gemeinsamen Nenner darin haben, dass die Investitionen politisch entschieden, politisch finanziert und die Produkte durch politisch verfügten kollektiven „Zwangskonsum“ zugeteilt werden. Beispiele für groß­industrielle Wachstumsstrategien, für die dies gilt, sind Rüstungs-, Energie-, Verkehrs- und Medieninvestitionen. Die entsprechenden Bedarfs-, Standort- und Qualitätsentscheidungen sind zwar aus Mehrheitsentscheidungen (Wahlen und parlamentarische Gesetzgebung) abgeleitet, affizieren aber durch ihre unmittelbaren und mittelbaren Folgen für „Nutzer“ und Betroffene Bereiche der Lebensgestaltung (z. B. Gesundheit), auf die der Durchgriff von „Mehrheitsentscheidungen“ schlechterdings nicht legitimiert werden kann. Zumindest wird die stimmige Grenzziehung zwischen „öffentlichen“ und „privaten“ Sphären immer schwieriger, und diese Schwierigkeit begründet die einfache, aber folgenreiche Wahrheit: „The lack of consensus on […] the scope of the government’s tasks means that there is no rational argument to accept majority rule if this leads to decisions in areas which one considers ought to remain free from government interference.“ (Daudt und Rae 1978: 336). b) Zweitens stimmt die neuere Literatur zum Mehrheitsprinzip durchweg in dem Grundsatz überein, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip nur im Rahmen rechtlich verfasster Organe Anwendung finden kann (vgl. Varain 1964, Scheuner 1973). Das be-

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deutet konkret, dass überall dort, wo eine Mehrheitsentscheidung stattfinden soll, eine Struktur von Rechtspositionen vorausgesetzt werden muss, die der Mehrheit (jedenfalls der „einfachen“ Mehrheit) nicht zur Disposition steht. In Übereinstimmung mit diesem Grundsatz würde es dem Alltagsbewusstsein z. B. als eine krasse Perversion des Mehrheitsprinzips erscheinen, wenn etwa die Mehrheit beschließen könnte, dass die Angehörigen der Minderheit deshalb, weil sie bei einer Abstimmung in der Minderheit geblieben sind, ihr Recht, an zukünftigen Abstimmungen teilzunehmen, verlieren. Daraus ergibt sich das Prinzip: Mehrheiten können nur im Rahmen einer rechtlich und faktisch gesicherten Struktur legitim entscheiden, über welche (dieselben) Mehrheiten nicht entscheiden können. So einleuchtend und sogar trivial dieser Grundsatz erscheinen mag, so leicht lassen sich andererseits Zweifel daran begründen, ob die institutionellen Mechanismen des Parteienstaats und der Massendemokratie tatsächlich geeignet sind, diesem Prinzip uneingeschränkt zur Geltung zu verhelfen, – oder ob es nicht im Gegenteil Tendenzen gibt, durch die das Mehrheitsprinzip seine eigenen Geltungsvoraussetzungen aufzehrt. Das wäre z. B. dann der Fall, wenn eine Mehrheit lediglich dadurch, dass sie einmal zur Mehrheit geworden ist, ihre Chancen verbessern kann, auch in Zukunft Mehrheiten zu gewinnen; die Mehrheit wäre demgemäß in der Lage, den Verfahrensstatus der unterlegenen Minderheit faktisch und sogar legal, relativ oder sogar absolut, zu mindern und sich auf diese Weise auf Dauer den Charakter einer „Mehrheit“ zu verschaffen. Das braucht natürlich nicht in der Weise zu geschehen, dass die Mehrheit die Angehörigen der Minderheit einfach physisch liquidiert, auch nicht in der schon etwas subtileren Weise, dass die Mehrheit sich aufgrund der Machtbefugnisse, die sie als Mehrheit genießt, in den Besitz der Zeitungen, Rundfunkstationen usw. setzt und dadurch die publizistischen Chancen der Opposition zerstört. Heute beruht eine gewisse Fähigkeit von Mehrheiten, sich zu permanenten Mehrheiten (und die Minderheiten zu strukturellen Minderheiten) zu machen, auf Mechanismen wie dem wahlpolitischen „Amtsinhaber-Bonus“ oder auch dem im Wahlrecht der Bundesrepublik Deutschland praktizierten Verfahren der Fünf-Prozent-Sperrklausel (vgl. Antoni 1983). Zudem ist der Wettbewerb um Mehrheiten über Parteiapparate vermittelt, die einerseits eine nahezu monopolistische, den Zutritt neuer „Anbieter“ auf dem politischen „Markt“ außerordentlich erschwerende Position einnehmen, andererseits, wie aus der Theorie des oligopolistischen Wettbewerbs bekannt, zur „Produkt-“ bzw. Programmangleichung neigen. Es ist gewiss eine spekulative, aber nicht völlig abwegige Überlegung, wenn man sich vorstellt, dass ein offeneres, aus anderen parteipolitischen Grundpositionen zusammengesetztes Parteiensystem sehr wohl ganz andere „Mehrheiten“ erzeugen könnte. Jedenfalls illustriert diese Überlegung den hier angesprochenen Sachverhalt, dass Mehrheitsentscheidungen nur solange und in dem Maße legitimationskräftig sein können, wie die jeweils gewonnenen Mehr-

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heiten gegen den Verdacht immun sind, auf der strategischen Selbstbefestigung und Selbstperpetuierung der Machtpositionen politischer Eliten zu beruhen; die Struktur und Dynamik der politischen Öffentlichkeit der repräsentativen Parteiendemokratie bieten jedoch diesem Verdacht zahlreiche Anhaltspunkte, von denen einige bereits von O. Kirchheimer in seinem Aufsatz über den Wandel der Opposition (1957) untersucht wurden. Der moderne Wohlfahrts- und Interventionsstaat einerseits und die Mittel der Massenkommunikation andererseits bieten mannig­ fache Handhaben für eine solche „Selbstbefestigung“ von Mehrheiten und die Verdrängung aktueller und potentieller Konkurrenten vom politischen Markt. Der strategische Einsatz materieller Ressourcen („Klientelismus“, Wahlgeschenke) sowie ihr Zugang zu Medien, die den politischen Eliten eine plebiszitär-charismatische Dauerpräsenz in den Köpfen der Bürger einräumen, lassen es (ähnlich wie analog die imperative Festlegung des Abgeordnetenwillens durch die Direktiven innerparteilicher Führungsgruppen) zumindest fraglich werden, ob der empirische Mehrheitswillen als unabhängige oder nicht vielmehr als abhängige Variable des politischen Prozesses interpretiert werden muss. Je mehr Anhaltspunkte für letztere Alternative sich bieten, desto geringeren Unterschied würde es machen, ob man statt der Gesamtheit des Wählerpublikums nur noch die Mitglieder des Herausgeberstabs großer Medienkonzerne zu „Wahlen“ zuließe. Die Differenz bestünde dann lediglich in dem Verzicht auf jenen „Beruhigungseffekt“, der darin besteht, dass ein – hypothetisch – diesem durchaus fremder Wille durch das nach Mehrheitsregeln wählende Volk selbst zum Ausdruck gebracht und mithin demonstriert wird, wie aussichtslos – im Rahmen dieser Regeln – eine Änderung der politischen Machtverteilung jeweils ist. Empirische Mehrheiten würden in einem solchen Falle nur die Rolle eines (zu diesem Zwecke ggf. auch noch fälschbaren) numerischen Indikators dafür spielen, wie fest politischen Eliten ihre Gefolgschaften vermöge der symbolischen Gewalt, welche sie über diese ausüben, im Griff haben bzw. umgekehrt dafür, wie geringfügig die Chancen rivalisierender Eliten tatsächlich sind. Dieser – aus der Kritik an Scheinwahlen in totalitären Staaten geläufige – Gesichtspunkt macht deutlich, wie sehr die legitimierende Wirkung der mehrheitlichen Entscheidung mit dem effektiven Schutz von Freiheits- und Teilhaberechten steht und fällt, die weder politischen Eliten selbst noch ihren Mehrheiten zur Disposition stehen. Das Mehrheitsprinzip gründet in der institutionell gesicherten und faktisch unangetasteten Autonomie derer, die ihren Willen als den eigenen im Akt der Wahl und Abstimmung bekunden. Die formale Eleganz der klassischen liberalen Demokratietheorie (J. S. Mill und A. de Tocqueville) beruhte u. a. darauf, dass sie individuelle Autonomie nicht nur als Voraussetzung, sondern gleichermaßen als unausbleibliche Folge demokratischer Teilnahme ansah (vgl. Pateman 1970). Die Funktion der Teilnahme

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des Bürgers an öffentlichen Entscheidungen diente nicht sowohl deren Qualität, sondern vor allem der intellektuellen und moralischen Selbstvervollkommnung („development“) des Bürgers selbst. Zu diesem kühnen Theorem fehlt uns heute jedes soziologisch ernstzunehmende (d. h. nicht nur pädagogisch gemeinte) Äquivalent; am ehesten wäre es noch in betriebs- und wirtschaftsdemokratischen Reformkonzepten (vgl. Novy 1978) der 20er Jahre zu finden, deren Wiederaneignung seit kurzer Zeit stattfindet. Im Übrigen fehlt es aber, wenn ich recht sehe, an tragfähigen demokratietheoretischen Konzepten, die den Bürger als Wahlrechtssubjekt (oder auch den Abgeordneten im Parlament) mit Gründen als eine Instanz voraussetzen können, dessen Entscheidungskompetenzen mit den über das Mehrheitsprinzip aggregierten Folgen seiner Entscheidungen schritthalten. Gewiss sollte man den Maßstab für „Entscheidungskompetenz“, d. h. für Autonomie, Verantwortung und selbständiger Urteilskraft, der hier anzulegen ist, nicht auch noch idealistisch überziehen. Aber allein was den Informationsaspekt jener Entscheidungskompetenz angeht, so wird man auf das Kriterium einer „capability of synthesizing vast amounts of information that more or less clearly bears on the problem at hand, in such a way that no element is given undue importance“ (J. Elster 1981: 38) kaum verzichten wollen. Gleichwohl ist es ein Gemeinplatz, daß die meisten Bürger bei den meisten „problems at hand“ schon nach diesem Kriterium versagen würden. Und das gleiche gilt wohl von den normativen Grundlagen der staatsbürgerlichen Beurteilungskompetenz, deren Lücken weder durch die Selbstverständlichkeit einer eingelebten politischen Kultur noch von „ideologischen“ Globalkonzepten politischer Parteien kompensiert werden. Es kommt hinzu, dass – wie immer man die Anforderungen an „autonome“ Entscheidungskompetenz des wählenden Bürgers (und abstimmenden Abgeordneten) im Einzelnen lockern will – man schwerlich in diesem Zusammenhang auch die egali­ täre Prämisse des Mehrheitsprinzips wird aufopfern wollen, die in dem Grundsatz zum Ausdruck kommt: „one man one vote“, d. h. keine Stimme soll mehr Gewicht haben als irgendeine andere. Empirisch lässt sich jedoch nicht nur ein durchschnittliches Defizit gegenüber selbst bescheidenen Maßstäben für Kompetenz nachweisen, sondern vor allem auch eine nach Klassen- und Schichtzugehörigkeit scharf ungleich verteilte Entscheidungskompetenz (vgl. für eine Übersicht Baum 1981). Folglich würde das Mehrheitsprinzip – entgegen seinem ursprünglich egalitären Pathos – die Angehörigen jener Schichten gerade begünstigen, in denen „man weiß, was man will“. Die hier angedeuteten Befunde über durchschnittliche Qualität und sozialstrukturelle Verteilung jener autonomen Entscheidungskompetenz erübrigen es praktisch, in unserem Zusammenhang auch noch nach institutionell rechtlichen Einschränkungen weiterzufragen, denen die individuelle Entscheidungsautono­ mie in der wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Massendemokratie unterliegt. Auch ohnedies

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dürfte deutlich sein, in welch hohem Maße die Voraussetzung der Mehrheitsregel, jedenfalls ihrer demokratischen Legitimationskraft, die in der Annahme einer gleichverteilten und problemadäquaten Entscheidungskompetenz der Aktivbürger besteht, fiktiv ist. Je mehr dies der Fall ist, desto wahrscheinlicher wird es, dass das mehrheitliche Wählervotum zum Resonanzboden für Eliten bzw. für Strategien zur Selbstbefestigung der Macht wird, – mit der Folge, dass dann andererseits auch der empirische Mehrheitswille selbst als politisch irrelevant ausgegeben und zugunsten anderer Strategien des Machterwerbs als bloßes Artefakt diskreditiert werden kann. Die Frage nach der „Echtheit“ oder „Authentizität“ empirischer Mehrheitsverhältnisse stellt sich auch im Zusammenhang mit dem sog. „Ostrogorski-Paradox“ (vgl. Daudt und Rae 1978, Rae und Daudt 1976). Dieses Paradox ergibt sich, wenn man einige einfache und nicht unrealistische Annahmen über die Bedingungen kombiniert, unter denen Volkswahlen in Massendemokratien stattfinden. Dazu gehören die Annahmen: 1) Es gibt weniger Parteien als politische Streitfragen („issues“); Parteien (im Beispiel: zwei) sind „Plattform-Parteien“, die in ihrer Wahlaussage zu mehreren issues (im Beispiel: drei, etwa Außen-, Wirtschafts-, Sozialpolitik) Stellung nehmen. 2) Wähler entscheiden sich „issue-orientiert“, d. h. sind nicht einer bestimmten Partei treu, sondern wählen jeweils die Partei, die bei den meisten issues die vom Wähler jeweils präferierte Alternative anbietet. Dann kann folgender Fall eintreten (Parteien X und Y): Wähler­ gruppen

Anteil

A

20 %

issue-bezogene Parteipräferenz für issue 1

issue 2

issue 3

X

Y

Y

Wahlergebnis nach Wähler­ gruppen Y

B

20 %

Y

X

Y

Y

C

20 %

Y

Y

X

Y

D

40 %

X

X

X

X

60 %

60 %

60 %

Mehrheiten für Partei X nach issues:

Wahlergebnis insgesamt

Partei Y siegt mit 60 % der Stimmen

Das Paradox besteht also darin, dass Partei Y gewinnt, obwohl die von Partei X vorgeschlagenen politischen Alternativen jeweils mehrheitlich bei den Wählern

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Anklang finden. Die Mehrheit der Partei Y kann insofern als „unecht“ diskreditiert werden. Die strukturellen Voraussetzungen, die das Auftreten dieses Paradoxons wahrscheinlich machen, liegen auf der Hand. Es handelt sich einerseits um eine Differenzierung von sozialen Lagen und politischen Präferenzen innerhalb der Wählerschaft („Pluralisierung“); zweitens um eine Erweiterung der Liste von Themen und Streitfragen, die politisch zu entscheiden sind; drittens um „oligopolistische“ Tendenzen im Parteiensystem, die zu faktischen und/oder legalen Beschränkungen des politischen „Marktzutritts“ führen; und viertens um qualitative Veränderungen der politischen Parteien zu Plattform- und Volksparteien, die weder bestrebt oder in der Lage sind, die von ihnen angebotenen issue-spezifischen Politik-Alternativen erkennbar auf den auch zeitlich stabilen „roten Faden“ einer (liberalen, christlichen, sozialistischen usw.) politischen Theorie aufzuziehen (und so eventuell parteipolitisch „gemischte“ Präferenzstrukturen vom Typus A, B, C in der einen oder anderen Richtung zu polarisieren), noch vermögen, gegenüber ihrer jeweiligen Wählerschaft eine „hegemoniale“, politisch-kulturell orientierende Rolle zu etablieren (und so „konsistente“ Wählerbasen vom Typ D zu konservieren). Kehrseite dieser sachlichen, zeitlichen und sozialen Verflüssigung des politischen Gehalts von Parteien, ihrer vom Wählerpublikum gelegentlich mit Anzeichen von Zynismus registrierten ideologischen und konjunkturellen „Quecksilbrigkeit“, ist dann ein offenbar wachsendes Maß an „issue-orientierten“ Wahlentscheidungen (vgl. Offe 1980). c) Mit dem Prinzip der Wähler-Autonomie, das der jeweiligen Minderheit zumindest die formelle Chance bietet, dank der selbständigen Urteilskraft der Wähler selbst einmal zur Mehrheit zu werden, hängt eine dritte Geltungsbedingung des Mehrheitsprinzips zusammen. Mehrheitsentscheidungen können nur über solche Sachfragen legitimer Weise getroffen werden, von denen angenommen werden kann, dass sie jedenfalls im Prinzip revidierbar, reversibel oder hinsichtlich ihrer potentiellen negativen Konsequenzen korrigierbar sind. Selbst aus noch so großen Mehrheiten könnte also nicht das Recht abgeleitet werden, für unabsehbare Zeit unumstößliche, vor allem in ihren Risiken und Bedrohungen nicht-revidierbare Tatsachen zu schaffen, welche dann naturgemäß die Entscheidungsfreiheit zukünftiger Mehrheiten mit anderen Präferenzen einschränken (vgl. dazu ausführlich Hofmann 1980). Dieses Argument ist interessanterweise in abgewandelter Form von konservativen Wirtschaftspolitikern verwendet worden, um eine nach ihrer Auffassung überhöhte Verschuldung der öffentlichen Hand und die mit ihr einhergehende langfristige Rückzahlungsverpflichtung des Staates (welche die „Zukunft unserer Jugend“ belaste) zu bekämpfen. Sehr viel aktueller und gravierender ist dieses Argument aber offenbar in Bezug auf mehrheitlich getroffene Entscheidungen über großtechnische Anlagen, insbesondere Atomkraftwerke; das gilt insbesondere dann, wenn ein Plutonium-Kreislauf geschaffen wird, der

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nicht (wie das bei Atomkraftwerken selbst unter allerdings phantastischen volkswirtschaftlichen Kosten für die dann „unproduktiv“ gewordenen Investitionen noch der Fall ist) einfach abgeschaltet werden kann, sondern buchstäblich als eine Naturtatsache für Jahrtausende die Lebensbedingungen zukünftiger Generationen bestimmt. Eine ähnliche Problematik ergibt sich im Zusammenhang mit militär- und rüstungspolitischen Entscheidungen, deren ökonomische und physische Auswirkungen schlicht irreversibel und unkontrollierbar sein können und bei denen aus diesem Grunde schon das Recht einer noch so großen Mehrheit, die Unterwerfung und den Gehorsam einer noch so geringen Minderheit zu verlangen, bestreitbar ist und bestritten wird. Die Sicherung der ökologischen Systeme und die Sicherung des Friedens stellen sich somit als zwei Aufgabenbereiche der modernen Politik dar, deren lebenswichtige Vordringlichkeit und zeitliche Fernwirkung der legitimierenden Kraft des Mehrheitsprinzips Schranken setzt. Überhaupt bringt die Zeitstruktur von Mehrheitsentscheidungen einige bedenkenswerte Probleme mit sich. Wie eingangs erwähnt, empfiehlt sich überall dort, wo es auf rasche Produktion von Entscheidungen ankommt, das Mehrheitsprinzip aus dem technischen Grunde, dass man nicht zu warten braucht, bis sich alle Beteiligten geeinigt haben (und auch nicht, bis der Befehlsberechtigte feststeht und sich zu einer Entscheidung durchgerungen hat). Mit den heute gebräuchlichen technischen Mitteln können die kollektiven Entscheidungen von Millionen-Elektoraten binnen Stunden festgestellt und bekanntgegeben werden, die von parlamentarischen Körperschaften mittels Knopfdruck binnen Sekunden. Bezahlt wird dieses Tempo allerdings mit einer extremen Zeitpunkt-Bezogenheit der Entscheidung: es sind – bei einer oft ausschlaggebenden Marge von Wählern – die augenblicklichen Stimmungen, Wahrnehmungen, Eindrücke, Erlebnisse usw., die das Ergebnis bestimmen. Im Normalfall dürfte der Wähler mit einem „nach vorn“ eng terminierten Risiko rechnen, das bis zum Abschluss der nächsten Legislaturperiode reicht (nach dessen Ende kann man sich dann ggf. anders entscheiden); und „nach rückwärts“ ist es die politische Leistung der letzten Legislatur­periode, mit denen zumindest die Regierungspartei für ihre Wiederwahl wirbt. Aus dieser Kurzfristigkeit der Wählerorientierung ergibt sich wiederum das oft kommentierte Phänomen der Kurzfristigkeit der Regierungs- und Gesetzgebungspraxis: ein rational handelnder mehrheitsabhängiger Politiker wird sich vor­zugsweise mit solchen Materien beschäftigen, deren zeitliche Problemstrecke kurz genug ist, um für den nächsten Wahltag bereits vorzeigbare Erfolge zu ermöglichen. Die Nachteile der strukturellen Diskontierung von Vergangenheit und Zukunft, die von der Mehrheitswahl auf den politischen Prozess insgesamt ausstrahlt, hat v. Hayek zu dem bizarr anmutenden Vorschlag veranlasst, dass jeder Bürger nur einmal in seinem Leben, und zwar in der Nähe seines vierzigsten Lebensjahres, das Wahlrecht solle ausüben dürfen. Damit ist beabsichtigt, dem Wahlakt selbst

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die Bedeutung einer einmaligen, im Lebenszyklus hervorgehobenen Entscheidung zu verleihen und damit die Verantwortlichkeit zu steigern, mit der er vollzogen wird, in ihn die in der ersten Lebenshälfte akkumulierten Erfahrungen und Wertorien­tierungen eingehen zu lassen und die Entscheidungen auf die Erwartungen und Befürchtungen zu beziehen, welche die jeweils wahlberechtigte Jahrgangskohorte für ihre zweite Lebenshälfte hegt. So unrealistisch diese Idee unter Gesichtspunkten des Gleichheitssatzes sein dürfte, so deutlich beleuchtet sie das Problem der Zeitpunkt-Fixierung des Wahlakts. Dieses Problem gewinnt offensichtlich in dem Maße an Gewicht, wie als Nebeneffekte der kurzfristig motivierten Wahl- und Regierungsentscheidungen langfristige und irreversible Festlegungen der Lebensverhältnisse eintreten. Ähnlich wie Markttransaktionen scheinen Wahlentscheidungen und nach dem Mehrheitsprinzip vollzogene Abstimmungen dazu zu neigen, die Zukunft zu diskontieren, d. h. prinzipiell absehbare zeitliche Fernwirkungen und Spätfolgen gegenwärtigen Entscheidens aus dem Kalkül von Regierten wie Regierenden auszublenden. Das Mehrheitsprinzip macht für die politischen Eliten die Mehrheitsbeschaffung zur obersten Bedingung politischen Erfolgs, – und diese Mehrheiten sind heute zu beschaffen: das Ergebnis ist die „opportunistisch“ sich am jeweiligen politischen „Markt“ orientierende „Plattform-Partei“. Um­gekehrt kann die Qualität von deren „Angebot“ seitens des Wählers nur kontrolliert werden, wenn er bereit ist, sich aus traditionalen Loyalitäten zu „seiner“ Partei zu lösen und sich als „Wechselwähler“ zu verhalten. Wenn man es als Merkmal politischer Rationalität ansehen will, dass Zielvorstellungen und Prioritäten über längere Zeiträume hinweg durchgehalten und intertemporale Konsistenz und Kontinuität des Handelns aufgebaut werden, dann ergibt sich, dass der Kampf um Mehrheiten das Handeln der Wähler wie der Parteien und Kandidaten in einer Weise konditioniert, die dieser Rationalität zumindest nicht förderlich ist. Ein weiteres Merkmal der Zeitstruktur von Mehrheitsentscheidungen ist ihre Periodizität, die entweder durch ein starres oder (wie in Großbritannien) in Grenzen variables Zeitschema von Legislaturperioden festgelegt ist. Das hat die Ungereimtheit zur Folge, dass in hohem Maße zeitpunktbezogene Umstände, etwa das Wetter am Wahltag (über die von ihm stark und schichtabhängig beeinflusste Wahlbeteiligung) für die gesamte Zeitstrecke von mehreren Jahren fixierte Tatsachen schafft. Nicht vereinzelt sind ja die Fälle, in denen unterlegene Wahlbewerber ihre Niederlage damit erklären – und damit das „Wählermandat“ des siegreichen Rivalen zugleich diskreditieren – dass sie u. U. durchaus plausibel darauf hinweisen, der Wahltermin habe eben zwei Wochen „zu früh“ oder spät gelegen; und eine andere Lage der Tagesnachrichten, des Ausflugsverkehrs oder der aktuellen Anzeichen für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung hätte die entscheidenden Prozentpunkte verschieben können. (Eine durchaus plausible, wenn auch schwer

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testbare Hypothese wäre die eines autonomen „Sonntagseffekts“ auf die Wahlentscheidung: die in der Bundesrepublik übliche zeitliche Platzierung des Wahlakts auf einen Tag, an dem die lebensweltlichen Bezüge zur Arbeitssphäre meist ge­ lockert, diejenigen zu Familie, Freizeitaktivität und z. T. Kirche jedoch akzentuiert sind, könnten durchaus eine nach Promille-Punkten ins Gewicht fallende Rolle spielen.) Ein völlig ungelöstes Problem der normativen politischen Theorie der Mehrheitswahl ist mit der Frage bezeichnet, wie ein unter so kontingenten und zufallsabhängigen Prämissen zustande gekommenes Mehrheitsvotum in der Lage sein sollte, ganze Parlamente und Regierungen für mehrere Jahre und für die Gesamtheit der von ihnen zu treffenden Entscheidungen mit einem legitimen „Mandat“ zu versehen. Warum sollte das für eine Periode von vier Jahren möglich sein, nicht aber für zwei oder zehn (vgl. Dahl 1956: 57 f.) ? Wäre es nicht technisch möglich und konsequent, Politik auf die Exekution der täglich und stündlich ermittelten Mehrheitspräferenzen der Bevölkerung zu reduzieren und eben dadurch „Demokratie zu verwirklichen“. (vgl. Kielmansegg 1977: 198). Will man nicht in wahrhaft magisches Denken verfallen bei der Suche nach einer Antwort auf diese Fragen, dann bleibt nur die pragmatische Erwägung, dass eben Regierungen und parlamentarische Körperschaften einen gewissen, konventionell festzulegenden Zeitkredit für ihre Arbeit benötigen und für diese Periode von der Sorge um ihre wahlpolitische Bewährung gerade freigestellt werden müssen. Wie überzeugend dieses Argument auch immer sein mag – und es ist sicher nicht für alle Entscheidungsgegenstände und -gremien gleichermaßen überzeugend – es gibt doch im Umkehrschluss nur zu erkennen, dass Wahlen eher als ein „Störfaktor“ der Entscheidungsroutine denn als ein Vorgang aufgefasst werden, der diese Routine begründet und ihre Ergebnisse rechtfertigt. d) Ein Topos der konservativen Kritik des Mehrheitsprinzips besteht in der Feststellung, dass die Mehrheitsregel Quantität gegen Qualität, die Anzahl der Masse gegen Würde und Einsicht des Individuums ausspiele. Soweit mit diesem Argument auf eine Wiederbelebung der Unterscheidung von „pars maior“ und „pars sanior“ spekuliert wird, ist es unter egalitären Prämissen sicher normativ hinfällig. Der Kritik an der vom Mehrheitsprinzip implizierten „mechanischen Gleichmacherei“ ist jedoch sehr wohl insoweit zuzustimmen, als Mehrheitsentscheidungen in der Tat auf der Zählung individueller Präferenzen beruhen, während sie die Intensität, mit der die Präferenzen von den Abstimmenden ver­ treten werden, un­berücksichtigt lassen. Das Problem ist, in den Worten von Dahl (1956:  90): „What  if the minority prefers its alternative much more passionately than the majority prefers a contrary alternative ?“ (vgl. auch Krippendorff 1962). In der empirischen sozialpsychologischen und Meinungsforschung werden nun manchmal Instrumente verwendet, die geeignet sind, sowohl die quantitative Ver-

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teilung wie die Intensität von Einstellungen zu messen, so dass dann ein kombinierter Indikator für das „Gewicht“ der einen oder der anderen Einstellung ermittelt werden kann. Es ist sogar vorgeschlagen worden, ein solches Intensitätsmaß auch in den politischen Prozess der Mehrheitsbildung einzubeziehen. Die Naivität dieses Vorschlages ist jedoch auf den ersten Blick ersichtlich: jeder Wähler würde im Interesse des Sieges seiner Präferenz die Angaben über die Intensität, mit der er diese Präferenz vertritt, wahrheitswidrig, weil in schlechterdings nicht prüfbarem Umgang inflationieren. Der Effekt wäre annähernd der gleiche, als wenn jeder Wähler fünf statt einer Stimme abgäbe. Immerhin ist diese Überlegung insofern lehrreich, als sich aus ihr eine vierte Beschränkung der Legitimationskraft der Mehrheitsregel ergibt: Mehrheitsentscheidungen sind nur unter solchen Bedingungen unproblematisch, unter denen vorausgesetzt werden kann, dass die Intensitäten der Präferenzen von Majorität und Minorität nicht drastisch differieren.* Fragwürdig werden sie dagegen dann, wenn eine Minderheit, die ihre Präferenz als sehr wichtig und dringlich empfindet, von einer Mehrheit überstimmt wird, der ihre Präferenz nahezu gleichgültig ist. Gegen diesen Einwand ließe sich das Argument anführen (und empirisch gut belegen), dass ein solches Intensitätsgefälle sich in Variationen der gruppenspezifischen Wahlbeteiligung niederschlagen und auf diesem Wege zu einem gewissen Ausgleich führen würde: die Praxis von Referenden, z. B. in der Schweiz, zeigt die Neigung der von einer Entscheidungsfrage nicht unmittelbar betroffenen Bürger, auf ihre Beteiligungsrechte zu großen Anteilen zu verzichten. Dann stellt sich allerdings sofort die weitere Frage nach einem Quorum, bzw. die umgekehrte nach der Legitima­tionskraft von Abstimmungen, an denen sich, wie in der Schweiz nicht selten, nicht mehr als 11 Prozent der Abstimmungsberechtigten beteiligen (oder auch die nach der Legitimationskraft der amerikanischen Präsidentenwahl, an der sich im Jahre 1980 nur 52 Prozent der Wahlberechtigten beteiligten). Es zeigt sich also, dass die scheinbar triviale Frage, was eigentlich eine Mehrheit ist und wie sie ermittelt werden soll, insbesondere in indirekten Wahlsystemen und hinsichtlich ihrer Ausgestaltung nach der Alternative Mehrheitswahl/Verhältniswahl keineswegs überflüssig *

Als weiterer Hilfsmechanismus zur Milderung des Problems des Intensitätsgefälles wird, allerdings nur für die parlamentarische Ebene, der Stimmentausch („log-rolling“) diskutiert (vgl. Tullock 1959). Für den Wähler selbst ergibt sich eine Chance, Intensitäten positiv zur Geltung zu bringen, nur in dem Maße, wie er durch andere Mittel der politischen Willensbildung (Demonstration, politischer Streik, Boykott usw.) die Möglichkeit hat, seinem Votum Nachdruck zu verleihen – und wie diese Ausdrucksformen nicht etwa illegalisiert oder als plebiszitäre Pressionen eines „Pöbels“ diskreditiert, sondern als notwendige Ergänzungen der Mehrheitswahl respektiert werden (vgl. Hirschman 1982). Auch in diesem Fall aber ergibt sich noch kein eindeutiger Verfahrensweg, nach dem Quantität und Intensität miteinander verrechnet werden könnten.

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ist (vgl. Varain 1964: 242 ff.). – Statt die damit angesprochenen Kon­struktions- und Verfahrensprobleme auch nur ansatzweise zu erörtern, möchte ich die These vertreten, dass die Politik des modernen Wohlfahrts- und Interventionsstaates sich typischerweise auf solche Entscheidungsmaterien ausdehnt und konzentriert, bei denen eine Gleichverteilung der Interessenintensität zwischen den Angehörigen der „Mehrheit“ und der „Minderheit“ keineswegs unterstellt werden kann. Vielmehr führen die wachsende „Disaggregation“ und die wohl ebenfalls wachsende „Eingriffstiefe“ dieser Politik dazu, dass von gesetzgeberischen Entscheidungen immer kleinere Gruppen oder soziale Kategorien (abgegrenzt z. B. nach Beruf, Einkommensniveau, Lebensalter, Wohnort, Familienstand, Branche usw.) betroffen bzw. begünstigt werden, während es gleichzeitig eine immer größer werdende Mehrheit von schwach oder überhaupt nicht Interessierten (bzw. auch nur Informierten) gibt. In dem Maße, wie der Anteil solcher hochgradig „spezialisierter“, gleichzeitig aber für die jeweils Betroffenen äußerst „wichtiger“ Politiken zunimmt, und in dem Maße, wie zudem aus strukturellen Gründen die Fähigkeit politischer Organisationen abnimmt, globale theoretische Gebäude oder „Ideologien“, die als Regeln für die Bestimmung von Präferenzen auch unter den nicht unmittelbar Betroffenen brauchbar wären, zu erhalten oder neu aufzubauen, wird die Bereitschaft von „Minderheiten“ steigen, sich „sezessionistisch“ zu verhalten und der formellen Mehrheit unter Berufung auf die besondere Dringlichkeit und Intensität ihrer Präferenzen den Gehorsam aufzukündigen. Schon die Rousseau’sche Konstruktion des Gesellschaftsvertrages, in der der Bürger zugleich absoluter Untertan und absoluter Souverän ist, macht von einer unhaltbaren Annahme Gebrauch: der Annahme nämlich, dass der kol­lektive Souverän wegen eben jener Identität den kollektiven Untertan schonen, d. h. ihm keine „unzumutbaren“, letztlich zur Lösung des Vertrages führenden Gehorsamspflichten aufbürden werde. Prämisse ist hier eine nahezu undifferenzierte Gesellschaft und/oder eine geringe Eingriffstiefe der Gesetze. Diese Konstruktion ist jedoch nicht überzeugend – und sie ist es heute weniger denn je. „Sobald aber ein Gesetz konkrete Verhältnisse regelt, trifft es notwendigerweise gewisse Bevölkerungskategorien stärker als andere […] Drückend ist die Pflicht, einem Gesetz zu gehorchen, stets nur für jene Bürger, die Gesetzesvorlagen bekämpfen und dann, aufgrund des Resultats der demokratischen Abstimmung, genötigt werden, sich dem Willen der Mehrheit zu unterziehen. Wie soll man der unterlegenen Minderheit plausibel machen, dass sie dabei ‚nur sich selber gehorche‘ ?“ (Gitermann 1958: 91 f.). – Die gleiche abwegige Fiktion enthält das ökonomische Konzept der „reinen öffentlichen Güter“, insofern es auf irgendwelche realen Erscheinungs- und Äußerungsformen des modernen Staates angewandt wird; denn dieses Konzept setzt ja – ähnlich wie die Rousseau’sche Gleichsetzung von kollektivem Souverän und kollektivem Untertan – eine Identität von kollektivem Nutz-

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nießer und kollektivem Steuerzahler voraus. Gegen den Wirklichkeitsgehalt dieses Konzepts ist überzeugend eingewandt worden (Benjamin 1980), dass es im modernen Staat keine „öffentlichen“, sondern nur noch „kategoriale“ Güter gebe, also Güter, deren Nutzen und Kosten jeweils auf nicht-kongruente Teilmengen der Gesamtheit der Bürger beschränkt seien: eine neue Eisenbahnlinie oder ein neuer Tarifvertrag nützt vielen und belastet wenige (z. B. Anwohner der Trasse, zahlende Gewerkschaftsmitglieder), ein Sozialhilfeprogramm verfährt umgekehrt, usw. (vgl. a. L. Thurow 1980). e) Ein paralleles Problem für die Legitimationskraft der Mehrheitsregel ergibt sich – fünftens – im Anschluss an die Frage nach der Extension, d. h. nach dem räumlichen und sozialen Geltungsbereich von Mehrheitsentscheidungen. Alessandro Pizzorno hat in einer Diskussion in den sechziger Jahren ironisch die Frage aufgeworfen, weshalb an einer Abstimmung über die Beendigung des amerikanischen Krieges in Vietnam nicht eigentlich auch der Vietcong beteiligt werden sollte. Ähnlich könnte man sich fragen, ob an Auseinandersetzungen über den Ausbau von Flughäfen, die gegenwärtig in zahlreichen Regionen Europas und der USA aktuell sind, nicht auch Interessenvertretungen von Flugpassagieren aus aller Welt beteiligt werden müssten, und nicht nur die lokalen bzw. nationalen Entscheidungskörperschaften. An der Verlegenheit, in die uns solche Fragen bringen, wird deutlich, dass die Mehrheitsregel in engem Zusammenhang steht mit der nationalstaatlichen Form politischer Herrschaft. Der Nationalstaat ist der Rahmen, in dem die Subjekte und die Objekte politischer Herrschaft in ihrer Gesamtheit kongruent sind. Unterhalb der nationalstaatlichen Ebene gibt es zwar (von dieser sanktionierte) Selbstverwaltungsrechte, in deren Rahmen kommunale oder regionale Teilkörperschaften ihre „eigenen Angelegenheiten“ regeln können. Auf supranationaler Ebene, also für den Fall, dass von einer Entscheidung mehr und andere Personen betroffen sind als die Bürger eines Nationalstaates, fehlen jedoch die Voraussetzungen für die Anwendung der Mehrheitsregel. Hier findet sich allenfalls, wie in der UN-Vollversammlung, die problematische Mischung korporativer und majoritärer Entscheidungsverfahren: „one nation, one vote“ – was in der Praxis bedeutet, dass alle nicht nur-deklamatorischen Entscheidungen, wie sie z. B. vom Sicherheitsrat der UN getroffen werden, auf Einstimmigkeit angewiesen sind. Offensichtlich ist heute nicht nur, wie zuvor erörtert, die in der Verknüpfung von Mehrheitsregel und Nationalstaat implizierte Annahme unrealistisch, dass alle Entscheidungen des Nationalstaates alle Bürger (in gleicher Intensität) berühren, sondern auch die reziproke Annahme, dass die Entscheidungen des Nationalstaates nur seine Bürger berühren. Damit wird die schon dem mittelalterlichen Rechtsdenken vertraute, dort allerdings noch nicht demokratisch verstandene Formel: „quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur“ hinfällig. Die Praxis der auf den nationalstaatlichen Rahmen beschränkten Anwendung der Mehr-

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heitsregel führt dazu, dass beide logisch denkbaren Abweichungen von dieser Regel heute an der Tagesordnung sind: entweder ist der Kreis der Betroffenen kleiner als der der Beteiligten, oder er ist größer. Selbst wenn wir das etwas anders gelagerte Problem der Repräsentation außer Acht lassen, werden sich nicht leicht Entscheidungsgegenstände finden lassen, bei denen im Streitfalle nachgewiesen werden kann, dass sich beide Kreise in Deckung befinden. Das Problem der nationalen bzw. europäischen Agrarpolitik bzw. die irritierende Tatsache, dass Atomkraftwerke und ähnliche Anlagen eine Tendenz zu haben scheinen, nahe den Grenzen zu Nachbarländern platziert zu werden, sind Illustrationsfälle für die hier berührte Problematik. Sie lässt erkennen, dass die Fiktion einer „nationalen Schicksalsgemeinschaft“ Voraussetzung ist für die legitimitätsstiftende Kraft der Mehrheitsregel, und dass diese Fiktion von der Natur der Entscheidungsthemen, die vom modernen Staat bearbeitet werden müssen, zunehmend unterhöhlt wird. f) Die klassische Begründung des Mehrheitsprinzips, die wir z. B. bei John Locke im Second Treatise finden, ging davon aus, dass die „nationale Schicksalsgemeinschaft“ nicht nur objektiv-funktional besteht, sondern von den Bürgern auch aufgrund geteilter kultureller Traditionen erlebt und vollzogen wird. Die Bürger müssen, wenn sie bereit sein sollen, sich dem Mehrheitsvotum zu unterwerfen, davon überzeugt sein, dass es sich um gewisser übergeordneter Werte einer kollektiven Identität und ihrer Aufrechterhaltung willen lohnt, auch Abstimmungsniederlagen hinzunehmen, ohne mit Widerstand oder Separatismus zu reagieren; und diese Überzeugung muss ihrerseits wiederum durch das Vertrauen darauf abgestützt sein, dass die Mehrheit auch ihrerseits das Fundament dieser kulturellen Gemeinsamkeiten nicht zerstören, sondern eine material gerechte, die Minderheit schonende und respektierende Herrschaft ausüben werde. Wie prekär und umstritten die Vorstellung von einer solchen nationalen kollektiven Identität, auf die sich die Mehrheit immer berufen muss, wenn sie die Gehorsamspflicht der Minderheit begründen will, heute geworden ist, zeigt sich u. a. daran, dass die Problematik der Nation heute nicht nur im konservativen und reaktionären Lager, sondern auch auf der Linken diskutiert wird (cf. Nairn 1978, Walser 1979), wo dieses Konzept lange Zeit umgangen oder allenfalls im Hinblick auf die Völker der Dritten Welt verwendet wurde. Nur die Bindung an eine historisch und kulturell begründete nationale Identität kann der in wichtigen Fragen unterlegenen Minderheit die Gründe bieten, die sie braucht, um nicht die Sezession (oder deren „anarchistische“ Äquivalente) zu wählen. Dieser Zusammenhang wird von Abraham Lincoln in seiner First Inaugural Adress beschworen: „Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or despotism.“ Aber der Ver-

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werflichkeit der Sezession entspricht eine positive moralische Tatsache: „We are not enemies, but friends. […] The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart […] all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched […] by the better angels of our nature.“ Dieses Zitat verdeutlicht im Kontrast, dass es für die positive Seite von Lincolns Argument, die doch allein die Fügsamkeit gegenüber der Mehrheitsregel begründet, heute kein ernstzunehmendes Äquivalent gibt. Insofern gibt es nicht nur – aus den zuvor erörterten Gründen – vermehrten Anlass, sondern auch verminderte Hemmungen, die moralische Verpflichtungskraft von Mehrheitsentscheidungen in Zweifel zu ziehen. Mit guten Gründen behauptet Guggenberger für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, und hierfür lassen sich auch in anderen Ländern Anhaltspunkte finden: „Was sich abzeichnet, ist eine bevölkerungsweite Fundamentalpolarisierung, welche die konfliktkanalisierenden Pazifizierungsmuster der parlamentarisch-repräsentativen Demokratie Stück für Stück außer Kraft setzt“, wobei er insbesondere die Anerkennung von Mehrheitsentscheidungen im Auge hat (1980: 59 ff.). g) Die wohl zugleich wichtigste und problematischste Geltungsvoraussetzung für Mehrheitsentscheidungen steht in einem komplementären Verhältnis zu der zuerst genannten Bedingung. Mit dieser hatten wir postuliert, dass Mehrheitsentscheidungen nur dann legitimationskräftig und verpflichtend sein können, wenn sie sich strikt auf „öffentliche“ Angelegenheiten beschränken und die private Dispositionssphäre unberührt lassen. Die Grenze zwischen der „öffentlichen“ und der „privaten“ Sphäre muss jedoch beiderseits gesichert werden, – so schwierig sie auch, gerade im interventionistischen Wohlfahrtsstaat, festzulegen ist. Dieser Gesichtspunkt führt zu der Formulierung einer weiteren Geltungsbedingung der Mehrheitsregel: Mehrheitsentscheidungen haben dann verpflichtende Kraft, wenn sie sich ausschließlich auf öffentliche Angelegenheiten, aber gleichzeitig auch auf ausnahmslos alle öffentlichen Angelegenheiten und auf diese Angelegenheiten in ihrem vollen Umfang erstrecken. Mit anderen Worten: Ebenso wenig wie Mehrheitsentscheidungen in die Privatsphäre eingreifen dürfen, kann umgekehrt die private Präjudizierung öffentlicher Entscheidungen, ihre Präjudizierung durch private gesellschaftliche Machtpositionen hingenommen werden. Mehrheitsentscheidungen können nur dann zu Gehorsam verpflichten, wenn diese Entscheidungsregel für den Gesamtbereich der „öffentlichen Angelegenheiten“ Anwendung findet, jedenfalls private Machtpositionen wirksam daran gehindert sind, öffentliche Entscheidungen anders als durch den egalitären Kampf um Mehrheiten zu beeinflussen. Jedermann würde ein Schachspiel für völlig absurd halten, wenn es nach folgenden Regeln ausgeführt würde: (a) Schwarz gewinnt, wenn der weiße König mattgesetzt wird, (b) Weiß gewinnt, wenn der schwarze König mattgesetzt wird,

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(c) Schwarz gewinnt auch dann, wenn es das Spiel abbricht oder mit dem Abbruch des Spiels droht. Die Regel (c), die uns für das Schachspiel zu widersinnig anmutet, hat aber eine ziemlich genaue Entsprechung in der Dynamik von Machterwerb und Machterhaltung in kapitalistischen Gesellschaften. In diesen Gesellschaften sind es nicht ausschließlich Mehrheiten, die das Handeln und Entscheiden von Regierungen und parlamentarischen Körperschaften programmieren (vgl. z. B. Nadel 1975). Da Parteien, Regierungen und Parlamente heute regelmäßig ein gewisses Maß an politischer Verantwortung für Wirtschaftswachstum und Vollbeschäftigung übernehmen, machen sie sich abhängig von Handlungen und Unterlassungen der Eigentümer und Funktionäre des Kapitals, die in letzter Instanz darüber entscheiden, ob und in welchem Umfange Wachstum und Vollbeschäftigung realisiert werden. Von diesen Investitionsstrategien, die selbstverständlich einer Bestimmung durch das Mehrheitsprinzip nicht unterliegen, wird man allerdings kaum bestreiten können, dass sie den Umfang und der Intensität ihrer Auswirkungen nach ein wie auch immer spezifiziertes Allgemeinwohl positiv oder negativ berühren. Dieser Zusammenhang wird heute als das zentrale Konstruktionsproblem der liberalen Demokratietheorie nahezu überall anerkannt. „The economy, the prime concern of modern governments, cannot prosper without business activities. But business cannot be forced to be active. It cannot be punished, given the ruling ideology and legal system, for scaling down its activities. So business is free to use the threat of doing less.“ (van Gunsteren 1979: 268) Ebenso besteht weithin Einigkeit darüber, dass wohlfahrtsstaatliche Methoden, die Transformation gesellschaftlicher Ressourcen in politische Macht – und damit die Durchlöcherung der egalitären Prämissen von allgemeinem Wahlrecht und Mehrheitsprinzip – auf dem Wege der Etablierung von Minima (allgemeine Schulpflicht, Sozialversicherungspflicht) oder Maxima (Parteienfinanzierung) einzuschränken, gegenüber „Unterlassungsphänomenen“ wie dem „Investitionsstreik“ völlig untauglich sind. Und ebenso unstrittig ist schließlich, dass es sich dem Ergebnis nach bei den Investitionsstrategien zumindest der Banken und der Großinvestoren um die Entscheidung „öffentlicher“ Angelegenheiten nicht durch das Mehrheitsprinzip, sondern durch – wenn auch indirekt wirkende – Drohungen, Pressionen und Nötigungen von Seiten der Inhaber privater Machtpositionen handelt (Böckenförde 1976). Nicht nur ist in kapitalistischen Industriegesellschaften definitionsgemäß der Geltungsbereich der Mehrheitsregel von Domänen durchsetzt, in denen – sozusagen am allgemeinen und gleichen Wahlrecht vorbei – gesellschaftliche Ressourcen und soziale Macht in Bestimmungsfaktoren für staatlichen Politik konvertiert werden können. Es gibt außerdem – ich stütze mich hier auf noch unveröffentlichte vergleichende Studien von Adam Przeworski über Demokratisierungsprozesse in Lateinamerika und Südeuropa in den 70er Jahren – starke Anhaltspunkte für die Vermutung, dass Demokratisierungsprozesse (d. h.

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Parteienkonkurrenz, Wahlrecht und Mehrheitsprinzip) in der Regel nur zugelassen werden, wo bzw. wenn starke gesellschaftliche Macht- und Vetopositionen die Gewähr dafür bieten, dass die Demokratisierung den sozialökonomischen Status quo ante nicht tangieren wird. Przeworski resümiert seine Ergebnisse: „Social and economic conservatism may be the necessary price for democracy […] Political democracy is possible only at the cost of limiting social and economic transformations.“ Nur solange die Verwobenheit von Mehrheitsprinzip und gesellschaftlicher Privilegienstruktur undurchschaut ist, wird man daher auf die Verpflichtungskraft der Mehrheitsregel setzen können. Eine weitere Kategorie solcher Pressionen, die der Regulierung durch das Mehrheitsprinzip entzogen sind, besteht in der Handhabung positiver oder negativer Sanktionen für bestimmte Regierungsentscheidungen, die von den Regierungen anderer Staaten oder auch von supranationalen Organisationen wie der Europäischen Gemeinschaft, der NATO oder der Weltbank ausgehen. In allen diesen Fällen büßt das Mehrheitsprinzip an verpflichtender Kraft gegenüber den Minderheiten dadurch ein, dass es evidentermaßen lückenhaft gehandhabt wird, d. h. nicht auf alle das öffentliche Wohl berührenden Entscheidungsgegenstände Anwendung findet. Die legitimierende Kraft der Mehrheitsregel steht auf besonders schwachen Füßen dann, wenn sich begründeter und plausibler Anlass für den Verdacht bietet, dass nicht nur die Entscheidungen von Parteien, Regierungen und Parlamenten, sondern die Mehrheitsentscheidungen der Wähler selbst unter dem Einfluss von Pressionen stehen, die durch den Einsatz solcher privater Machtmittel wirksam werden, zu denen auch Desinformationskampagnen gehören können. Das ist z. B. der Fall, wenn Wahlentscheidungen unter dem Einfluss einer verbreiteten Angst vor Inflation und/oder Arbeitslosigkeit stehen, oder wenn der Wähler durch die publizistische Macht privater Informationsmedien getäuscht, desinformiert oder zu unrealistischen Hoffnungen bewogen wird. Natürlich handelt es sich hier immer um eine Frage, die nicht völlig „objektiv“ zu entscheiden ist, sondern bei der man auf Plausibilitäten und die Überzeugungskraft von ad-hoc-Argumenten angewiesen ist. Es ist jedoch zu erwarten, dass in dem Maße, wie solche Plausibilitäten erzeugt werden können – und dafür gibt die für kapitalistische Gesellschaften charakteristische Auswirkung privater Dispositionen von Kapitaleigentümern auf öffentliche Belange einen strukturell erhöhten Anlass –, die bindende Kraft von Mehrheitsentscheidungen in Frage gestellt werden kann und wird. Ein etwas anders gelagertes Problem für die Mehrheitsregel entsteht dort, wo neben der Mehrheitsregel andere politische Entscheidungsverfahren Verwendung finden, die nicht auf den Gebrauch privater Ressourcen und Machtmittel zurückgehen. In den meisten politischen Systemen westlicher Industriegesellschaften finden wir eine Koexistenz von korporativen bzw. föderativen Entschei-

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dungsverfahren einerseits, Mehrheitswahlen und -abstimmungen andererseits. In den neuen politikwissenschaftlichen Arbeiten über die Entwicklung korporatistischer Strukturen wird sogar die These vertreten, dass Mehrheitsentscheidungen hinter korporativen Entscheidungsverfahren – d. h. dem Aushandeln von Kompromissen zwischen Interessenorganisationen und Gebietskörperschaften – zunehmend an Gewicht verlieren und zurückbleiben. Wo immer die Prinzipien territorialer Repräsentation (durch Parteienkonkurrenz, Wahlen und Parlamente) und funktionaler Repräsentation (durch „inkorporierte“ Verbände oder auch föderative Gebietskörperschaften) auf Verfassungsebene koexistieren, stellt sich die Frage, was „Mehrheiten“ für das Entscheidungsergebnis eigentlich wert sind und ob nicht-mehrheitsdemokratische Machterwerbsstrategien nicht eigentlich vielversprechender seien. Stein Rokkan (1966: 105) hat diese Frage mit der ernüchternden Formel beantwortet: „Votes count but organizational resources decide.“ Selbst wenn man in verbändepluralistisch zusammengesetzten Beiräten oder Kommissionen die einzelnen Verbände mit Stimmen ausstattet und abstimmen läßt, wird die Ungereimtheit nicht beseitigt: „the principle of voting equality is necessarily violated whenever units […] are granted equal votes“ (Dahl 1982: 92). Da aber moderne Regierungen auf die förmliche Einschaltung von Mechanismen funktionaler Repräsentation nicht verzichten können und sich solcher Entscheidungsverfahren offenbar sogar zunehmend – u. a. im Interesse der Staatsentlastung – bedienen, wirken sie selbst mit an einer schleichenden Diskreditierung des Mehrheitsprinzips und der Legitimationstheorie, auf die es sich stützt. Die Beobachtung, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip bei weitem nicht das einzige, sondern sogar ein an Boden verlierendes Prinzip der Entscheidungsfindung in der politischen Wirklichkeit westlicher Industriestaaten ist, kann man durch den Hinweis darauf unterstützen, dass die Entscheidungspraxis von Regierungen und Parteien zunehmend von demoskopischen Verfahren zur Ermittlung des „Volkswillens“ programmiert wird. „The methods of the social survey become the principal means of predicting and synthesizing putative majorities, aggregating the attitudes of masses of individuals. Parties do this rather than creating and responding to collective, deliberative expressions of political goals.“ (Rustin 1981: 38) Hier mag der Einwand naheliegen, dass die Demoskopie eigentlich nur ein abgewandeltes (und zudem kostensparendes) Verfahren zur Feststellung des Mehrheitswillens ist. Dagegen hat jedoch Scheuner (1973: 56 f.) mit einleuchtenden Argumenten auf „den qualitativen Unterschied der rechtlich bedeutsamen Stimmabgabe des Wählers von der Meinungsumfrage“ hingewiesen. Dieser Unterschied besteht in der Förmlichkeit des Mehrheitsprinzips bzw. der rechtlichen Formlosigkeit der Meinungsumfrage: Zum Mehrheitsprinzip gehören institutionelle Elemente wie die Periodizität von Wahlen und Abstimmungen (bzw. mindestens das de­fi nierte Recht von Minderheiten, Wahlen und Abstimmungen zu beantragen), häufig ein

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Quorum (und nicht nur eine Stichprobe), ein zeitlicher Ablauf, der Raum für Debatten bzw. Wahlkämpfe bietet, sowie die Pflicht definierter Instanzen, die Abstimmungsergebnisse unverzüglich, öffentlich und vollständig (und nicht, wie bei Meinungsumfragen möglich, nach Gutdünken, zu einem beliebig gewählten Zeitpunkt und selektiv) bekanntzugeben. Außerdem finden wir bei der institutionellen Ausgestaltung des Mehrheitsprinzips den Grundsatz der (zumindest auf Antrag oder bei bestimmten Kategorien von Entscheidungen) gewährleisteten Geheimhaltung der Stimmabgabe, während in der Demoskopie eine solche Geheimhaltung nicht als Rechtsanspruch der „Abstimmenden“, sondern allenfalls aus forschungspragmatischen Erwägungen der Meinungsforscher stattfindet; der Person des Interviewers gegenüber kann die abgefragte Präferenz oder Meinungsäußerung ohnehin nicht geheim gehalten werden (wie die anonyme Stimmabhabe im Wahllokal). Alle diese formellen Regelungen, welche die Anwendung des Mehrheitsverfahrens auf politische Entscheidungen institutionell ausgestalten, lassen sich so interpretieren, dass sie dazu dienen, die Unabhängigkeit und Rationalität des Entscheidungsverhaltens der Abstimmenden zu maximieren. Der verbreitete Gebrauch demoskopischer Techniken sowohl durch Regierungen wie durch Parteien führt demnach – ebenso wie das Vordringen „korporatistischer“ Entscheidungsverfahren – dazu, dass die begrenzte Rationalität des Mehrheitsverfahrens durch die politische Praxis der Staatsapparate selbst unterhöhlt und diskreditiert wird. Der Befund einer faktischen Zurückdrängung der Verfahrensprinzipien des Parteienwettbewerbs und der ihm zugrundeliegenden Mehrheitsregel wird auch von neueren Analysen der Funktionsweise des Föderalismus in der Bundesrepublik bestätigt. Gerade die „Parteipolitisierung des Bundesrates führt […] zu einem Ergebnis, das mit parteienstaatlichem Parlamentarismus eigentlich nicht vereinbar ist; zur Ablösung des Konfliktregelungsmechanismus des dualistischen Par­ teienwettbewerbs durch Prozesse des Aushandelns, zur Ablösung der Herrschaft des parlamentarischen Mehrheitswillens durch einen (von Fall zu Fall hergestellten) Allparteienkonsens“ (Abromeit 1981: 8; vgl. a. Lehmbruch 1976).

IV Die bis hierher erörterten Einwände gegen die realen Geltungsbedingungen und die Haltbarkeit der dem Mehrheitsprinzip zugrundeliegenden Legitimationstheorie haben in keinem Punkt die grundlegende normative Idee des Mehrheitsprinzips, nämlich die der Gleichheit staatsbürgerlicher Partizipationsrechte in Frage gestellt. Mit elitären oder partikularistischen Rechtfertigungen für eine Ablehnung des Mehrheitsprinzips hat die entwickelte Argumentation insofern nichts gemein. Im Gegenteil: vor allem im letzten Abschnitt wurde gezeigt, dass die Mehrheits-

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regel in kapitalistischen Demokratien durch eine Reihe von Mechanismen durchlöchert und umgangen werden kann, die ihren egalitären Anspruch leerlaufen lässt. Diese Feststellung nötigt freilich zu einer Präzisierung dessen, was mit diesem Anspruch selbst eigentlich gemeint ist. Berg unterscheidet in seiner Studie über das Mehrheitsprinzip (1965) drei Varianten des Begriffs der politischen Gleichheit. Die erste und anspruchsloseste heißt „equality of participation“ und bezieht sich auf die Gleichheit der Verfahrensbeteiligung. Sie ist durch das allgemeine und gleiche Wahlrecht (für volljäh­ rige Inländer) gewährt, bleibt aber unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Legitimation der Verfahrensergebnisse insofern schwach, weil ich als Teilnehmer nicht schon einen Grund habe, nur weil ich an einem Verfahren ebenso wie alle anderen teilnahmeberechtigt war, seine Resultate als bindend anzuerkennen. Das ist deshalb und insofern nicht der Fall, weil die Gleichheit des Verfahrensstatus noch keineswegs die zweite Form von Gleichheit, nämlich die Gleichheit des Einflusses auf das Ergebnis nach sich zieht. Das Ergebnis kann nämlich durch Einflussfaktoren bestimmt sein, die jenseits der gleichen Verfahrensrechte wirksam werden und ungleich verteilt sind: jeder hat eine Stimme, aber manche haben zusätzlich noch das, was Rokkan „organizational resources“ nennt. Aber auch die effektive Egalisierung nicht nur der Beteiligungsrechte, sondern darüber hinaus der Kontrolle von Faktoren, die auf das Verfahrensergebnis Einfluss ausüben, räumt noch nicht alle Einwände aus. Denn ein solches Arrangement ignoriert, dass verschiedene Entscheidungsthemen und -ergebnisse mich in ganz ungleichem Maße betreffen und interessieren, und es leistet insofern jenem Verstoß gegen den Gleichheitsgrundsatz Vorschub, der darin besteht, dass Ungleiches gleich behandelt wird: jeder Bürger hat gleichen Einfluss auf ein Ergebnis, das tatsächlich einige viel stärker berührt als andere. Wir haben gesehen, dass Entscheidungsmaterien, die diese Eigenschaft haben, in interventionistischen Wohlfahrtsstaaten eher die Regel als die Ausnahme sind. Eine Lösung für dieses Problem wäre nur durch eine weitere Radikalisierung des Gleichheitsgrundsatzes zu finden, die Berg als „weighted equality of influence“ bezeichnet und die er dadurch definiert „that individuals are given a greater share in the control of decisions in which they are more interested than in the control of decisions in which they are less interested“ (125). Die Schwierigkeiten, auf die man stößt, wenn man sich nach Modalitäten zur institutionellen Ausgestaltung auch dieser dritten und anspruchsvollsten Interpretation des Gleichheitsgrundsatzes umtut, bestehen vor allem in der Definition eines nicht-subjektivistischen Kriteriums für Betroffenheit: woran erkennt man und wie kann man im Streitfalle klären, wessen Anspruch, „betroffen“ zu sein, in welchen Abstufungen anerkannt werden muss oder zurückgewiesen werden kann ? Diese Frage kann hier nicht weiterverfolgt werden. Die Erörterung der drei Versionen des Gleichheitsbegriffs hatte in unserem Zusammenhang nur den

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Zweck zu zeigen, dass eine Kritik des Mehrheitsprinzips und der Legitimität von Mehrheitsentscheidungen keineswegs nur von anti-egalitären Positionen ausge­ führt werden kann oder solche Positionen impliziert; vielmehr folgt diese Kritik gerade aus dem Nachweis, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip nur der schwächsten Version der Gleichheitsnorm Genüge tut – der Gleichheit des Rechtsanspruchs auf Verfahrensbeteiligung –, die Gleichheit des Einflusses auf Entscheidungsergebnisse (oder gar des nach „Betroffenheit“ gewichteten Einflusses auf dieses Ergebnis) keineswegs verbürgt (Berg 1965: 157). Nur wenn dies der Fall wäre, ließe sich der Widerstand gegen Mehrheitsentscheidungen als unberechtigt disqualifizieren.

V Die Aufzählung und Illustration der dem Mehrheitsprinzip innewohnenden Fiktionen und Aporien kann Schlussfolgerungen sehr verschiedener Art nahelegen. Eine Schlussfolgerung ist, das Thema tunlichst ruhen zu lassen bzw. die verfügbaren moralisch-politischen Ressourcen gegen den zu mobilisieren, der dennoch daran rührt (vgl. den Briefwechsel zwischen einem Bonner Ministerialbeamten und dem Verfasser in: Mez, Wolter 1980: 135 – ​146). Eine andere Reaktion besteht in der „realistischen“ Anerkennung all der Mängel und Engpässe, in die jeder Versuch gerät, die demokratietheoretischen Voraussetzungen des Mehrheitsprinzips als erfüllt auszugeben, und der demnach konsequente Rückzug von dem normativen Anspruch, allgemeines Wahlrecht nach dem Mehrheitsprinzip genüge politischen Wertvorstellungen wie denen der Gleichheit, der Rationalität oder der Legitimität kollektiven Entscheidens auch nur annähernd. Ein Beispiel für diese Position liefert William Riker (1980: 456/7) mit einem schneidenden Resümee seiner Position: „[…] the products of majority rule are probably seldom defensible as consistent or as the true choice of the voting body. […] what comes out of majority rule is a function not only of the tastes of persons, but also of the political institutions surrounding the process of voting, of the skill with which individuals manipulate the selection of alternatives and the statement of issues, and indeed even of the intelligence and character of the voters. […] there is simply no possible way to interject meaning into majority rule decisions.“ Schon Max Weber hat über den „blinden Köhlerglauben an die Unfehlbarkeit und Allmacht der Mehrheit“ gespottet. Der einzige Sinn, den Riker der Mehrheitsregel dann noch zuzubilligen vermag, besteht in ihrem defensiven Potential bei der (negativen) Mehrheitsentscheidung über Personen: „the protection of rights by means of popular vetoes over officials.“ Diese von demokratischer Ideologie gänzlich unbefangene, durch und durch „realistische“ Sicht des Problems läuft freilich auf zwei Fragen auf. Erstens: warum sollte es dem Manipulationsgeschick politischer Eliten und/oder dem stummen Zwang

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institutioneller Arrangements nicht gelingen, auch die ihnen potentiell bedrohlich werdende Vetomacht von Mehrheiten noch zu entschärfen ? Zweitens: Warum sollte es, selbst wenn dies nicht geschieht, nicht andere und wirksamere (vielleicht auch weniger riskante) Formen der Verteidigung individueller Freiheitsrechte gegenüber hoheitlichen Übergriffen geben als ausgerechnet das Mehrheitsprinzip ? Wie man sieht, handelt es sich bei der Position Rikers um die Renaissance eines im Prinzip vordemokratischen Eigentümer-Liberalismus, der sich halbherzig vorbehält, demokratisch-majoritäre Beteiligungsformen als Abwehrwaffe gegen die hoheitliche Beeinträchtigung der individuellen Freiheitssphäre einzusetzen. Mit einer anderen und sozialtheoretisch wesentlich aufwendigeren Argumentation entkleidet Luhmann das Mehrheitsprinzip seiner herrschaftsbegründenden Funktion. In modernen komplexen Gesellschaften sei das Festhalten an der liberalen Vorstellung, „gerechte“ Verfahren und „richtige“ Ergebnisse könnten noch eine Einheit bilden, ohnehin naiv (im Ergebnis ähnlich Kielmansegg 1977: 254). Ebenso wenig wie im Gerichtsverfahren „procedural fairness“ als (bestgeeignetes) Mittel zur Produktion richtiger Urteile aufgefasst werden könne, lasse sich Wahl und Mehrheitsentscheidung als zweckmäßiger Weg zu richtigen politischen Entscheidungen konstruieren. Die „Übereinstimmung instrumenteller und expressiver Verfahrensfunktionen“ (1969: 227) sei heute ebenso passé wie es die Übereinstimmung von Motiven und Funktionen in komplexen Sozialsystemen generell ist. Weil das so ist, erhalten nun die sozusagen übriggebliebenen Verfahren neue Funktionen zugewiesen: die an ihnen Beteiligten kontrollieren oder programmieren nicht etwa per Verfahren die Entscheidungen, sondern sie trösten sich gleichsam durch Ausagieren ihrer Emotionen über die Tatsache hinweg, dass die wirklichen Entscheidungen sowieso ohne ihre Mitwirkung stattfinden. Gerade dadurch, dass der Bürger in gewisse Verfahren einbezogen wird (als Öffentlichkeit in die Gerichtsverhandlung, als Wähler in die Politik), gelingt es umso zuverlässiger, ihn aus den Entscheidungen herauszuhalten, – wodurch die Politik dann die von ihr benötigten Dispositionsspielräume, ihre Autonomie aufbaut und verteidigt. Diesen beiderseits – für Bürger wie für Eliten – wohltätigen Entlastungseffekt diskutiert Luhmann ausdrücklich an der Institution der Wahl (155 ff.) und des Mehrheitsprinzips (176 f., 196). Beide übertragen nicht etwa Interessen, Forderungen und Richtungsvorgaben des wählenden Volkes auf staatliches Entscheiden oder führen gar zur Formulierung eines „Wählerauftrages“. Derartige „ideologische Zusatzannahmen“ (21) über die Funktion demokratischer Institutionen sind heute völlig obsolet: „Das Mehrheitsprinzip ist … keine Legitimierungsweise, sondern eine Verlegenheitslösung“ (196) und die Funktion der Wahl besteht darin, dem Wähler die Gelegenheit zu zweckfreiem Ausdrucksverhalten zu gewähren, zur befriedigenden „Ab­reaktion“ der Motive von Protest oder Unterstützung. Wenn schon nicht „der Wähler“ die Inhalte künftigen kollektiven bindenden Entscheidens bestimmt, so nährt die Institution

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der Wahl und des Mehrheitsprinzips das Vertrauen darauf, dass jedenfalls nichts und niemand anderes als der Wähler die letzte Entscheidung über die personelle Zusammensetzung von Parlaments- und Regierungspersonal treffe. Dies freilich ist ein Effekt, der sich mit ein paar Würfeln ebenso gut erzielen ließe. Wahlen und Mehrheitsentscheidungen sind demzufolge Mechanismen, mit denen das politische System seine „Selbstlegitimation“ bewerkstelligt und den Bürger veranlasst, dessen von ihm ohnehin nicht lenkbaren Entscheidungen in der Haltung des „fast motivlosen Akzeptierens“ (28) entgegenzunehmen. So einleuchtend und „realistisch“ diese Analyse sich in vielen ihrer einzelnen Ar­gumente und Anhaltspunkte ausnimmt, so unrealistisch bleibt sie doch insofern, als sie sowohl der offiziellen Deutung der Institutionen von Wahl und Mehrheitsprinzip als Medien der Betätigung von „Volkssouveränität“ wie vor allem der vorwissenschaftlichen Selbstauslegung des Handelns von Wählern und Mehrheiten widerstreitet. Die Überzeugungskraft der Luhmann’schen Analyse ist folglich selbstzerstörerisch: ließen sich die Wähler vom Soziologen über die wahre Funktion ihres Tuns „aufklären“, sie könnten sie nicht mehr erfüllen – ebenso wenig, wie man vorsätzlich einen Irrtum begehen oder Selbstbewusstsein erwerben kann. Eine dritte mögliche Reaktion auf die Analyse der Kontext- und Anwendungsbedingungen des Mehrheitsprinzips besteht natürlich darin, sowohl die empirische Verletzung seines normativen Anspruchs wie aber auch die soziale Realität dieses Anspruchs selbst ernst zu nehmen und nach Möglichkeiten zu suchen, diesen Anspruch durch geeignete institutionelle Modifikationen oder Ergänzungen des Mehrheitsprinzips selbst wie seiner gesellschaftlichen Anwendungsbedingungen in einem höheren Maße einzulösen, als dies heute der Fall ist. Dieses „konstruktive“ Problem ist auf zwei alternativen Wegen zu lösen. Zum einen durch die Einschränkung des Anwendungsbereichs des Mehrheitsprinzips, zum anderen durch dessen Ausdehnung. Was die erste Alternative angeht, so steht ein umfangreiches Instrumentarium zur Verfügung, dessen einzelne Elemente in mannigfaltiger Kombination eingesetzt werden können (und z. T. werden), um die Reichweite des Mehrheitsprinzips einzuschränken und seine pervertierten Effekte abzuschwächen. Zu nennen sind etwa ■■ föderale Entscheidungsverfahren, denen einerseits die Funktion des Minderheitenschutzes, andererseits die der Entlastung des Entscheidungsprozesses von wahlpolitischen Opportunismen zugutegehalten wird; einschränkend zu der ersten Funktion wäre jedoch auf das Problem hinzuweisen, dass die wenigsten Minderheiten „gerade regional/bundesstaatlich konzentriert sind“ (Abromeit 1981) und dass es außerdem „minorities within minorities“ (Dahl 1956;  115) gibt, und zur zweiten Funktion wäre zumindest für das Beispiel der BRD auf die entsprechenden Befunde von Lehmbruch (1976) hinzuweisen;

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■■ Dezentralisierung/Zentralisierung, sie könnten zur Bewältigung der oben unter III e) angesprochenen Probleme eingesetzt werden, wobei diese Probleme ja alle in einer räumlichen und sozialen Nicht-Kongruenz von Betroffenen und Beteiligten bestehen; ihre Grenze fänden solche Korrekturen jedoch zweifellos an rasch steigenden externen Effekten bzw. Koordinationskosten einerseits, an der geringen Leistungsfähigkeit supranationaler Problem-Zentralisierung andererseits; ■■ Stärkung der proportionalen Komponenten im Wahlrecht und im parlamentarischen Gesetzgebungsverfahren; die entsprechenden Gefahren lägen in der Ausbildung „latenter großer Koalitionen“, die nicht mehr durch Mehrheitsentscheidungen, sondern nur noch durch Verhandlungskompromisse operieren könnten und deshalb den alternativen Gefahren der Entscheidungsblockade oder des Immobilismus ausgesetzt wären; ■■ verfahrensmäßige Befestigungen des Minderheiten- (evtl. sogar des Mehrheits-)schutzes durch verstärkten Gebrauch von Quoren bzw. von qualifizierten Mehrheits-Anforderungen; auch hier stößt man bald an das (u. U. in Kauf zunehmende) Problem der Entscheidungsblockade; ■■ ein Ausbau der Grundrechte und institutionellen Garantien der Verfassung sowie gesetzliche „Negativkataloge“, die (wie eine Reihe von Fragen im Hochschulrecht) „mehrheitsimmun“ zu machen wären (vor allem in Bezug auf die Probleme III a) und III c)); ■■ Maßnahmen zur Sicherung der Autonomie und Entscheidungskompetenz der Wähler bzw. Abgeordneten zur Vermeidung der unter III b) diskutierten Probleme durch politische Bildung, neue Formen der Kommunikation zwischen Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit, materielle und institutionelle Sicherung der Medien- und Wissenschaftsfreiheit, institutionelle, materielle und pädagogische Sicherung „rationaler“ politischer Willensbildung unter Einschränkung der Kontrolle desselben durch die politischen Parteien; ■■ „kurzgeschlossene“ Legitimations- und Konfliktregelungsmechanismen im Verhältnis zwischen betroffenen Bürgern und den Ordnungs- und LeistungsVerwaltungen zum Ausgleich des „Intensitätsgefälles“ (s. o., Punkt III d)) unter Verstärkung von Formen der Selbsthilfe, Selbstverwaltung und Klientenautonomie; dementsprechend die Ausdünnung spezifischer Detailregelungen und Erweiterung von administrativen Dispositionsspielräumen bei der Programm-Implementation; generell Erprobung von „verwaltungsnahen“ Formen der Bürgerbeteiligung einschließlich neuer Formen der „Wählerspezialisierung“ bzw. der „Fachwählerschaften“ (Horn 1980); ■■ Erweiterung sozialstaatlicher Teilhaberechte und Kontrolle der unter III g) erörterten ökonomischen „Erpressungs-“ bzw. „Nötigungs“mechanismen durch extensiven Gebrauch des Instruments der Sozialisierung; entsprechende „pro-

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tektionistische“ Anstrengungen zur Lockerung außenwirtschaftlicher und militärisch-politischer „Sachzwänge“; ■■ Einführung von „Eventualstimmen“ ins Wahlrecht, um den Entmutigungseffekt der 5 %-Sperrklausel (vgl. III b)) zu unterlaufen (vgl. Wagenbach 1980). Diese Aufzählung hat hier nur den Zweck der Illustration; sie ist weder vollständig, systematisch, unbedingt konsistent noch als verfassungspolitisches Aktionsprogramm gedacht. Sie soll lediglich andeuten, in welchem Umfang, in welchen Grenzen und z. T. mit welchen Nebenfolgen das Mehrheitsprinzip mit anderen Verfahrensregeln kombiniert und in seinen zuvor diskutierten problematischen Effekten eingeschränkt werden kann. Nur scheinbar entgegengesetzt ist der andere Weg zur Lösung des „konstruktiven“ Problems, nämlich einer Ausweitung des Mehrheitsprinzips. Diese Ausweitung könnte die Form haben, dass die Gegenstände, Modalitäten und Grenzen der Anwendung des Mehrheitsprinzips selbst zur mehrheitlichen Disposition gestellt, d. h. das Mehrheitsprinzip als ein gewähltes auf sich selbst angewandt wird. Eine solche reflexive Schleife fehlt bei den üblichen Anwendungsformen der Mehrheitsentscheidung, in Wahlen und Abstimmungen. Dort sind sämtliche Parameter der Entscheidungssituation durch vorausgegangene Verhandlungen, gesetzliche Normierungen oder hierarchische Anordnungen festgelegt, und zu ent­scheiden ist nur zwischen den Voten Ja/Nein/Enthaltung bzw. den Alternativen A, B, C … N. Weitere Alternativen sind lediglich die im Verfahren nicht vorgesehenen der NichtBeteiligung und der „missbräuchlichen“ Benutzung des Verfahrens für nicht-erfragte Kommunikationen (bzw. Optionen für nicht-vorgesehene Alternativen); beide Möglichkeiten werden als „ungültig“ (bei Wahlpflicht sogar als illegal) behandelt und im Verfahrensablauf selbst folgenlos gemacht. Der Disposition der Wählenden/Abstimmenden sind also (zumindest zum Zeitpunkt der Wahl/Abstimmung) die folgenden Parameter entzogen: ■■ ob eine Frage überhaupt durch Wahl oder Abstimmung entschieden wird; ■■ die personellen oder sachlichen Alternativen, zwischen denen zu wählen ist (begrenzte Ausnahme: „Primaries“); ■■ der Zeitpunkt der Wahl, die Dauer der vorausgehenden Wahlkämpfe und Debatten; sowie der Zeitpunkt der nächsten Wahl; ■■ die Bestimmung der Wahlberechtigten, evtl. von Quoren und Sperr­minoritäten; ■■ die Modalitäten der Umsetzung von Wahlentscheidungen in parlamentarische Sitzverteilungen (Mehrheits- vs. Verhältniswahlrecht), der Umsetzung von Sitzverteilungen in die Regierungsbildung (Koalitionsbildung) und der Regierungsbildung in Gesetzgebungs- und Entscheidungsprogramme und Politikziele;

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■■ der Grad der räumlichen und sozialen „Disaggregation“ bzw. Aggregation der Entscheidungsthemen, also die Frage, ob dies durch Mehrheiten verliehene pauschale Handlungsmandat für die kommunale, die Landes-, die Bundes­ ebene gelten bzw. evtl. sogar für noch anders zugeschnittene Kategorien von Betroffenen und Beteiligten Wirksamkeit erlangen soll. Diese außerordentliche Starrheit der prozeduralen Randbedingungen, unter denen Mehrheitsentscheidungen veranstaltet werden, lässt sich – im Interesse der Steigerung ihres aus den zuvor genannten Gründen höchst zweifelhaften Legitimationspotentials – durchaus lockern. Natürlich kann man nicht über alles zu ein und demselben Zeitpunkt entscheiden, und insofern sind der rekursiven Anwendung des Mehrheitsprinzips auf sich selbst gewisse Grenzen gesetzt. Eine wei­tere Grenze ergibt sich daraus, dass Mehrheitsentscheidungen über (Teile der) Verfahrensmodalitäten anstehender Mehrheitsentscheidungen ja durchaus von den Effekten inspiriert sein können, welche sich die „sachlichen“ Mehrheiten von den zur Entscheidung stehenden Verfahrensalternativen jeweils erwarten; das würde dazu führen, dass eine bestehende Mehrheit ein Verfahren durchsetzt, das ihre Position favorisiert. Dagegen spricht jedoch, dass die materialen Folgen der Verfahrenswahl nicht immer bekannt und kalkulierbar sind und deshalb die Debatte um das „richtige“ Verfahren zumindest auch unter Berücksichtigung von Kriterien der Angemessenheit, Gerechtigkeit und Fairness geführt werden muss. Im Übrigen zeigen historische Beispiele, dass eine Problematisierung des Verfahrens auch dort zustande gekommen ist, wo die Initiatoren (zumindest kurzfristige) Einbußen ihrer Position nach dem veränderten Verfahren erwarten konnten (Beispiel: Arbeiterparteien haben sich für das Frauenwahlrecht eingesetzt), während solche Initiativen umgekehrt selbst bei verlockenden Aussichten auf wahlpolitische Vorteile unterbleiben (Beispiel: der Niedergang der Sozialdemokratie in den Großstädten geht zum Teil auf den hohen Ausländeranteil der Wohnbevölkerung zurück, d. h. ein Teil des klassischen Wählerreservoirs dieser Partei, nämlich die Arbeiterschaft, erleidet faktisch den Verlust des Wahlrechts; dennoch waren nur vereinzelt sozialdemokratische Vorstöße zur Einführung des kommunalen Wahlrechts für Ausländer erkennbar). Auch sind dem geltenden Wahlrecht solche „rekursiven“ Figuren nicht völlig fremd. So stellt z. B. das bayerische, das baden-württembergische und das niedersächsische Kommunalwahlrecht dem Wähler durch die Techniken des Kumulierens bzw. Panaschierens nicht nur die Auswahl zwischen vorgegebenen personellen Alternativen (Listen), sondern auch die Wahl der Alternativen selbst in engen Grenzen zur Disposition. Dasselbe würde von einer Veränderung des Wahlrechts gelten, die „Eventualstimmen“ zuließe (vgl. Wagenbach 1980): der Wähler könnte dann angeben, in welchem Falle (z. B., wenn eine Partei fünf Prozent erreicht

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oder nicht, wenn eine Regierungskoalition gebildet wird oder nicht usw.) seine Stimme wie gewertet werden soll. Schließlich ist mit dem Instrument des Volksbegehrens, das in verschiedenen Landesverfassungen vorgesehen ist, eine verfahrensmäßige – freilich erschwerte und begrenzte – Möglichkeit zur Entscheidung der Frage gegeben, welche Fragen zu welchem Zeitpunkt aus dem parlamentarischen Routineverfahren herausgenommen und auf eine andere Verfahrensschiene gesetzt werden sollen. Denkt man entlang solcher relativ schwacher Ansatzpunkte weiter, so kämen durchaus verfahrensbezogene Mehrheitsabstimmungen zu bestimmten Entscheidungsthemen in Betracht, mit denen eine Reihe von gegenwärtig weitgehend unregulierten und brisanten innenpolitischen Konfliktthemen in Bereichen wie Ökologie, Energiepolitik, Stadtsanierung und Wohnungsbau, Verkehrspolitik, Frauen- und Familienpolitik angegangen werden könnten. Alle diese Politikbereiche zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass Entscheidungen anstehen, die zwar „von allen“ (mittelbar) getroffen werden, deren Kosten und Folgekosten aber mehr oder weniger scharf abgegrenzte Bevölkerungskategorien treffen. Hier handelt es sich offenbar um Beispielsfälle für die oben unter III a), III c) und III d) diskutierten Probleme. Deshalb liegt es hier nahe, die Verfahrensentscheidung (einschließlich einer Entscheidung über Kriterien für „Betroffenheit“) selbst zu demokratisieren statt schematisch und doktrinär auf den demokratischen Gehalt des Mehrheitsprinzips zu setzen. Es wäre keineswegs ausgemacht (und sogar höchst überraschend), dass sich die Mehrheit immer dafür entschiede, dass immer die Mehrheit entscheiden soll. Plausibel und selbst bei starken Interessenvorbehalten vorstellbar wäre vielmehr, dass je nach der spezifischen Nutzen- und Kostenverteilung, die ein spezifisches Entscheidungsthema impliziert, von dieser schematischen Regel mehrheitlich mehr oder weniger weit abgewichen würde – etwa durch Festlegung von Moratorien, Negativkatalogen, Quoren, Abstimmungswiederholungen, themenbezogene Umdefinitionen von Wahlkreisen, Entscheidungsdelegation an bestimmte Gremien, Neudefinition der Wahlberechtigung nach Personenkategorien, usw. Durch die kontinuierliche, jedenfalls nicht unmäßig erschwerte Vorschaltung solcher Verfahrensentscheidungen vor die Sach- und Personalentscheidungen selbst würde zwar ein Teil des höchst ambivalenten „Vorteils“ des Mehrheitsprinzips verlorengehen, der in der Geschwindigkeit der mit ihm produzierbaren Entscheidungen besteht; dieser Verlust würde jedoch durch die Förderung der öffentlichen Einsicht in die Tatsache mehr als aufgewogen, dass das Mehrheitsprinzip keineswegs „von selbst“ Gerechtigkeit und Richtigkeit politischer Entscheidungen verbürgt, sondern allenfalls dann, wenn die Frage, ob dies in konkreten Entscheidungslagen unterstellt werden darf, zuvor selbst der mehrheitlichen Prüfung durch die Bürger unterzogen worden ist.

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Kielmansegg, P. Graf, Volkssouveränität. Eine Untersuchung der Bedingungen demokratischer Legitimität, Stuttgart: Klett, 1977. Kirchheimer, O., „Wandlungen der politischen Opposition“, in: ders.: Politik und Verfassung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1964, 123 ff. Kitschelt, H., Kernenergiepolitik. Arena eines gesellschaftlichen Konflikts, Frankfurt: Campus, 1980. Krauch, H., Computer-Demokratie, Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag, 1972. Kriele, M., Einführung in die Staatslehre, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1975. Krippendorff, E., „Legitimität als Problem der Politikwissenschaft“, Zeitschrift für Politik 9 (1962), 1 – ​11. Lehmbruch, G., Parteienwettbewerb im Bundesstaat, Stuttgart etc.: Kohlhammer, 1976. Locke, J., Two Treatises on Government (1690). Luhmann, N., Legitimation durch Verfahren, Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969. Mez, L., Wolter, U. (Hrsg.), Die Qual der Wahl, Berlin: Olle und Wolter, 1980. Nadel, M. V., „The Hidden Dimension of Public Policy; Private Governments and the Policy-making Process“, The Journal of Politics 37 (1975), 2 – ​34. Naujoks, R., Art. Mehrheit, Mehrheitsprinzip, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 5, Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1980. Nairn, T., Nationalismus und Marxismus: Anstoß zu einer notwendigen Debatte, Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1978. Novy, K., Strategien der Sozialisierung, Frankfurt: Campus, 1978. Offe, C., „Die Logik des kleineren Übels“, in: Die Zeit Nr. 46 v. 9. Nov. 1979. Offe, C., „Konkurrenzpartei und kollektive politische Identität“, in: Roth, R., (Hrsg.), Parlamentarisches Ritual und politische Alternativen, Frankfurt: Campus 1980, 26 – ​42. Offe, C., „Überlegungen und Hypothesen zum Problem politischer Legitimation, in: Ebbighausen, R. (Hrsg.), Bürgerlicher Staat und politische Legitimation, Frankfurt: Edition Suhrkamp, 1976, 80 – ​105. Pateman, C., Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge, 1970. Rae, D. W., Daudt, H., „The Ostrogorski Paradox: A Peculiarity of Compound Majority Decision“, European Journal of Political Research 4 (1976), 391 – ​398. Riker, W. H., „Implications of the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions“, The American Political Science Review 74 (1980), 432 – ​458. Riker, W. H., A Reply to Ordeshook and Rae, ibid. 456 – ​458. Rokkan, S., ‚Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism‘, pp. 70 – ​117 in Dahl, R. A. (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Rucht, D., Planung und Partizipation, München: Tuduv, 1982. Rustin, M., „Different Conceptions of Party: Labour’s Constitutional Debates“, New Left Review Nr. 126, March/April 1981, 17 – ​42. Scheuner, U., Das Mehrheitsprinzip in der Demokratie, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1973. Schmitter, P. C., Lehmbruch, G. (eds.), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation, Bever­ly Hills, London: Sage, 1979.

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Schumpeter, J., Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie (1942), 3. Auflage, München: 1972. Therborn, G., „The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy“, New Left Review No. 103 (May-June 1977), 3 – ​41. Thränhardt, D., „Das Eigeninteresse der Deutschen am Wahlrecht für Ausländer“, Ms. Münster, 1981. Thurow, L., The Zero Sum Society, New York: Basic Books, 1980. Tocqueville, A. de, De la Démocratie en Amérique, Paris: 1836. Tullock, G., „Problems of Majority Voting“, Journal of Political Economy 67 (1959), 571 – ​ 579. Usher, D., The Economic Prerequisite to Democracy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981 (dt. Campus 1983). Varain, H. J., „Die Bedeutung des Mehrheitsprinzips im Rahmen unserer politischen Ordnung“, Zeitschrift für Politik 11 (1964), 239 – ​250. Wagenbach, K., „Anfrage eines Freibeuters angesichts der Bundestagswahl“, Freibeuter H. 4, 1980, 170 – ​173. Walser, M., „Händedruck mit Gespenstern“, in: J. Habermas (Hrsg.), Stichworte zur „Geistigen Situation der Zeit“, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1979 Bd. 1, 39 – ​50.

Teil III Defekte

9

Bewährungsproben. Über einige Beweislasten bei der Verteidigung der liberalen Demokratie (1995)

Eine melancholische Diagnose, die im vergangenen halben Jahrzehnt geradezu als Gemeinplatz in der publizistischen und politikwissenschaftlichen Literatur herumgeistert, mündet in die Feststellung, dass die liberale Demokratie des Westens heute an ihrem welthistorischen Sieg laboriert. Gesiegt hat die Regierungsform des demokratischen Verfassungsstaates mit stark sanktionierten Grund- und Menschenrechten, mit Gewaltenteilung und Parteienkonkurrenz, mit egalitären Teilnahmerechten und repräsentativen gesetzgebenden Körperschaften schon deswegen, weil die einzige Alternative zu diesem Regimetyp, die jemals als dauerhaftes politisches Regime für moderne Gesellschaften im Rahmen einer internationalen Friedensordnung vorgeschlagen und praktiziert worden ist – nämlich das Regime des Staatssozialismus – ohne äußeres Zutun in den Jahren 1989 – ​91 von der Bildfläche verschwunden ist. Ob indes dieser Sieg der Stabilität und Entwicklungsfähigkeit des demokratischen Regimetyps zugutekommen wird – das ist eine Frage, die oftmals (und trotz der manifesten Vorbildwirkung, welche die westliche Demokratie auch auf eine Reihe von vormals nicht-kommunistischen autoritären Regimes Südasiens und Lateinamerikas ausgestrahlt hat) mit Antworten bedacht wird, die sich durch das Gegenteil von Euphorie und Selbstgewissheit auszeichnen. Es ist nicht leicht, sich auf das Zusammentreffen von („objektivem“) Triumph und („subjektiver“) Malaise der westlichen Demokratie einen Reim zu machen. Könnte es sein, dass die Vitalität der Demokratie sowie die Unterstützung, die sie als Organisationsform des politischen Gemeinwesens bei der Masse der Bürger findet, ganz entscheidend von der Evidenz abhängen, mit der sie ihre moralische, ökonomische und ggf. auch militärische Überlegenheit über einen nicht-demokratischen Gegner ausspielen kann ? Dann wäre der Demokratie 1989 nicht nur ein Gegner, sondern hintergründig auch ein moralisch-politischer Kreditgeber abhandengekommen. Könnte es sein, dass die Stabilität demokratischer Systeme (samt ihrer ja legislativ nicht einfach zu dekretierenden politisch-moralischen und © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_9

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236 Bewährungsproben

kulturellen Grundlagen in den gelebten Normen und Erwartungen der Bürger) nicht nur ein hohes Maß der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung zur historischen Entstehungsvoraussetzung hat (Lipset 1994), sondern auch (jedenfalls auf dem europäischen Kontinent) ein hohes Maß an wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischer Leistungs- und Integrationsfähigkeit regierender Eliten zur Bestandsvoraussetzung ? Dann wären die Symptome der Rat-, Hilf- und Erfolglosigkeit, mit denen Eliten in vielen demokratischen oder neuerdings sich demokratisierenden Ländern akuten Krisenphänomenen des Arbeitsmarkts, der sozialen Sicherung und der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit gegenüberstehen, legitimer Anlass für einen (auch an den politischen Resultaten der Weltwirtschaftskrise der frühen 30er Jahre geschärften) besorgten Blick auf die Zukunft der Demokratie. Oder könnte es sein, dass (wie Guéhenno 1994 in seinem symptomatisch erfolgreichen Essay behauptet) die Demokratie nur in nationalstaatlicher Einhegung gedeihen kann und in dem Maße ebenso gegenstands- wie sinnlos wird, in dem nationalstaatliche Grenzen in vereinbarter Weise durchlässig gemacht werden (wie im EU-Europa) oder im Zuge der ökonomischen und kulturellen Globalisierung zunehmend porös sind ? Oder trifft es zu, dass es demokratisch gewählten und dem Wählerpublikum verantwortlichen politischen Eliten aus (ggf. aufzuhellenden) Gründen immer schwerer fällt, überzeugende Argumente dafür anzuführen, dass ausgerechnet die demokratischen Verfahrensmerkmale der Öffentlichkeit, der Parteienkonkurrenz, der Gewaltenteilung, der allgemeinen Wahlen, des Mehrheitsprinzips und der repräsentativen Gesetzgebung in irgendeinem Sinne für die überlegene Zweckmäßigkeit, Rationalität, Weitsicht oder Gemeinwohlorientierung kollektiv bindender Entscheidungen sollten jene Gewähr bieten können, welche die demokratische Herrschaftsform ihren (autoritär-bürokratischen, technokratischen, korporatistischen) Alternativen gegenüber als ihre auszeichnende Differenz reklamieren muss: werden wir „besser“ regiert, nur weil und nur wenn wir demokratisch regiert werden ? Schließlich: Könnte es sein, dass die kulturellen und sozialstrukturellen Prozesse, die unter Stichworten wie Individualisierung, Pluralisierung, Postmodernismus, De-Standardisierung und Multikulturalismus vielfältig beschrie­ben worden sind, zu einem Maß an interner Diversifikation und Desaggregation demokratisch verfasster Gesellschaften und ihrer assoziativen Strukturen geführt haben, das nicht nur keinen materialen Konsens, sondern nicht einmal mehr einen „Konsens zweiter Ordnung“ (d. h. einen Konsens über vernünftige Verfahren im Umgang mit Dissens) mehr übriglässt ? Die Demokratie ohne commitment der Bürger und ohne Selbstbewusstsein der Eliten, die Demokratie ohne nicht-demokratisches Gegenüber und ohne nationalstaatliche Grenzen – das sind zumindest einige der Aspekte, auf die sich der Eindruck einer „Entzauberung“ der Demokratie, ja der verbreiteten Ungewissheit über ihre Geltungsgrundlagen und Leistungsfähigkeit gerade im historischen Au-

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genblick ihrer weltweiten Expansion und des definitiven Niedergangs ihres staatssozialistischen Gegenmodells stützt. Diese Kontexte real existierender liberaler Demokratien sind offenbar geeignet, das normative Selbstbewusstsein der Demokraten und ihrer politischen Theorie zu ruinieren, zumindest in Ratlosigkeit zu verwandeln. Der demokratische Verfassungsstaat ist ja, dem Selbstbewusstsein seiner theoretischen und politischen Stifter zufolge, durch vier Vorzüge gegenüber allen alternativen Regimetypen ausgezeichnet: Er befestigt die individuelle und kollektive Freiheitssphäre der Bürger gegen die Übergriffe der Staatsgewalt. Er begründet eine zivile Friedensordnung im Inneren, insofern bindende Verfahren zur Konfliktregelung und Mittel zur Sanktionierung von Konfliktergebnissen zur Verfügung stehen. Er ist notwendiges Element einer internationalen Friedensordnung, insofern – der berühmten Kant’schen Hypothese zufolge – Demokratien gegen andere Demokratien schon aus innenpolitischen Rücksichten regierender Eliten keine Angriffskriege führen. Schließlich ist eine demokratisch verfasste und entsprechend „responsive“ Staatsgewalt ein – alternativloses – Mittel zur lernbereiten Einwirkung der Gesellschaft auf sich selbst und die Regulierung von Verteilungsverhältnissen und Lebenschancen nach Kriterien sozialer und politischer Gerechtigkeit. Es spricht wenig dafür, dass die Gewissheit dieser Vorzüge heute Gemeingut von Eliten oder Massen wäre. Die westliche Demokratie hat nicht nur keine ideologisch und organisatorisch formierten Gegner (auf Dauer wohl nicht einmal in Gestalt fundamentalistischtheokratischer Regimes) – sie hat sogar als kopierwürdig geltendes Erfolgsmodell eine weltweite Konjunktur. So richten sich die Besorgnisse auch nicht auf eine Gefahr der „Abschaffung“ der Demokratie durch ihre Gegner, sondern eher auf die der „Aushöhlung“ durch anonyme soziale Prozesse und strukturelle Verschiebungen, die der Idee der Demokratie und ihrer verpflichtenden Kraft (für Bürger wie Eliten) Abbruch tun. Diese Aushöhlung könnte, wenn sie nicht aufgehalten wird, normative Schwundstufen von Demokratie (vgl. O’Donnell 1994), ja bloße Demokratie-Fassaden übriglassen, von denen sich nicht leicht angeben lässt, wer oder was im verfassungspolitischen Konfliktfall sie eigentlich noch stützen sollte. Ich möchte in diesem Beitrag nach dem einfachen Denkmodell der doppelten Negation verfahren und der Frage nachgehen, welche Voraussetzungen eigentlich erfüllt sein (und von relevanten Teilen der Bevölkerung auch als erfüllt betrachtet werden) müssen, wenn jene schleichende innere Erosion des democratic creed aufgehalten und in ihren zerstörerischen Wirkungen neutralisiert werden soll. Welche Beweislasten müssen Demokratien überzeugend auf sich nehmen können, um Versuche, sie zu diskreditieren, unglaubwürdig zu machen ? Die Demokratie „fortzuschreiben“, so die hier verfolgte Perspektive, hieße nichts anderes als Desiderate zu beschreiben, durch deren Erfüllung ihre offenbar endogenen Erosionserscheinungen neutralisiert und ihre schleichende De-Konsolidierung aufgehalten wer-

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den könnten. Diese Perspektive unterscheidet sich von der in den 70er Jahren populären, in der nach Möglichkeiten der Ausweitung, ja Radikalisierung demokratischer Ideen und Praktiken gefragt wurde; statt um das Bewirken von „Fortschritt“ geht es hier, durchaus defensiv, darum, durch welche Vorkehrungen und institutionellen Innovationen sich Rückschritte aufhalten und kontrollieren lassen. Das soll in 10 Punkten und auf zwei Ebenen geschehen. Die ersten fünf Punkte betreffen Desiderate, die sich auf Handlungsweisen, Kompetenzen und Orientierungen der politischen Eliten beziehen, und die zweite Gruppe von ebenfalls fünf Punkten auf demokratische Dispositionen des Massenpublikums der Staatsbürger. (1) „Innere Souveränität“ – Der demokratische Gemeinplatz ist, dass in einer De-

mokratie das Staatsvolk – vermittelt durch Wahlen, Abstimmungen, repräsentative Organe – die Herrschaft ausüben soll. Unterwirft man diesen Satz einer doppelten Verneinung, so ändert sich an seinem logischen Gehalt nichts, wohl aber an seinen politischen Implikationen: Innere Souveränität bedeutet dann, dass es nicht der Fall sein soll, dass andere als unter der letztinstanzlichen Kontrolle des verfassten Staatsvolkes stehende Akteure maßgeblich an der Ausübung politischer Herrschaft beteiligt sind (vgl. Schmitter und Karl 1991: 81). Unter die Kategorie solcher „anderen“ Akteure, bei denen sowohl ein Interesse wie die Fähigkeit zutage liegt, die politische Herrschaftsausübung positiv und negativ mitzukontrollieren, fallen militärische Gegeneliten (Spanien in den späten 70er Jahren), terroristische Gruppen und illegale („mafiöse“) ökonomische Organisationen (Italien, Kolumbien), militante separatistische Organisationen (Spanien, Nordirland) – aber auch markt- und regionenbeherrschende multinationale Großunternehmen mit ihrer erwiesenen Fähigkeit, mit den Mitteln der offenen Erpressung (oder auch der weniger offenen Bestechung) Entscheidungen von Exekutive und Legislative in einem von ihnen bevorzugten Sinne zu blockieren oder abzufälschen. Eine ähnliche Obstruktionskapazität können faktisch auch die leitenden Stäbe von Ordnungsund Leistungsverwaltungen mobilisieren, ebenso (v. a. auch im Verbund mit strategisch koordinierten Massenmedien) die Führungsgruppen von politischen Parteien und Verbänden. In allen der hier nur angedeuteten Varianten werden Teile der Staatsgewalt, sowohl was ihre Formierung wie was ihre Verwendung betrifft, zur Beute privater Akteure, denen bei der Ausübung der Staatsgewalt keine verfassungsmäßige Rolle zukommt. Hier ist nicht zu prüfen, unter welchen Bedingungen diese Spielarten von nicht-legitimierter Machtausübung in welchem Maße zur Geltung kommen und wie sich eine solche Obstruktion demokratisch legitimierter Herrschaftsausübung im Streitfalle nachweisen ließe – bis hin zu den diffizilen Fällen der durch gesellschaftliche Macht bedingten Entscheidungs- und Thematisierungsblockaden. Auch ist nicht evident, mit welchen neuen und zusätzlichen institutionellen Mit-

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teln (der Rechtsprechung ?, der Medienpolitik ?, der Stärkung von Elementen „direkter“ Demokratie ?) hier eventuell Abhilfe, also ein höheres Maß materieller Regierungsverantwortlichkeit zu schaffen wäre. Aber das Desiderat ist eindeutig: Die Unterstellung einer effektiven und robusten inneren Souveränität muss für die meisten Bürger für die meiste Zeit plausibel sein – einfach deshalb, weil die gegenteilige Unterstellung zur Brutstätte von Apathie, Zynismus, u. U. auch schlicht paranoischer Feindbilder und aus ihnen herrührender Gewaltbereitschaft zu werden tendiert. (2) „Äußere Souveränität“ – Schmitter und Karl erwähnen als eine weitere Be-

dingung demokratischer Konsolidierung, dass „the polity must be self-governing; it must be able to act independently of constraints imposed by some other overarching political system“ (1991: 81). Damit ist die entmutigende Wahrnehmung angesprochen, die Bürger westlicher Demokratien über die Entgrenzung ihrer demokratischen politischen Gemeinschaften machen. Nur ein Beispiel ist das Demokratie-Defizit der Europäischen Union – und das bittere Bonmot: Wenn die Europäische Union ein Staat wäre, so wäre sie wegen des mangelnden demokratischen Gehalts ihrer Verfassung nicht dazu qualifiziert, Mitglied der Europäischen Union zu werden. Die Klagen der französischen Medien über den über Frankreich verhängten Oktroi wirtschaftspolitischer Prämissen durch „le Bundesbank“ sind ein Anzeichen dafür, dass Politik ihre Legitimität verliert, wenn ihre Ergebnisse mit externen und demokratisch nicht legitimierten Akteuren in kausalen Zusammenhang gebracht werden können; es war ja der explosive Sinn von Kurt Schumachers Satz, Adenauer sei ein „Kanzler der Alliierten“, diesen Legitimitätsverlust zu bewirken. Transnationale Politik büßt, selbst wenn sie zwischen den Beteiligten verabredet und ausgehandelt ist, auch viel von ihrer Effektivität ein, weil die Koordinations- und Transaktionskosten, die aufgebracht werden müssen, um jedem der vetoberechtigten Teilnehmer sein Veto abzukaufen, in der Regel unter größtem zeitlichen Aufwand zu allenfalls kleinsten Schritten führen. Gleichwohl ist der Prozess der handels- und außenpolitischen Transnationalisierung weder vermeidbar noch hinwegzuwünschen, wenn auch in diesem Prozess die Ausbildung asymmetrischer Interdependenzen zur Regel wird. Nur gehört zu seinen Kosten eben auch, dass, zumindest temporär, jene legitimationsspendenden Mechanismen stillstehen, die eine feste nationalstaatliche Hülle zur Voraussetzung ihrer Wirksamkeit haben. Es wird deshalb schwerlich gelingen, die Demokratie „fortzuschreiben“, wenn nicht transnationale Äquivalente für nationalstaatliche Proze­ duren der Sicherung von Legitimität und Effektivität der Politik entstehen (vgl. Held 1995).

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(3) „Oligarchie“ – Was immer man unter der demokratischen Leitidee der Volks-

souveränität genau verstehen will – sie ist diskreditiert, wenn der Gedanke Nahrung findet, der empirische Volkswille, wie er sich in Wahlen und Abstimmungen bekundet, sei nicht die unabhängige Variable demokratischer Politik, sondern geradezu ein Artefakt von Elitenkartellen und Medienstrategien (vgl. Bobbio 1987, Zolo 1992). Schon der Verdacht, dass es sich so verhält, dissoziiert das Staatsvolk in der Weise, dass jeder Bürger alle anderen nicht als Träger legitimer Interessen und Präferenzen und als Subjekt autonomer Urteilsbildung, sondern – vulgärsoziologisch – als Projektionsfläche betrachtet, auf der sich nur die Folgen manipulativer Strategien von politischen Eliten und Medien widerspiegeln. Es ist nicht leicht, sich wirksame institutionelle Abhilfen gegen die korrumpierenden Auswirkungen einer solchen Wahrnehmung politischer Realitäten vorzustellen, nach der Teile der Bürger andere Teile als irregeleitete Opfer von demagogischer Fehlinformation bewerten. Es geht also um die Bedingungen dafür, dass die Staatsbürger die Ergebnisse ihrer kollektiven Willensbildung als autonom und authentisch zustande gekommene anerkennen können. Worin diese Bedingungen bestehen – diese Frage ist Gegenstand demokratietheoretischer Debatten, die gegenwärtig um Konzepte der „deliberativen“ oder „reflexiven“ Demokratie, auch der „civil society“ kreisen und sich zum guten Teil auf das von Habermas im „Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit“ (1962; vgl. ders. 1992) klassisch konzipierte normative Kriterium einer autonomen politischen Öffentlichkeit zurückverfolgen lassen (vgl. Offe 1996). Andere, eher an Tocqueville anschließende und/oder neuere kommunitaristische Ansätze aufgreifende Konzeptionen setzen auf die Stärkung eines „sozialen Kapitals“ republikanischer Tugenden (Putnam 1993). Skeptisch sind dagegen „plebiszitäre“ oder direkt-demokratische Abhilfen gegen die oligarchische Vermachtung des Willensbildungsprozesses zu beurteilen, insoweit nämlich zu vermuten ist, dass diese das Problem eher verschärfen, das sie lösen sollen (Offe 1992). (4) Eliten-Konsens – Die „Produktivität“ des demokratischen Entscheidungsver-

fahrens hängt von der Bereitschaft und Fähigkeit politischer Eliten in Parlamenten und Parteien, Regierungen, Gebietskörperschaften und Verbänden ab, ihre Konflikte zu begrenzen, nach unantastbaren Verfahrensregeln Kompromisse und Koalitionen einzugehen und bei der Bewältigung von Entscheidungs- und Steuerungsproblemen im Geiste eines leicht erschütterbaren Vertrauens zu kooperieren. Das ist nicht allein eine Frage des guten Willens und der professionellen Qualität politischer Eliten, sondern auch ihrer Fähigkeit, sich gegenüber ihrer jeweiligen internen „Basis“ die Spielräume für externe Kooperation zu verschaffen und zu erhalten – und ihrer moralischen Widerstandsfähigkeit gegen die Versuchungen des Opportunismus und der Obstruktion. Verbreitete Zweifel an der Eignung demokratischer Institutionen, Eliten mit genau diesen Fähigkeiten

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und Dispositionen hervorzubringen, stützen sich (ganz ausgeprägt übrigens in den neuen Demokratien Mittel- und Osteuropas, vgl. Ágh 1995) auf die notorisch knappe „Personaldecke“ der Parteien und die nicht nur aus der amerikanischen Demokratie-Praxis gewohnten Anleihen bei politik-fernen Eliten aus Medien und Militär, Kirchen und Geschäftswelt. Schwierigkeiten der Eliten-Rekrutierung können z. T. aus den abschreckenden Ungewissheiten erklärt werden, mit denen der ergebnisoffene demokratische Prozess dem Bedürfnis nach Sicherheit von beruflicher Position und Karriere entgegensteht; zum anderen mit der offensichtlichen Diskrepanz, die zwischen den Eigenschaften besteht, die man braucht, um zum Spitzenpolitiker (gewählt) zu werden, und denen, die man braucht, um das erworbene Amt erfolgreich und im Geiste der genannten Eliten-Tugenden auszuüben. Auch in diesem Punkte sind überzeugende Problemlösungen schwer zu definieren. Die politischen Parteien, die unter dem Problem der Eliten-Rekrutierung besonders zu leiden haben, versuchen es abwechselnd mit forcierter Volkstümlichkeit ihres Spitzenpersonals, dem Angebot beamtenähnlicher Sekurität für Mandatsträger, „offenen Listen“, innerparteilichen Plebisziten und Quoten – also mit Mitteln, die der Qualität und Stabilität politischer Eliten bestenfalls sehr bedingt zugutekommen. (5) Politische Alternativen – Demokratische politische Eliten müssen nicht nur in Prinzipien und Prozeduren übereinstimmen – sie müssen ebenso material differieren. Als Bedingung für die Wahrung des Ansehens nicht nur der Eliten selbst, sondern auch des von ihnen getragenen demokratischen Regimes lässt sich ohne weiteres formulieren: Sie müssen insgesamt, insbesondere aber als Führungspersonal politischer Parteien, in der Lage sein, den Bürgern und Wählern auf derselben institutionellen Ebene zu übereinstimmenden Problemdefinitionen alternative sachliche Programmatiken zu offerieren, deren Eignung zur Lösung der Probleme zudem ein Minimum von Plausibilität aufweist. Jede einzelne der in dieser Formel steckenden Bedingungen muss heute als prekär betrachtet werden. Am folgenreichsten sind Abweichungen von dieser wohl nicht übertrieben anspruchsvollen Soll-Vorstellung dort, wo konkurrierende Parteieliten in ihrer programmbildenden Funktion versagen und statt sachlicher Ziele des Regierungshandelns personelle Alternativen in den Vordergrund rücken. Dies insbesondere dann, wenn die Natur der Probleme (und der Ressourcen des Regierungshandelns) die Formulierung sachlicher Alternativen erschwert. Vordringliche Politik­themen wie die Beschäftigungslage, die Sicherung der sozialen Sicherung, die Krise der öffentlichen Haushalte oder transnationale Fragen der militärischen Sicherheit bzw. der Friedenssicherung werden dann im Geiste entweder eines überparteilichen Einverständnisses abgehandelt – oder im Geiste einer überparteilich geteilten Ratlosigkeit (samt der daraus folgenden Neigung zum Verschweigen, Vertagen

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und Verharmlosen von Problemen). In beiden Fällen fällt es schwer, im Publikum die legitimierende Vermutung wachzuhalten, dass die Konkurrenzdemokratie dem Bürger bedeutsame Wahlmöglichkeiten zwischen politischen Alternativen zur Verfügung stellt und sich als politische Ordnung durch ihre spezifische Dynamik von Innovation und Lernfähigkeit empfiehlt. Die TINA-Logik der britischen Premierministerin Thatcher („there is no alternative“) taugt jedenfalls nicht zum Dauerzustand einer demokratischen Ordnung; sollten sich die verfügbaren Alternativen tatsächlich auf eine einzige reduzieren, schrumpft die Demokratie auf null. Es ist eine offene Frage, ob und wie politische Akteure, die weder am Parteienprivileg teilhaben noch (wie die meisten Verbände) auf die funktionale Repräsentation einer bestimmten sozialen und ökonomischen Domäne beschränkt sind, also die Kirchen, die organisierte Wissenschaft, die Medien, die sozialen Bewegungen und plebiszitär agierende Teilöffentlichkeiten, verfassungspolitisch dazu instandgesetzt werden können, kritisch und konstruktiv in politische Willensbildungsprozesse einzutreten und ihrer Armut an Alternativen abzuhelfen. Von „politischem Marktversagen“ können wir sprechen, wenn die am politischen Wettbewerb um Herrschaftspositionen und Entscheidungsbefugnisse beteiligten Akteure Monopole und Kartelle bilden und mit dem Ziel, die Macht unter bereits Beteiligten stabil aufzuteilen, nach außen hin exklusiv agieren. Der Sache nach regrediert dann das demokratische Prinzip des Wettbewerbs auf die bloße Rivalität von Machtinteressenten. Eine Auflösung von politischen Kartellen und ihren internen Strategien der Machterhaltung wäre nur von „unten“ zu erwarten – aus den Lernanstößen, welche die amtliche Politik aus der Partizipation der Bürger an einer zivilgesellschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit empfängt. Indes setzt dieser korrigierende Mechanismus, der über Medien, Bewegungen, nicht-konventionelle Formen der politischen Beteiligung oder Religionsgemeinschaften vermittelt ist, nicht automatisch ein. Das im Zustand von Stabilitätsinteresse und Ratlosigkeit eingefrorene Elitenkartell wird dann vom Publikum nicht mehr korrigiert, sondern nur noch beobachtet. So hat in den letzten Jahren die Rede von „der politischen Klasse“ nicht nur in der Bundesrepublik eine etwas beunruhigende Konjunktur erlebt (Borchert und Golsch 1995). In dieser Rede schlägt sich die Intuition nieder, dass die Inhaber von Mandaten und Ämtern tatsächlich nicht damit befasst sind, in der Gesellschaft präsente Interessen und Einsichten zu „artikulieren“ und ihren Konflikt zu vermitteln, sondern eben als kognitiv und normativ selbstgenügsames Machterhaltungskartell agieren. Dieser Intuition zufolge verläuft die wichtige Spaltungslinie nicht zwischen gesellschaftlichen Interessen und ihren Assoziationen, sondern, gleichsam um 90 Grad gekippt, zwischen Amtsträgern und Volk. Zwar ist die außerordentliche Schwierigkeit hier einzurechnen, die sich in pluralisierten, individualisierten, von vielfältigen Milieugrenzen zerklüfteten Sozialstrukturen dem

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Versuch entgegenstellt, umfassende politische Lager und Orientierungsgemeinschaften auszubilden und im Geräusch der Meinungsäußerungen gesprächsfähige Stimmen vernehmbar zu machen. Aber die Gefahr liegt auf der Hand (und kann durch italienische und österreichische Beispiele der jüngsten Zeit illustriert werden), dass das in dieser Weise als von seinen Repräsentanten vernachlässigt und entfremdet gedachte „Volk“ als Resonanzboden populistischer Mobilisierungen erfolgreich in Anspruch genommen wird. (6) Säkularismus – Damit sind wir bei der Masse der Bürger und ihrer Rolle in

der Demokratie. Worin bestehen die Minimalanforderungen, die realistischerweise an jeden einzelnen Angehörigen einer demokratischen „Bürgergesellschaft“ („civil society“) gestellt werden können ? Statt diese Frage im Sinne ambitionierter Pflichten- und Tugendkataloge eines „civic republicanism“ anzugehen und hohe Grade von Partizipation, Informiertheit und Gemeinwohlorientierung einzufordern, genügt es hier vielleicht, an ein negatives Desiderat zu erinnern: Ein demokratischer Bürger darf nicht unter der Prämisse handeln, dass er oder sie „bessere“ Rechte hätten als irgendjemand unter allen anderen Angehörigen der politischen Gemeinschaft. Die Bürgergesellschaft trägt die Privilegien ab, die in früheren Formationen vom Adel und der Monarchie, von den Glaubensgemeinschaften, auch den vermeintlich von der Geschichte privilegierten Sachwaltern des gesellschaftlichen Fortschritts sowie von denen reklamiert wurden, die einen ethnisch-kulturellen Vorzugsstatus reklamierten. Sie richtet an ihre Angehörigen die anstrengende Zumutung, auch radikale Formen der Säkularisierung auszuhalten: Demokratien sind, so betrachtet, das polare Gegenteil von Theokratien, in denen die öffentliche Gewalt im Namen von Heilsgewissheiten, als Exekution göttlichen Willens und im Rahmen einer religiös fundierten Statusordnung von Privilegien und Zugehörigkeiten ausgeübt wird. Dagegen beschränkt sich demokratische Politik unter der Prämisse von Rechts- und Beteiligungsgleichheit der Bürger auf weltliche Angelegenheiten; alles andere ist „Privatsache“. Umgekehrt: Wie auch immer sich jemand in diesen Privatsachen orientieren mag – seinen Bürgerstatus beeinträchtigt das nicht. Eine scharfe Grenze, die zwischen „diesseitigen“ und „jenseitigen“ Anliegen gezogen wird, ist Voraussetzung dafür, dass eine Grenze zwischen Bürger und Bürger nicht gezogen zu werden braucht. So bedingen sich Säkularismus und Universalismus wechselseitig, und „farbenblind“ kann nur eine in „letzten Dingen“ jeglicher Art agnostisch agierende politische Gemeinschaft sein, die kategorial darauf verzichtet, für politische Überzeugungen und Willensakte Wahrheitswerte zu reklamieren. Das Bedürfnis, die erste dieser beiden Grenzen mit Hilfe religiöser, ethnischer oder kultureller Kriterien aufzuweichen, um die zweite dann um so schärfer ziehen zu können, ist weder archaisch noch gar auf den islamischen Kulturkreis be-

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schränkt – auch nicht auf den protestantischen Fundamentalismus in den USA. Vielmehr ist es in Raum und Zeit gegenwärtig und findet an akuten ökonomischen Notlagen und Unsicherheiten seine Nahrung. Auf der anderen Seite kann man eine universalistische politische Kultur, die robust widerständig wäre gegen die Versuchungen einer „ethnischen“ Aufladung von Politik und politischer Zugehörigkeit, weder mit pädagogischen noch mit legislativen, mit polizeilichen so wenig wie mit philosophischen Mitteln in Geltung setzen. Soviel jedenfalls besagt das „Böckenförde-Paradox“: „Der freiheitliche, säkularisierte Staat lebt von Voraussetzungen, die er selbst nicht garantieren kann.“ (Böckenförde 1976: 60). Wie zuverlässig diese säkularistische kulturelle Voraussetzung der Demokratie ist (die man nicht kreieren, sondern deren Bestand man nur pfleglich behandeln kann) – darüber bietet die bisherige Erfahrung mit der aus der Nachkriegszeit in die Einheit entlassenen Bundesrepublik ein zwiespältiges Anschauungsmaterial. Ein noch so mehrheitlicher „Volkswille“, der darauf versessen ist, den Demos in ethnisch vorzugswürdige und rechtens weniger anspruchsberechtigte Teile des Volkes auseinanderzudividieren, ist jedenfalls das Zerrbild seiner selbst. (7) Sozialökonomische Melioration – Eine weitere Voraussetzung demokratischer

politischer Verkehrsformen auf Massenebene ist die durch Erfahrung bestätigte und gestützte Erwartung, dass die staatliche Politik gegenüber dem ökonomischen Prozess zwar (qua Marktwirtschaft und Privateigentum) „eigentumslos“, aber dennoch nicht machtlos ist. Die Gestaltung und Gewährleistung materieller Lebensverhältnisse und -chance, die geltende Auffassungen von Gerechtigkeit jedenfalls nicht frontal und dauerhaft verletzen, ist sogar der eigentliche (Streit-) Gegenstand demokratischer Politik. Demokratien können nur dann stabil sein, wenn sie glaubhafte Aussichten auf die gerechte Bestimmung von Lebenschancen bieten. Dadurch, dass sie diese ihre Fähigkeit zur „gerechten“ Modifikation von materiellen Lebenschancen laufend unter Beweis stellt, leistet die staatliche Politik einen Beitrag zur Zivilisierung des Verteilungskampfes und der Akquisitionsinstinkte der Bürger. So sehr sich auch die Politik aus dem marktwirtschaftlichen Geschehen heraushalten muss – sie erzeugt durch ihr Handeln (und zurechenbares Unterlassen) Verteilungseffekte, die sie unter Kriterien sozialer Gerechtigkeit zu verantworten hat. So erklärt sich die immer wieder festgestellte positive Korrelation zwischen der Prosperität industrieller Marktgesellschaften und liberal-demokratische Regimes (Lipset 1993: 156 m. w. N.; Lipset 1994). Einerseits wird durch die institutionelle Anerkennung des Eigentums als einer „privaten“ Angelegenheit der Streitwert des politischen Konflikts auf ein zivilisierbares Niveau abgesenkt; deshalb können ja Staatswirtschaften keine sein, die sich an demokratische Prozeduren halten. Andererseits generiert die hohe Produktivität einer auf

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Privateigentum und Marktpreisbildung beruhenden Wirtschaftsordnung Wachstumsdividenden, über die nach Maßgabe von Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen politisch, d. h. durch steuerliche Abschöpfung, vielfältige Regulierung und sozialpolitische Garantien disponiert werden kann. Was verteilt wird, sind Zuwächse eines Positiv-Summenspiels, nicht Vermögenstitel. Und die Unantastbarkeit der Vermögenstitel wiederum sorgt dafür, dass das Spiel eine positive Summe abwirft. Das alles jedenfalls galt für nationalstaatlich eingekapselte Ökonomien mit weitreichender Zins- und Haushaltssouveränität der verfassten staatlichen Auto­ rität. In dieser Konstellation hatte es die Staatsgewalt vergleichsweise leicht, die Bürger davon zu überzeugen, dass sich die Teilnahme am „democratic class struggle“ (Lipset) auch unter dem Gesichtspunkt individueller Erwerbsinteressen „lohnt“. Diese Zuversicht droht abhanden zu kommen, wenn Wachstum, Beschäftigung und soziale Sicherheit nicht mehr in der glaubhaften und einklagba­ ren Verantwortlichkeit von Regierungen liegen, sondern sich als praktisch weithin unbeeinflussbare Resultate des Wirkens globaler ökonomischer Naturgewalten darstellen. Eine der wichtigsten Beweislasten, die der demokratischen Politik aufgebürdet sind, ist deshalb ihre Fähigkeit, mit wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischen Mitteln eine als gerecht beschreibbare Ordnung von materiellen Lebenschancen auch noch unter Bedingungen der Globalisierung und dem Imperativ der „Wettbewerbsfähigkeit“ aufrecht zu erhalten. Wenn die Politik an dieser Front die Waffen streckt und Gerechtigkeitsansprüche aufkündigt, dann entfallen die interessenrationalen Gründe dafür, demokratische Prozeduren als verbindlich anzuerkennen. Wir werden in der unmittelbaren Zukunft sehen, ob und wieweit der Prozess der europäischen Einheitsbildung in der Lage sein wird, einen entscheidenden Teil der auf anonyme Weltmarktvorgänge vs. verlagerten wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischen „governing capacity“ zurückzugewinnen. (8) Selbstanerkennung – Der moderne Staat wird als ein Gebilde beschrieben,

das drei Dinge zur Deckung bringt: Staatsvolk, Staatsgebiet und Staatsgewalt. Eine Achillesferse der Demokratie besteht darin, dass keines dieser begriffsnotwendigen Elemente des Staates auf demokratischem Wege seine Bestimmung finden kann. Will sagen: Das Volk kann nicht (jedenfalls nicht pauschal, sondern nur mit den Mitteln des Einwanderungsrechts) darüber entscheiden, wer zum Volk gehört (denn bevor das Volk entscheiden kann, muss der Kreis der Entscheidungsund Teilnahmeberechtigten schon feststehen). Das Volk kann ferner nicht darüber entscheiden, wo die Grenzen des Staatsgebietes verlaufen. Und am wenigsten kann eine demokratische Staatsgewalt auf demokratischem Wege ins Leben treten; vielmehr ist sie, wo sie besteht, in aller Regel durch die pouvoir constituant von „runden Tischen“, Staatsstreichen, Besatzungsregimes und Revolten begründet worden. Demokratien sind deshalb auf eine Art von Selbstanerkennung der

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gegebenen Lage und ihrer historischen Voraussetzungen angewiesen; diese Selbstanerkennung verbietet es (ohne dass es indes irgendjemand wirksam verbieten kann ! ), Fragen nach Grenzen, Bevölkerung und Regimetyp erneut aufzuwerfen. Für die effektive Abdunkelung dieser Großthemen sind internationale Organisationen und völkerrechtliche Verträge eine hilfreiche und unersetzliche, aber nicht die einzige Voraussetzung. Sie sanktionieren Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, die Unverletzlichkeit der Grenzen und die Einhaltung demokratischer Prozeduren mit den Mitteln des „Konditionalismus“, also der bedingten Zuweisung bzw. Vorenthaltung ökonomischer und militärischer Ressourcen. Zu diesen Außenstützen des verfassungs- und territorialpolitischen Status quo hinzukommen muss allerdings wohl eine effektive Selbstbindung im Inneren – eine „verfassungspatriotische“ Verpflichtung der Bürger auf das politische Gemeinwesen, wie es nun einmal (geworden) ist. Die Stabilität von Demokratien hängt demnach davon ab, dass im demokratischen Prozess keine Anlässe zur Aufkündigung dieser Selbstverpflichtung aufkommen. (9) „Vertikales“ Vertrauen – Demokratische Regierungen benötigen „Kredit“, d. h.

das Vertrauen der Regierten, dass sie in der Lage sind, wirksam zu handeln und kollektiv geltende Entscheidungen tatsächlich zu implementieren. Regierungen müssen evident in der Lage sein, Staatsfunktionen zu erfüllen, vorab Leben, Eigentum und Freiheit der Bürger zu schützen. Diese Evidenz kann sich in dreierlei Hinsicht eintrüben. Zum einen können Regierungen in einem Umfeld handeln, das als so komplex, turbulent und unkalkulierbar wahrgenommen wird, dass das Regierungshandeln kaum noch nach dem Rationalmodell des Bewirkens beabsichtigter Wirkungen zu beschreiben und nachzuvollziehen ist. Zum anderen können Exekutive und Verwaltungen aus der Sicht ihres Publikums als Handlungssysteme wahrgenommen werden, die an einem Übermaß innerer Komplexität laborieren und sich durch eine Hypertrophie von Koordinations- und Ressourcenproblemen selbst blockieren; Klagen über den Zeit- und Ressourcenverbrauch von Verwaltungen und die „Normenflut“, mit der sie die Bedürfnisse des Publikums überschwemmen, sind Indikatoren für prekär gewordenes „vertikales“ Ver­trauen. Zweifel an der Regierungsfähigkeit der Regierenden können schließlich am persönlich zuzurechnenden Handeln festgemacht sein: Politische Eliten werden als hochgradig korruptionsanfällige Akteure unter Pauschal- und Dauerverdacht gestellt, die den charakteristischen Wechselfällen des demokratischen Prozesses, d. h. eventuellen Amts- bzw. Mandatsverlusten, durch illegitime Machterhaltungsstrategien, zu denen auch autoritäre Übergriffe gehören, zuvorzukommen oder sie durch persönliche Bereicherung zu kompensieren bestrebt sind. Dem aus einem oder allen diesen Gründen herrührenden Verschleiß der Kreditwürdig- bzw. -fähig­keit politischer Eliten könnte offensichtlich nur mit den Mitteln einer stren-

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gen Selbst-Evaluation, Selbst-Reform und Selbstkontrolle durch die Eliten selbst begegnet werden, wobei die Parteienkonkurrenz allein – wegen des „überparteilichen“ Charakters der erwähnten Störfaktoren der Vertrauensbildung – wenig ausrichten dürfte. (10) „Horizontales“ Vertrauen – Als eine letzte Stabilitätsbedingung der Demo-

kratie möchte ich das Postulat anführen, dass alle Bürger allen anderen Angehörigen des politischen Gemeinwesens nicht nur gleiche Rechte zuerkennen, sondern darüber hinaus ein Minimum an Argumentations-, Verhandlungs- und Verständigungsfähigkeit zugutehalten müssen. Das Bild der Bürger voneinander darf weder durch den vormodernen Code von Rechtgläubigen vs. Abtrünnigen geprägt sein (s. o.), noch vom postmodernen Code einer grenzenlosen Pluralität einander fremder Stämme und Subkulturen. Das einende Band einer hochkomplexen Bürgergesellschaft besteht in der Aufmerksamkeit („attention“) und An­ teilnahme („empathy“, vgl. Dahl 1992), auf die Bürger wechselseitig rechnen. Die Zuversicht, dass „die anderen“ nicht von völlig unzugänglichen, je individuellen Motiven getrieben, sondern der zivilisierten Bildung von Konsens oder Kompromiss zugänglich sind, ist auch die Voraussetzung dafür, dass assoziatives Handeln in Vereinen, Verbänden und Religionsgemeinschaften zustande kommt und dass sich die Binnenstrukturen solcher Assoziationen von denen positiv unterscheiden, die wir aus gebührenfinanzierten Dienstleistungsorganisationen vom Typus der Automobilclubs kennen. Wovon hängt die Stärke solcher assoziativer Strukturen ab – und damit auch ihre Fähigkeit, ihre Mitglieder zur internen und externen Solidarität zu verpflichten ? Negativ sicher vom Grad sozialer Differenzierung, Individualisierung und Fremdheit. Positiv dagegen, so ist belegt, von lokalen und re­ gionalen Traditionen, dem „sozialen Kapital“ bürgerlicher Gesittung und vertrauensgestützter Kooperationsbereitschaft und Solidarität (vgl. Putnam 1993). Zum anderen aber, so ist zumindest zu vermuten, von den institutionellen und materiellen Vorkehrungen und Ermutigungen, die auch die staatliche Politik zur Entfaltung gesellschaftlicher Assoziationsverhältnisse beisteuern kann. Diese hier nur locker systematisierte und vielleicht nicht einmal vollständige Aufstellung von Beweislasten, die westliche Demokratien nach dem Untergang des gegnerischen Systems nun aus eigener Kraft für sich selbst übernehmen müssen, gestattet drei Konklusionen. Zum einen gibt es in der Bundesrepublik einen Nachholbedarf der Politischen Theorie: Viele der hier aufgeworfenen Fragen werden, wo sie überhaupt gestellt werden, auch heute noch zu oft mit selbstgewissen Erbaulichkeiten quittiert, die aus der Zeit der antitotalitären Konfrontation und als Handreichungen für den Sozialkundeunterricht entwickelt wurden, aber heute nicht einmal dafür mehr taugen dürften; diagnostische und praktisch fol-

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genreiche Beiträge zu aktuellen Demokratieproblemen basieren bis heute fast ausnahmslos auf der Grundlage von Untersuchungen, die aus angelsächsischen Kontexten stammen. Daraus ergibt sich zweitens die Notwendigkeit, im Rahmen der Politischen Theorie nicht nur juristische und philosophische Wert- und Begründungsdiskurse zu betreiben, sondern zusätzlich in empirisch-sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive die Beiträge zu bestimmen und zu evaluieren, die einzelne institutionelle Komponenten der demokratischen Verfassungswirklichkeit zur Bewältigung der genannten Beweislasten beitragen und durch institutionellen Umbau gegebenenfalls auch besser beitragen könnten. Eine komparative Funktionsanalyse demokratischer Institutionen und ihrer vorfindlichen wie vorstellbaren Varianten ist das Desiderat. Und drittens sollte hier deutlich geworden sein, dass Qualität und Stabilität der Demokratie nicht in erster Linie von ihrer offiziösen Selbstdefinition in Verfassungstexten und Gesetzesnormen, auch nicht allein von der politischen Praxis von Mandats- und Amtsträgern, sondern zusätzlich ganz entscheidend von einer Größe abhängen, über die diese beiden Instanzen jedenfalls nicht zu disponieren vermögen: von dem Bild, das die Bürger selbst sich von den Realitäten und Schwächen wie von den Möglichkeiten und Wünschbarkeiten der Demokratie machen, und von den Verpflichtungen, denen sie dann gemäß diesem Bild in ihrem Handeln folgen.

Literatur Ágh, Attila, 1995: „Die neuen politischen Eliten in Mittelosteuropa“, Leviathan, Sonderheft 15, 422 – ​436 Bobbio, Norberto, 1987, The Future of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 1976, Staat. Gesellschaft. Freiheit, Frankfurt: stw Borchert, Jens und Lutz Golsch, 1995, „Die politische Klasse in westlichen Demokratien“, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 36, Nr. 4, 609 – ​629 Dahl, Robert, 1992, „The Problem of Civic Competence“, Journal of Democracy 3, No. 4, 45 – ​60 Guéhenno, J.-M., 1994, Das Ende der Demokratie, München: Artemis Habermas, J., 1994, „Three Normative Models of Democracy“, Constellations Vol. 1, No. 1, 1 – ​10 Held, David, 1995, Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge: Polity Lipset, Seymour Martin, 1993, „A comparative analysis of the social requisites of democracy“, International Social Science Journal 45, No. 2, 155 – ​175 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 1994, „The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited“, American Sociological Review 59, 1 – ​22 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 1994, „Delegative Democracy“. Journal of Democracy Vol. 5, No. 1, 55 – ​69.

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Offe, Claus, 1992, „Wider scheinradikale Gesten. Die Verfassungspolitik auf der Suche nach dem ‚Volkswillen‘“, in: G. Hofmann, W. A. Perger (Hg.), Die Kon­troverse. Weizsäckers Parteienkritik in der Diskussion, Frankfurt: Eichborn, 126 – ​142 Offe, Claus, 1996, „Micro-Aspects of Democratic Theory: What Makes for the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens ?“ in: A. Hadenius (ed.), Democracy’s Victory and Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge UP Putnam, Robert D., 1993, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton: Princeton UP Schmalz-Bruns, Rainer, 1995, Reflexive Demokratie, Baden-Baden: Nomos Schmitter, Philippe C. and Terry Lynn Karl, 1991: „What Democracy is … and is not“, Journal of Democracy 3, 3 (Summer), 75 – ​88 Vorländer, Hans, 1995, „Der ambivalente Liberalismus. Oder Was hält die liberale Demokratie zusammen ?“, Zeitschrift für Politik 42, Nr. 2: 250 – ​267 Zolo, Danilo, 1992, Democracy and Complexity, Cambridge: Polity

10

Political disaffection as an outcome of institutional practices ? Some post-Tocquevillean speculations (2006)

In this chapter I proceed as follows. Its first part provides a conceptual map by which we can locate the various symptoms of political malaise and disenchantment which beset, as it is widely perceived, political life and political developments even in established liberal democracies (and a fortiori in new ones). The second part proposes to invert the chain of causation that is widely used in empirical political science as a model of analysis. Rather than proceeding from opinions to behavior to institutional viability, I propose here, in an admittedly speculative mode, to proceed in a top-down perspective from institutional patterns to the observable ‘enactment’ of institutions and the perceived opportunities, incentives, and expectations they inculcate in citizens and finally the opinions, habits, and attitudes people exhibit and which are in turn registered and analyzed by the methods of survey research. In the third and final part of the chapter, I propose a taxonomy of the various sorts of ‘failure of citizenship’ (or deficient modes of its practice) that we encounter within established democracies of the OECD world. I conclude with a few remarks on the hypothetical impact of disaffection upon the liberal democratic regime form.

Dissatisfaction, illegitimacy, disaffection: towards a conceptual map Eighteenth-century political philosophers believed that there are three forces in the nature of human beings that shape all of social and political life: people have interests, reason, and passions. In other words, they pursue their advantage against others, are open to rational argument as well as capable of finding and giving comprehensible reasons for what they think and do, and they are emotionally or passionately attached to other people, communities, and shared values and life forms. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_10

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The (‘proper’, though in no way exclusive) institutional arenas in which these forces or capacities unfold are the market as the sphere of the rational pursuit of interests, the polity as the sphere of reasonable argument, and the community as the sphere of emotional or passionate attachment. But also, within political life itself, all three of these capacities – the pursuit of interest, the ability to form and to accept rational argument, and the emotional attachment to the political community – all have their role to play. It seems that this tripartite classification is still useful as a set of conceptual tools suitable for the analysis and understanding of present-day political realities and changes. One of today’s central concerns of both political scientists and often also those actively involved in political life is – somewhat paradoxically, it might seem – the issue of the robustness and viability of the liberal democratic regime form. Numerous books and articles that appeared in the 1990s try to make sense of the coincidence in time of two things. First, the triumph of the liberal democratic regime form that is the major global political event of the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. And second, the democratic malaise or desencanto that seems to be creeping into many contemporary political and analytical discourses. A guiding question is: How certain can we be that the accomplishments of political modernization and civilization that we have achieved are of a durable nature after the end of state socialist and other authoritarian forms of governance, rather than being susceptible to deformation and decay ? What do we make of the numerous symptoms of challenges, crises, malperformance, fragility, and perversions of nascent as well as established liberal democratic regimes and their widely perceived failure to redeem the promises of the liberal democratic regime form ? The experience of victory is followed by a sense of deep crisis and uncertainty. Such complaints and concerns often seem to follow a spiral of decay: as the promises and options of the conduct of public policies and their alternatives become unappealing, citizens get bored, frustrated, and disaffected, if not outright cynical about the dealings of the ‘political class’. And as citizens become disengaged in political institutions and their operation, there is ever less support and the potential for mobilization that political elites can rely upon. To quote just one prominent voice from the academic world: Far from being secure in its foundations and practices, democracy will have to face unprecedented challenges. Its future […] will be increasingly tumultuous, uncertain, and very eventful. […] The ability [of democracies] […] to accommodate the growing disaffection of their citizenries will determine the prospects of democracies worldwide. […] All [citizens] experience in their daily lives are what Antonio Gramsci called ‘morbid symptoms’ – a lot of grumbling, dissatisfaction, and suboptimality. (Schmitter 1995: 15 – ​22)

Political disaffection as an outcome of institutional practices ? 253

I understand that the notion of ‘disaffection’1 is widely held to be a promising concept which, if developed into a sharp analytical tool, may help us to assess empirically the extent to which concerns of this sort can in fact be substantiated. It usefully highlights the ‘affective’ dimension of political life and involvement of citizens in it. ‘Disaffection’ is clearly the antonym of ‘passion’, and operationalized as such (Montero et al. 1997b: 141). It thus is a welcome component in an effort to ‘reactivate’, as it were, on the level of sophistication of modern social science the eighteenth-century conceptual triplet of interest-reason-passion into a set of three conceptual tools which, however, are framed in negative terms. That is to say and propose: if my interests are being violated, I am left with a sense of dissatisfaction; if the reasons given for the worthiness of the political order and its actual practice of governance are not supported and confirmed by autonomous insight, we speak of illegitimacy, as experienced as a lack of good and valid reasons in support of what we actually see happening at the level of public policies and the ways they affect ‘us’; and if people dissociate themselves from a polity or political community that they experience as being strange, boring, incomprehensible, hostile, or inaccessible, we can speak of disaffection. A similar conceptual structure emerges if we link the three types of political aversion to the three hierarchical levels of political identification and support that David Easton (1965) has famously distinguished. Citizens are tied to the policy outcomes of particular governments by their (material as well as ideal) interests and how they perceive them to be affected by a particular set of policies or a party in government; in the negative case, they are frustrated or dissatisfied. They are tied to – or can be rationally convinced to maintain their loyalty towards – the political regime such as liberal democracy; failing that, we speak of a condition of delegitimation or illegitimacy. Finally, they are attached by passions (e. g. through patriotism, nationalism, sense of identity, pride, but also chauvinist and xenophobic emotions) to some political community as a whole; in the absence of such attachment, we speak of disaffection. Yet ‘political disaffection’ is still largely an under-conceptualized term. While the term does play a certain role in some diverse and highly specialized fields of the social sciences and humanities (such as urban studies, curriculum studies, organization studies, gender and race relations, as well as marriage and family therapy), it has been relatively rarely used until recently, beyond the everyday language and ad hoc semantics, in political analysis and the study of political behavior. Here, it has much less of a standing as an established concept than related concepts such as political alienation, political apathy, anomie, sense of powerless1

The term figures prominently in the title of a recent book edited by Pharr and Putnam (2000).

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ness, ‘negative social capital’, distrust, cynicism, perhaps also ‘post-modernism’, and the like. The Spanish word of desencanto or the German concept of Politikverdrossenheit seem to be more widely used in these languages than are their English equivalents, though more often in journalistic accounts of current conditions and developments than in academic ones.2 If we speak of political disaffection, I take it to mean a group of phenomena that have to do with negative attitudes and behavioral patterns of people towards the universe, their fellow citizens, political life in general, political institutions (above all parties and party elites), and the practice of citizenship (such, as a minimum, voting). As in the use of ‘disaffection’ in the above fields of social and educational science studies, disaffection in politics also refers to the primarily emotional and passionate (rather than cognitive) condition of absence of a ‘sense of belonging’, not ‘feeling-at home’ in the political community, marginalization, perceived lack of representation, institutionally mediated lack of capability to make one’s voice heard, deprivation of political resources, lack of horizontal and vertical trust, profound aversion to the political order, etc. If these preliminary semantic approximations can serve as a guideline, we can, it seems to me, usefully proceed to develop a typology of the range of phenomena we have in mind; try to assess the interaction between violations of interest, absence of compelling reasons, and negative emotions, also addressing the question of possible cumulative effects; look at trends and patterns of distribution across time, across societies, and across segments of the social structure; explore possible causal antecedents and effects of political disaffection; discuss the question on whether or not these dispositions might involve negative consequences for the robustness of liberal democratic regimes; and, if so, at which level of the social and political system these consequences can be observed and what might eventually be done about them. All that can of course not possibly be done within the limits of the present chapter.

On democratic legitimacy ‘We regard legitimacy as citizens’ positive attitudes towards democratic institutions’ (Montero et al. 1997b: 126). I wish to argue that this is an overly ‘thin’, or in2

Recently the concept of ‘disaffected groups’ has been employed by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, when he addressed the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, and Security on 11 March 2005. Outlining a UN strategy to combat terrorism, he stated as the first element of that strategy the need to ‘dissuade disaffected groups from choosing terrorism as a tactic to achieve their goals’.

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sufficiently demanding, definition of what democratic legitimacy ‘is’. It lacks, or at any rate de-emphasizes, one important antecedent and one relevant consequence of the condition of legitimacy. As to the antecedent, I wish to suggest that the sense of democratic legitimacy does not just depend upon a person’s having a positive attitude, but depends (at least in the context of any ‘modern’ society) upon the arguments and reasons given for, and accepted as effectively supporting and validating, the democratic regime form and its institutions. For instance, a person could say that ‘I hold a positive attitude towards democratic institutions because experience tells me that my interests are well served by the operation of these institutions; should this turn out to be no longer true, I will have to reconsider the case’. Or the person could say that, while liberal democracy is definitely not a desirable institutional arrangement of political life, we’ll have to stick to it for the time being as its alteration appears currently unfeasible. For this person, democracy is obviously not ‘legitimate’, but at best a contingently beneficial or useful arrangement, and at worst one that must be accepted for the sake of ‘realism’. Similarly, an attitude derived from habituation such as this would positively not do as proof of legitimacy: ‘I am in favor of democratic institutions because I am used to them and emotionally feel familiar with them’. In contrast, what would be a consistent proof of democratic legitimacy, as held as an attitude by citizens, would be a statement such as the following: I hold a positive attitude towards democratic institutions because in societies such as ours there is simply no compelling case that could be made (or that I, at any rate, would be willing to accept from autonomous insight) in support of an unequal distribution of political and civil rights; all arguments in support of, say, a privileged right of dynastic, military, authoritarian, ethnocratic, theocratic, racist, or party-monopolistic rulers to make collectively binding decisions are clear non-starters (especially after what the world has seen in the course of the twentieth century). Hence the only argument in support of political authority I, as well as my fellow citizens, are likely to accept is the argument that all those who are supposed to obey the law must have an equal right to participate in the making of the law. And all members of the political elite must be held effectively accountable for what they are doing or fail to do. Furthermore, there is no conceivable good reason permitting the political authorities to dictate or interfere with my freely chosen religious, economic, communicative, or associative preferences. In short, a liberal democracy is reliably anchored in supportive attitudes of the citizenry only if these attitudes, in their turn, are in fact informed by the kind of arguments for individual liberty and popular sovereignty I have just alluded to. I am perfectly aware of the fact that modern survey research measures attitudes and opinions, not the modalities of arriving at and holding fast to these attitudes, nor the reasons supporting opinions at the individual level. But it still seems

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worthwhile to highlight (for instance, through methods of discourse analysis) the way people arrive at (or the basis upon which they hold) attitudes, and what reasons they give in their defense. For this genetic aspect of attitudes and opinions is significant for the function of legitimacy beliefs (rather than an attitude of opportunistic or ‘realist’ acceptance). For it is invariably for the sake of the function, or consequences, of legitimacy that we are at all interested in the concept. Following Max Weber, the function of the belief in the legitimacy of a given political order consists in the beliefs capacity to motivate obedience or compliance on the part of those who hold the belief, even in cases when the decisions to be complied with are contrary to the manifest interests of those called upon to comply. The assumption here is that if my allegiance to the liberal democratic regime form is based upon reasons and autonomous insight, such insight will condition my compliance even if such compliance is contrary to my interests (or, for that matter, my emotional attachment or aversion to certain communities and life forms). In other words: only reason- and insight-based, and certainly not to the same extent interest- and passion-based, ‘positive attitudes towards democratic institutions’ will generate what legitimacy is all about, namely compliance. Thus, legitimacy is not just any positive or supportive belief, but a belief specifically rooted in certain arguments and principles and, most importantly, a belief resulting in certain behavioral outcomes, namely voluntary compliance.3

Democracy’s triumph Let me venture the generalization that reasons-based legitimacy (as opposed to situationally contingent acceptance) of the liberal democratic regime form is more firmly entrenched and more widely shared in today’s world than it has ever been in history. If this is so, it can be explained as the combined effect of two conjunctures. For one thing, non-democratic regimes which would be able to muster strong arguments in support of themselves have virtually vanished from the scene.4 Dynastic, theocratic, fascist, state socialist, or military versions of politi3

This conceptualization of legitimacy is quite commonplace in today’s political analysis. ‘Legitimacy is […] here understood as a widely shared belief that it is my moral duty to comply with requirements imposed by state authorities even if these requirements violate my own preferences or interests, and even if I could evade them at low cost. […] Democratic legitimacy is about good reasons that should persuade me to comply with policies that do not conform to my own wishes’ (Scharpf 2000: 4, 13). 4 To this, it might rightly be objected that theocratic fundamentalist revivals advocating the ‘will of God’ as rightfully governing and taking precedence over the ‘will of the people’ are the only remaining instance of a principled antidemocratic political theory.

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cal authoritarianism are clearly on the retreat, though unevenly so and with some transitions to democracy stagnating at the point of defective ‘semi-democracy’. For another, the variability of the liberal democratic regime form and the diversity of its present-day incarnations is so great that all conceivable arguments for (and interests in the improvement of) a political order can be accommodated under the broad ‘liberal democratic’ roof. In short, nobody (not even, say, Mr. Milosevic) has a presentable argument (as opposed to opposing interests and passions) why democracy (in any of the many versions it allows for) is ‘bad’ and to be feared in view of its consequences, or why any conceivable alternative regime form should be held to be preferable.5 At the very least, this rule applies to ‘old’ democracies, while the argument in new, nascent, and semi-democracies is at best (or rather at worst) that ‘our country is not yet quite ripe’, given some looming ethnic, religious, or class conflict, for the introduction of a regime form; the long-term unavoidability, however, is conspicuously rarely at issue. With the exception of much of the Islamic world, the issue is when and how, not whether, democracy, including a regime of human and civil rights, is to be adopted, and a democratic transition to be made. When, in the course of the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, the percentage of democracies jumped up from less than 30 to more than 60 per cent of all states, intellectually minimally respectable arguments against the adoption of the democratic regime have virtually vanished.6 It is not only the institutional and ideological system of state socialism (as the only ‘really existing’ alternative political order for a modern society) that has collapsed after 1989. Similarly collapsed have autocratic and military regimes. At any rate, they are in the. process of doing so under the impact of international organization, the threat of intervention, policing, and the practices of ‘conditionalism’, and the international and supranational politics of ‘promoting and protecting democracy’, as well as the current and often dubious strategies of ‘state building’ or even ‘nation building’ from the outside. Where they still exist, ‘non-democratic’ regimes are put under both internal and external pressure to liberalize. The international embeddedness of regimes has also helped in many cases to invalidate 5

Note the stark contrast to the situation after the ‘first wave’ of democratization after the First World War and during the entire inter-War period. At that time, not only large Segments of the middle class, but also numerous members of the intellectual and literary elite felt attracted by and actually significantly supported the ‘totalitarian’ ideologies of fascism and Stalinism and their political ambitions. At least in consolidated democracies, no analogue for such potential for ideological defection from liberal democracy is evident (or indeed conceivable) today. 6 This is in stark contrast to the situation of the inter-War period in Europe and elsewhere, when theorists of both the far Right and far Left could in fact make influential, as well as most consequential, anti-democratic arguments.

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the ‘pragmatic’ reasons for the reluctance to democratize which is based on the pretext that if ‘we’ would allow the transition to a liberal democracy ‘now’, the result would be not liberal democracy, but the collapse or breakup of the state tout court. With all the supranational military, political, and economic resources in place, even the ‘not yet’-objection (that has taken the place of any outright ‘no’argument) has lost much of its credibility. Moreover and second, liberal democracy is a regime form that allows for a considerable range of variation. It can be ethnos-based and demos-based, presidential and parliamentary, centralist or federal, majoritarian and proportional, direct and representative, bicameral or unicameral, with an extended or highly limited bill of rights, with or without a written constitution, with or without constitutional guarantees of social rights, with or without autonomous institutions (such as the central bank or a constitutional court), and so on. Moreover, democracy comes in degrees; it can be ‘complete’ or defective (or ‘delegative’), and its installation can proceed through a revolutionary rupture or a negotiated transition. Thus, both the components of ‘liberalism’ and of ‘democracy’ allow for a great deal of variation. Given these wide-ranging options, there are hardly any economic, cultural, ethnic, political, or social concerns which could not be suitably built into a specifically, designed case of a liberal democratic polity-to-be built, arguably with the exception of religious concerns of a theocratic sort. Also, most conceivable committed anti-democrats would be dissuaded from pursuing (and even voicing) their hopeless ambitions owing to the fact that there is a very slim chance of success in advocating any such anti-democratic political initiative, both because such an initiative would fail to get much support from others and because it would be vigorously resisted by democratically elected authorities, domestically as well as internationally. Hence the legitimacy of the democratic regime form as such simply does not seem to be the major problem, given the overwhelming weight of reasons supporting it. Virtually nobody has anything resembling a reasonable argument (i. e. having the chance of being endorsed by citizens on the basis of autonomous insight) proposing a political arrangement other than what passes for liberal democracy. This is in stark contrast to the intellectual situation of the inter-War period. Liberal democracy has become, and not just in advanced societies, ‘commonplace’ – the ‘only game in town’. This has given rise to the speculation that democratic legitimacy may be in the process of becoming a victim of its own success. The reasons why democracy is ‘better’ fade away with the evidence, provided on a daily basis, of the conditions prevailing in non-democracies. After its only ‘modern’ alternative, i. e. state socialism, having made its dramatic disappearance, democrats and political elites of democracies may be deprived of an arguably essential challenge to point out and validate, to themselves as well as to others, the reasons on which

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democratic legitimacy is based. Thus, the absence of a (nearby, seriously ‘comparable’) synchronic alternative, as well as the fading of diachronic memories and recollections, might eventually contribute to the transformation of a reason-based legitimacy, or rationally motivated support of democracy, into habituation, banalization, and unthinking routine. But it is certainly too early to pursue such gloomy speculations any further here. But perhaps we must consider high levels of support and enthusiasm and the ensuing strong involvement of citizens with the political process, such involvement being based on emotions, interests, or reasons, something that is an exceptional rather than normal condition of democratic citizenship and its practice. Could it be the case that ‘consolidated’ (i. e. well-established and no longer precarious) democracies in the course of their ‘normal politics’ are generally not good at engaging the hearts, minds, and interests of citizens ? If so, it would follow that in times of normal politics it is to be expected that citizens would mentally withdraw from political life and turn into rather apathetic actors, coolly and selectively watching political events in an emotionally distanced, somewhat bored, and indeed disaffected manner, spending most of their energies on the pursuit of their private lives. Securely established democracies are not good at evoking strong sentiments, visions, and ambitions – and that may well be for the better. As it is formal procedures with uncertain outcomes that make up the essence of democratic political life, it arguably does not provide much opportunity for citizens to get engaged, particularly as in modern democracies individual citizens seem to have less and less a role to play relative to representative collective actors that populate the scenery of political life. In that sense, widespread apathy has been conceived of as a sign of strength of democracy, not of weakness, as withdrawal and non-participation is taken to be indicators of consent and diffuse support for the regime and its modus operandi.

De Tocqueville: how democratic institutions generated democratic citizens In his two volumes on Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville takes the opposite view. He consistently and repeatedly makes the three-step argument that (i) life in democratic societies does indeed generate disaffected, depoliticized citizens, that (ii) such degeneration is by no means a harmless development, as it facilitates the rise of despotic or tyrannical deformations of democracies and the loss of liberty, which is why he is (iii) intensely interested in the identification of spontaneous rebounds, or endogenous counter-tendencies, that are capable of overcoming and neutralizing such dangerous tendencies. Let me briefly recon-

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struct the dialectical chain of these three arguments that he develops in either of the two volumes. Volume I of de Tocqueville’s work on American democracy7 is the account of a proponent of a ‘new political science’, as the author states in his introduction to volume I (lxxiii). (i) Democracy is defined by the presence of equal political rights of all citizens and the absence of an aristocratic status order, with collective decisions on laws etc. being made by majority rule. (ii) The bad news is that the power of the majority is so overwhelming that ‘no sure barrier is established against tyrannical abuses’ (307). This leads, at the elite level, to mediocrity and opportunism of people who try to please the majority, with the consequence of a ‘singular paucity of distinguished political characters’ which is to be explained by the ‘ever-increasing activity of the despotism of the majority in the United States’ (313). Similarly, at the mass level, this leads to pervasive conformism and a lack of freedom of opinion that is even worse, he claims, than that which prevailed under the Inquisition in Spain (312), with the minorities being urged to desperation (317) by the majoritarian force of opinion. But then there are also (iii) ‘good news’,8 summarily introduced as ‘causes which mitigate the tyranny of the majority’ (319). These causes include the four countervailing powers of the legal profession and its constitutional role and ‘magisterial habits’ (321), in particular the educational impact the practice of trial by jury has upon the ‘judgment’ and ‘intelligence’ of ordinary people (337); the mores which comprise ‘the whole moral and intellectual life of a people’; religious institutions and their exclusion from political control, this exclusion being the reason why religion’s ‘influence is more lasting’ (370) than it would be if it were permitted to exercise political control; and, perhaps most importantly for de Tocqueville, what he observes as a learning-on-the-job pattern of forming political culture through endogenous preference-building, rather than through ‘book-learning’ (377): ‘The American learns to know the law by participating in the act of legislation; and he takes a lesson in the forms of government, from governing’ (378). Political life itself will inspire the people, de Tocqueville believes, ‘with the feelings which it requires in order to govern well’ (391). As to volume II, originally published in 1840, we get the sociological version of the same three-step theory of how (i) ‘democracy’ causes (ii) damages that (iii) can be corrected. Here, the argument proceeds roughly as follows. (i) The ‘democratic age’, as he observes it in the United States, is defined by the equality of conditions, i. e. of legal status of all citizens (115). Equality of legal status entails the desire, on the part of each citizen competing with every other citizen, for ever greater equal7 8

Page numbers in brackets refer to the respective volume of de Tocqueville (1961). For an account of these, see Maletz (2005).

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ity of outcomes, the ‘ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible’ (117) desire for ‘living in the same manner’ (114). (ii) That concentration on competitive equalization of material gain seduces citizens to forget about their freedom (always understood in the republican sense as the opposite of tyranny). ‘If they cannot obtain equality in freedom […] they still call for equality in slavery’ (117). Why this is so follows from de Tocqueville’s subtle theory of the respective temporal structures of equality and freedom. The good that comes from equality is instantaneous and affects all, whereas the good that comes from freedom is long term and is appreciated only by some (116). As to the negative effects of each, the reverse holds true: equality is a long-term threat, resulting in a slow and imperceptible deformation, while the threat coming from, as it were, ‘too much’ freedom is perceived as short term aberration from the calm and orderly conduct of business. Given the general human propensity to discount the future, the resulting preference order is obvious: equality > freedom. Yet the equalization drive breeds individualism, egotism, the inclination to dissociate from fellow citizens, which in turn ‘saps the virtues of public life’ (118), and ‘the bond of human affection is relaxed’ (119). People become ‘indifferent and strangers to one another’ (120), and this ‘general indifference’ (120) applies also to the temporal dimension, as the ‘track of generations’ is ‘effaced’ (119). People develop ‘the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone’, so that everyone ends up being ‘entirely confined within the solitude of his own heart’ (120). The author presents a long list of character damaging socialization effects that result from living in an egalitarian and competitive society: their ‘feverish ardor’ (161) and constant ‘anxiety to make a fortune’ (167) puts the life of citizens in a mood of ‘strange unrest’, ‘strange melancholy’, and even ‘disgust of life’ (164). Above all, people are profoundly de-politicized: ‘they lose sight of the close connexion that exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all […] The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome annoyance, which diverts them from their occupation and business’ (167). Such a people will ‘ask nothing from its government but the maintenance of order’ and is by that token ‘already a slave at heart’ (168). This syndrome of negative, dissociating effects of egalitarian market society upon people’s character invites despotism. ‘A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other’ (123). But now de Tocqueville points to the way out of this disaster and offers again (iii) a set of good news by claiming a spontaneously operative and experience-based mechanism of self-correction. The citizen ‘begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow-men as he had first imagined, and, that in order to obtain their support, he must often lend them his cooperation’ (124). This spontaneous solution of the problem of collective action relies on two causal mechanisms: equality leads to interdependence, and interdependence in turn to the

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widespread practice of ‘the art of associating together’ (133). The conditions which mediate the latter causal link are several: the ‘local freedom’ (126) of small communities, the absence of the ‘governing power’ of a state that ‘stands in the way of associations’ with the consequence that individuals will be ‘losing the notion of combining together’ (131), and, most importantly, the religiously inspired (150 ff.) alleged capacity of the Americans, based upon the Christian belief in the ‘immortality of the soul’ (175), to revise constantly their narrowly conceived notion of individual short-term interest according to the ‘principle of interest rightly understood’ (145 ff.), leading them to the pursuit of an ‘enlightened’ egotism (148) and the ultimate fusion of private interest and public virtue: ‘It is held as a truth that […] [man’s] private interest is to do good’ (145).

Democracy’s crisis ? This short excursion into some of the work of, arguably,9 the greatest political theorist of the nineteenth century should provide us, I believe, with a useful model with the help of which we can shed light on the mass phenomenon of contemporary political disaffection. I take it to be the essence of de Tocqueville’s argument and mode of analysis that he puts the habits, mores, opinions, etc., in a top-down perspective, as he sees them as generated and inculcated by the practice of the political process itself and the constitutional rules by which it is governed.10 The argument that I am about to pursue follows this logic of ‘on-the-job learning’. It comes in two parts. For one, I would claim that if we look at the contemporary scholarly literature on social foundations of liberal democracy, we hardly find any analogue to the type of optimistic arguments and evidence that de Tocqueville presented at 9 See Elster (1993: 107 and 112 ff.). 10 In modern political theory, the classical source from which de Tocqueville probably adopted his analytical model is Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (and more particularly from book 11, ch. 6, ‘On the Constitution of England’), where the author undertakes a ‘proto-Tocquevillean’ analysis of the British system of government. It is still not widely understood and appreciated to which considerable extent the political sociology of Max Weber, who wrote two generations after de Tocqueville, is a continuation and elaboration of the work of the latter. What Weber is concerned with is how certain institutional settings shape and cultivate the particular kind of ‘modal personality’ (‘Menschentum’, as he puts it), the moral and political qualities of which reflect the qualities of the institutions in question. For instance, he vehemently criticized the fact that the semi-authoritarian protectionism that characterized the political system of Imperial Germany would breed a kind of ‘timid’ and ‘politically uneducated’ bourgeoisie incapable of assuming a political role of responsible participation and leadership.

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stage (iii) of his analysis. De Tocqueville had claimed that ‘the great privilege of the Americans [as the author’s model case of a democratic society, C. O.] […] consists […] in their being able to repair the faults they may commit’ (I, 268) by virtue of a continuous process of broad self-education through participatory politics. It does not seem easy to make and support a similar empirical claim today,11 be it concerning the American or any other variant of today’s liberal democracy.12 After all, if it were, we would not be speaking of political disaffection. The second part of my argument is more ambitious (and presumably more controversial), as it moves from the observation of an academic field just made to an attempt to explain phenomena in the real world. Boldly stated, and using de Tocqueville’s core idea of ‘inculcation’ or ‘habituation’ as a mechanism of what might be called soft causation, the perspective I wish to suggest is that everything we mean by disaffection is as much a ‘fallout’ of current institutional practices and experiences as were the civic-republican virtues that de Tocqueville found to be nurtured by the political process of American democracy he observed at his time. The only, though of course all-important, difference is that, in his time, de Tocque­ville could see that democracy breeds competent and experienced democrats trained in the arts of self-government and cooperation, whereas we need to understand why today’s practice of democracy breeds evidently growing numbers of consistently alienated, uninvolved, and disaffected cynics who get stuck, as it were, at level (ii) of de Tocqueville’s analysis, without ever achieving the transition that he models as level (iii). Following de Tocqueville, we can take it that political institutions (i. e. the branches and levels of government, the collective actors of territorial and functional representation, various autonomous or self-governing agencies such as central banks or social security funds, the mass media, the electoral system, the bill of rights) together make up the opportunity structure, or framework of action and orientation, of individual citizens as well as political elites. These institutional patterns define the ‘possibility space’ of citizenship and political action. They provide a learning environment which frames the citizens’ points of access to the political 11 In fact, the rich contemporary literature on ‘deliberative’ democracy attempts to remedy this deficiency (which it thereby highlights) through normative models and institutional designs. For a recent and highly suggestive example, see Ackerman and Fishkin (2004). 12 In German political theory debates, one of the symptomatically most often quoted theorems is condensed in a sentence from the constitutional lawyer Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. It reads: ‘Der freiheitliche, säkularisierte Staat lebt von Voraussetzungen, die er selbst nicht garantieren kann’. (‘The liberal secular state depends upon premises that itself cannot guarantee by its own means.’) This is the precise opposite of de Tocqueville’s account of American democracy, which, in his view, induces the learning processes on the results of which it thrives.

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process, shapes perceptions, defines incentives, allocates responsibilities, conditions the understanding of what the system is about and what the relevant alternatives are. These patterns function as a suggestive hidden curriculum of what the citizens can expect and hope for, what they can do, which of the citizens’ competencies are needed, invited, discouraged, how to ascertain credibility, and in which way individuals can play a role in the shaping of public policies. Political institutions and the observation of their actual functioning ‘make’ citizens in that they engender in them, as well as in elites, a perception of duties, opportunities, and meanings. The citizen is constituted and positioned as an agent in politics by the institutions in and through which politics takes place. We learn what ‘we’, the citizens, ‘are’ through the hidden curriculum of day-to-day politics and its formative impact. The analytical perspective proposed and employed by de Tocqueville (as well as later by Max Weber) looks upon patterns of political behavior and attitudes as constituted not so much by individual properties (such as education, income, wealth), nor by individuals’ value and ideological orientation or ‘political culture’, and neither by structural background conditions (such as indicators of political and economic stability and the respective policy outcomes), but by institutional contexts in which citizens are embedded and which endows them with a ‘possibility space’ of familiar options, meanings, political resources, and responsibilities. Needless to say, this ‘institutionalist’ top-down perspective makes sense only to the extent that we can come up with an account of what explains the variations of institutional settings across space and time. Two answers to this question have been given. One focuses upon historical background conditions (such as size of a country, position within international trade and security relations, composition of its population by class, ethnicity, settlers vs. aborigines, the experience of civil and international war, etc.) and path-dependent institutional traditions. The other focuses on the strategic action of political elites and the ways in which they either comply with the letter and spirit of the institutional rules which the regime is made up of, or whether they, to the contrary, succumb to the temptation (or alleged ‘necessity’) to exploit, bend, pervert, and relate strategically and opportunistically to the institutional rules of the regime, thereby continuously redesigning it. Here, the question is whether decisions are being made ‘under’ the institutional rules that govern them or whether they are being made ‘above’ the rules and ‘about’ their particular mode of operation. Institutions are double-faced. On the one hand, they are ‘inherited’ and often show a great deal of tenacity. On the other, they are malleable and altered in the process of their day-to-day enactment by elites (and perhaps also non-elites). Elites can interpret, alter, and revise in the interest of gaining or maintaining political control the institutional frame within which they operate. That does not

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imply that they regularly break the rules according to which they are supposed to operate, although sometimes of course they do. Yet while they remain perfectly within the bounds of the script of formal institutions, they invent styles and strategies for the conduct of office according to the problems they need to solve and the support they want to generate or maintain. The opportunities and incentives built into representative and competitive party and media politics lead them, given the kind of challenges that policy-makers must respond to in contemporary democratic politics, to choose opportunistic practices of governing which in turn cannot but generate disaffection. (The term ‘opportunistic’ does not stand for negative character features of the members of political elites, but for the dilemmas and tensions in their roles that necessitate a peculiar style of adaptive behavior.) In line with this general hypothesis, I suggest that we look at the various symptoms of the liberal democratic malaise and discontent (such as dissatisfaction, distrust, illegitimacy, apathy, voter volatility, etc.) through the prism of the impact upon political institutions that results from opportunistic elite strategies and styles of conducting their office. To the extent this hypothesis holds true, ‘disaffection’ is less of a deviant or pathological response of those who exhibit it than a perfectly rational and easily understandable response to a drama of politics in which ordinary citizens are at the same time players and spectators. What are the dilemmas and tensions of contemporary political systems to which the elite responses can be held responsible for provoking and inculcating the negative type of responses just mentioned ? I will outline three types of answers to this question. First, in a time when policy-making is constrained by market-liberal precepts leading to the fiscal starvation of the state, on the one hand, and issues of international exposure (‘globalization’), on the other, democratically competing political elites face the difficulty of making constituencies believe that it actually makes a difference whether they are in government or not. They need to convince voters that they are at all ‘in control’ and able ‘to make a difference’ in questions that are even remotely related to a distinctive notion of the common good of the political community, however that good may be conceived. Pressing problems of economic change, labor market regulation, social security, fiscal deficits, international competitiveness, demographic imbalances, inadequacies of the education and health systems, and many others are typically at any given moment of ‘normal politics’ to be dealt with simultaneously and without any overarching set of normative principles being available that could create coherence or an order of priorities among these diverse challenges. Each of the issues is embedded in a dense policy network of representative actors among whom working agreements must be negotiated and coalitions formed. As a result, the overall process of governance becomes, from the point of view of the citizen, ideologically colorless and cognitively opaque. As ‘good’ policy-making always aims at complying with

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the dual imperative of (a) ‘solving problems’ and (b) winning support, policies must be advertised in terms of the group-specific interests and advantages it offers to specific constituencies. This explains why public communication about governance is cast in an entirely functionalist mold (‘which interests are being served ?’) rather than a normative one (‘what principles of social and political justice can provide reasons for or against policy x ? ’). Yet consequentialist arguments concerning specific benefits, even provided that they can be objectively assessed, find the attention and support of ever smaller segments of a highly differentiated social structure. In contrast, encompassing collective benefits serving ‘all of us’ (economic growth is the standard example, an even better one being the prevention of climate change) are typically beyond the power of public policy makers to achieve. Adding to these dilemmas the phenomena of political corruption, or the blurring of the divide between private and public interests (in its dual form of either buying public decisions with private funds or feeding public funds into private pockets), we can appreciate why a great and apparently growing number of citizens look upon the ‘political class’ with a sense of distrust and animosity. To illustrate the distinction between normative vs. functionalist frames in which policies are cast, let me use the issue of migration in German domestic politics. Like in many other countries, the issue is who should be granted asylum, residence, social, and citizenship rights. Any proposal concerning these questions can be argued for in terms of normative principles and obligations of justice, such as the obligation to care for refugees, the claim that an ethnic connotation of citizenship must be over-come, or the egalitarian demand that all people who are permanent residents and work in the domestic labor market must also be allowed to enjoy voting and other political rights. In short, what does a reasonably just migration regime provide for ? At the same time, such proposals can also be argued for or, for that matter, criticized in functionalist terms, i. e. in categories of costs, benefits, and interests affected. The basic distinction here is that between duties and costs, the difference being that the fulfillment of duties always involves some costs, the costs resulting from duties cannot (or rather, should not) be saved or economized in the same way as they can (and rationally ought to be, wherever feasible) in economic contexts. As to the German debate on migration policy, it has been framed in terms of the distinction between two categories of migrants: people ‘whom we need’ (i. e. as bearers of scarce human capital) vs. ‘people who need us’, the latter category referring to refugees and asylum-seekers. The policy implication has been framed to be this: the more we need to recruit of the former, the fewer we can afford to admit of the latter of these two categories. This calculus of costs and interests that has largely displaced the discourse of rights and obligations, in the field of migration policy as well as other fields, is also likely to have a depoliticizing implication: the calculus of how costly or beneficial the admission of cer-

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tain categories of people will be transcends the competence of ordinary citizens and must thus be left to the decision of experts, whereas normative judgements on rights and obligations can be left to the ordinary citizen who is (by definition) capable of making and appreciating reasonable arguments. My speculation is that the underutilization of this capability is what leaves citizens disaffected. My second and (equally sweeping) generalization is this. The ‘political class’ is typically aware of the widening affective and cognitive distance that exists between the citizenry and itself, as well as of the ensuing risk of further losing support. In response, it tries to bridge the gap by populist appeals to cultural values and the emotions attached to them, such as the emotions of indignation or enthusiastic approval. One familiar pattern is politicians acting as ‘anti-politician politicians’, i. e. as ordinary people with common-sensical views and lifestyles and a heartfelt disgust for bureaucracy, taxes, and other negative features of ‘the state’ and ‘big government’. Another one is the incitement and exploitation of fears (e. g. of terrorist acts or other kinds of crime) and hopes (e. g. for new wonder drugs) for political gain. Another familiar pattern of political elites’ rhetorical self-presentation is the expression of concerns for community values, family values, religion, national identity, and patriotism. Politicians thereby frame themselves as decent and respectable personalities who are deeply concerned and committed to values that everyone shares. No doubt that may even be true, and they certainly can succeed with large parts of the audiences which these messages are intended to reach. But it is nevertheless a strategy of building a kind of counterfeit charisma by which politicians overstep the bounds of their office and colonize the moral life of their constituencies. A local candidate showing up, without being invited, at a neighborhood garden party (with a TV team happening to be nearby), or a spokesperson of the opposition party instrumentalizing the horror and sadness caused by the recent murder of a child for accusing the governing party for having been soft on crime, are instances of the purposive use of people’s moral sentiments and emotions. For the mandate of elected politicians in a liberal democracy is not to provide moral guidance or emotional satisfaction to constituencies, but to conduct good legislation and public policies. While parts of these constituencies, and the media in particular, will be quite receptive to such manifestations of ‘political kitsch’, others will react with disgust and disaffection. My third point is related to the key concept of any democratic theory, which is accountability. The necessary minimum of such accountability obviously consists in general elections. However, it is in the nature of elections that the electorate answers questions put before them by political elites; it cannot address questions to the elites or question the alternatives party elites have posed. One problem with elections as the basic democratic accountability mechanism is that they occur relatively rarely. Even more serious is the problem that they are extremely modest

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and undemanding in terms of the thoughtfulness they require of the voter casting his or her vote. The choice of the yes/no/abstention alternatives may well be based upon well-considered reasons and a fully ‘adequate understanding’ (Dahl 1992: 47 – ​ 48) of the issues at hand, but it can as well be guided by momentary impulses or a misleading campaign trick of one of the competing candidates or parties. There is nothing in the solitude of the voting booth, as well as the anticipation of that solitude, that would activate the deliberative capacity of voters. Moreover, the yes/no/ abstention code does not allow to ask questions, present arguments, substantiate objections, or transmit specific demands voters may want to bring to the attention of democratic rulers. To be sure, there are plenty of facts and arguments presented in the course of election campaigns, but these are always arguments being advanced not for a point of view, but from the strategic point of view, namely that of attracting votes. Nor can we rely on the print and electronic media performing the function of adequately educating and informing voters, as media organizations, and in particular the commercial ones, have their own agenda to pursue. For all these reasons, it has been convincingly argued, for old and new democracies alike (see Rose-Ackerman 2005), that a merely ‘electoral’ democracy is deficient in terms of the extent to which it is actually able to hold governing elites accountable. Their institutionalized practices amount to a systematic underutilization of the intelligence and the moral resources of the citizenry and its capacity for making informed judgement (see Offe and Preuss 1991). As citizens have very limited autonomously organized opportunities to ask elites for arguments and information, to evaluate both in terms of its accuracy and reasonableness, and to learn from each other in the process of doing so (which includes reflection and learning about their ‘interests rightly understood’), a number of additional institutional mechanisms have been proposed that would enhance democratic elite accountability. These are not the subject of the present discussion. However, as long as democratic practice is stuck at the level of the electoral mechanism of accountability (plus the bargaining between governments and collective actors behind closed doors), it is not entirely unreasonable if the realities and outcomes of such impoverished kind of accountability test is met with a sense of disaffection and disenchantment. These endogenously generated attitudes amount arguably to a moral crisis of the practice of democracy and an apparently growing disaffection, or affective distance, to the political life of liberal democracy. Charles Maier (1994: 59) speaks of ‘a flight from politics, or what the Germans call Politikverdrossenheit a weariness with its debates, disbelief about its claims, skepticism about its results, cynicism about its practitioners’. The finding of a profound and pervasive distrust of political leaders in all parties is virtually ubiquitous and uncontested (see Nye et al. 1997). Not only for the US, the diagnosis is uncontroversial: ‘Americans’ direct en-

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gagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the last, generation […] Every year over the last decade or two, millions more have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities’ (Putnam 1995a: 68). Indicators such as ‘declines in voter turnout, trade union membership, prestige of politicians, citizen interest in public affairs, in the perceived role of legislatures, in the extent and intensity of party identification, and in the stability of electoral preferences’ (Schmitter 1995: 18) all point in the same direction, as does the new popularity of the term ‘the political class’ with its dismissive and contemptuous undertones. As a consequence, political institutions do not encourage, absorb, and engage the interests, as well as the cognitive, moral, and emotional resources of citizens – who thereby somehow cease to be citizens, as opposed to subjects, spectators, semibored consumers of ‘infotainment’, voters obsessed by myths and resentment, or simply victims of disinformation campaigns. The phenomenon is so consistent and widespread that it appears dubious to trace it to external determinants of people’s ‘attitudes’ and ‘opinions’, rather than to the institutional contexts which endogenously generate and reinforce these dispositions. One important aspect of this institutionally induced political alienation is what might be called ‘cognitive flooding’. Every new item that appears on the agenda of public policy, including items of great and universal political concern, seem to have an ever-shorter initial phase when ordinary citizens can feel confident to know everything that is necessary to know in order to form competent judgement on preferred political responses. After this period (which, according to my subjective estimate, may last about two weeks) there is already ‘too much’ to know and to consider in order for average citizens to avail themselves of what they would rely on as their own ‘reasoned opinion’. As the gap between what we need to know and what we feel we actually know is rapidly widening, mass constituencies are reduced to political analphabetism, while the circle of the ‘competent’ shrinks to the tiny minority of those who have the time, opportunity, or professional mandate to immerse themselves into all the relevant complexities. In the meantime, political elites and media busy themselves with the task of feeding mass constituencies with those prefabricated views and basic (if distorted) pieces of information on which we all depend.

Types of disenchantment with the practice of liberal democracy I wish to conclude this exercise in conceptual clarification and hypothesis building with a tableau of ‘disenchanted’ responses. In order to specify all the deficiencies that we try to address with the concepts of disaffection, dissatisfaction,

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frustration, apathy, etc., we need to contrast these conditions (just as ‘illness’ is understood as the deviation from ‘health’) to the notion of the ‘good’ or fully competent citizen. Here is a sketch of what (the civic-republican version of) such a citizen looks like: The good democratic citizen is a political agent who takes part regularly in politics locally and nationally, not just on primary and election day. Active citizens keep informed and speak out against public measures that they regard as unjust, unwise, or just too expensive. They also openly support politics that they regard as just, and prudent. Although they do not refrain from pursuing their own and their reference group’s interests, they try to weigh the claims of other people impartially and listen to their arguments. They are public meeting goers and joiners of voluntary organizations who discuss and deliberate with others about the politics that will affect them all, and who serve their country not only as taxpayers and occasional soldiers, but by having a considered notion of the public good that they genuinely take to heart. The good citizen is a patriot. (Shklar 1991: 5)

This ideal type of a democratic citizen is, to reduce this rich description to a schematic construct, someone who combines two sets of characteristics. For one thing, he or she has some ‘cause’ (‘considered notion of the public good’) that is believed to be capable of being promoted in political life. This is some value, interest, group, or concern that – ultimately in the name of some notion of justice – should be served by the makers of public policy. For the other, the democratic citizen is reasonably confident that the institutional resources and mechanisms (‘public meetings, voluntary organizations, elections, paying taxes’) that the political community has at its collective disposal are capable of actually processing and promoting those ‘causes’, and that the citizens wishing to promote some cause can confidently and effectively rely on these institutional mechanisms to do so. These two variables – let us call them ‘political engagement’ and ‘sense of political efficacy’ – relate to the substantive content and institutional forms of political life, or to its ends and means, or the specific and the general. Either of these variables can be dichotomized and combined to yield four groups of cases. To complicate things, I propose to add the elite/mass distinction to some of the cells of the resulting twoby-two matrix. As in all such routines of conceptual exploration, the plus/minus combinations are of greatest interest. The plus/plus combination represents the ideal democratic citizen at the mass level and, at the elite level, the committed politician who ‘stands for’ some programmatic cause and, following Max Weber, lives ‘for’, rather than ‘off’, politics and a distinctive vision of the public good. In extreme contrast, the minus/minus combination (‘privatism’) represents the apathetic, perhaps cynical,

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and at any rate disenchanted citizen who does not perceive any meaningful place or role being provided to him or her by political institutions. At the same time, not much is seen to be missed by this fact, as the person in question sees private (family, occupational, religious, associational, consumption) and not political life as the scene or appropriate context where his or her important concerns and interests can be pursued. Politics is not held to be ‘worth the effort’, because what counts is seen to be outside of politics anyway, and political institutions (including the notion of ‘the country’) are at best dubious as to their worthiness of the citizens’ confidence; this is the essence of post-modernist and neo-liberal dispositions towards political life. The ‘privatism’ type shies away from the complexity of politics and policies and the cognitive opaqueness of decision processes, which have made reasonably competent political participation more demanding in cognitive terms, while fiscal and other constraints imposed upon an essentially post-interventionist (as well as post-Cold War and, in Europe, post-national) political life have diminished both the interest-based and passion-based modes of involvement of citizens. As a consequence, politics itself has changed in ways which makes it both more difficult to understand and follow and less consequential (or more boring) in terms of the material benefits and emotional appeals it has to offer. Moreover, the remaining emotional appeals (on which both competitive strategies of media reporting and populist elite politics relies) are often of a negative, scandalizing, and implicitly ‘anti-political’ nature. They are designed to stir up audiences’ sense of indignation (with politics as a ‘dirty business’) and thus to undermine the reputation and respectability of the ‘political class’, its authority and activities. Both the perceived realities of political life and the strategies of media converge on suggesting to the citizenry that politics is rarely ‘worth the effort’. While rational and well-focused distrust is arguably healthy for the viability of democratic political life, the opposite may be said for the framing of politics in terms of a generalized anti-political suspicion and a detachment from issues of justice. Perhaps more interesting than privatism is the combination of strong loyalty with political institutions and low intensity of political causes. Citizens belonging in this category, call them conventionalist, do follow the political process with attention and without a sense of being left out, but they do so without providing any input or even substantively adequate and relevant judgement of their own. They relate to politics in terms of spectator sports or personality show, without being able to (or finding it worth the effort to) evaluate, take sides, or pass independent judgement on issues and programs. If mobilization of this kind of citizen occurs at all, it follows the ‘populist’ logic: both the issues over which the mobilization occurs and the standards and values applied to them are unreflective evaluative intuitions invoked by political leaders. There is also an elite-level equivalent to this ‘a-political’ conduct of politics: the all-purpose politician specializing in the

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brokerage of power without a sense of purpose and values, prudence, and justice of his own. The absence of authentic causes and programmatic visions can take the form of careerism, opportunism, or the ritualistic defense of agencies, parties, and budgets. This is the syndrome that Richard von Weizsäcker (1992), the former German president, had in mind when he criticized leaders of political parties for their routines of maximizing and monopolizing power without having any idea, or sense of purpose, for which causes and objectives to deploy that power. The inverse combination is that of strong causes with low confidence as to the capacity of established political institutional procedures to respond to and process the issues making up these causes. This disposition may result in a number of behavioral and attitudinal outcomes. One of them is involvement in ‘non-conventional’ politics, such as the politics of new social movements. The pattern of movement politics is to develop and practice new (and mostly perfectly legal) channels of political representation and communication in addition to existing routines and mechanisms of association and representation. A more radical outcome of the combination of strong causes with weak confidence is the turn to violent militancy, terrorism, and other illegal forms of political action, including the separatist denial of the validity of some established political authority and political community. The type of disaffection we encounter here amounts to the negation, typically fueled by passionate emotions of resentment, fear, and hatred, not just of the institutional order of political life, but of the underlying political community to which actors no longer wish to belong (secessionist movements and separatism) or from which they want to exclude others (xenophobic violence). This disposition can manifest itself in overt and active forms, but it can also take the latent and passive form of rejection of authority, non-identification, and the virtual dissociation from the political community over which this authority is established. In this passive version, we may speak of political cynicism, or a sense of futility of politics and the pervasive incompetence of political elites. For instance, almost half of all those asked in a German survey a question on ‘Which party is best capable of solving the problems of Germany ?’ answered by choosing the answer ‘none of them’ (Die Woche, July 21, 2000). Withdrawal from political life that is the result of accumulated frustrations (which may be also due to a lack of trust in the cooperation of a significant number of others) is, at the surface of it and in behavioral terms, hard to distinguish from the syndrome of ‘privatism’.

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Conclusions In conclusion, let me briefly, reflect on the impact the various phenomena of disaffection, alienation, and dissatisfaction might have upon the viability and stability of the democratic regime form. Why is disaffection ‘bad’ – be it in itself or in terms of its consequences ? To be sure, it is bad in terms of the normative ideals derived from the republican tradition, such as those evoked in the above quote from Judith Shklar. Assessments of the causal impact of disaffection, however, range from mildly benign to strongly alarmist. Distrust and even some measure of cynicism concerning the ‘political class’, its members, and its procedural routines may be considered a syndrome that positively strengthens democracy, as it helps to reduce participation and attention in ‘normal politics’ to tolerable levels, maintains a repertoire of capacity for mobilization for ‘extraordinary’ causes and critical conditions, and activates the search for additional and alternative modes of mobilization and representation, such as new social movements. A less favorable assessment claims that the spread of disaffection creates space and opportunities that might be exploited by anti-liberal and/or anti-democratic political entrepreneurs and their populist projects. The danger of backlash into hyper-mobilization has been cited, as underutilized political ‘slack resources’ are available for the populist support of charismatic ideas and leaders who promise to relieve people from their widely shared sense of frustration and powerlessness. Similarly, the fear has been voiced that disaffection breeds non-compliance and defection, with the law in general (and tax laws in particular) meeting with more or less passive obstruction and becoming ever more difficult to enforce, thus generating a post-modernist spiral of state impotence and mass cynicism. Third and finally, the gloomiest of visions concerning the consequences of political disaffection is the fear that the institutional order of liberal democracy and its principles might itself be challenged as a consequence, thereby giving rise to anti-democratic and authoritarian mobilization. It is hard to see what the intellectual resources could possibly be on which such radical and ‘principled’ challenge of liberal democracy could be based – except, arguably, a fundamentalist revival of theocratic theories of the political order and ‘good’ politics. But, at least as far as ‘the OECD world is concerned, liberal democracy as a regime form does not show any signs of being in danger because any non-democratic ideas or models have a chance to win mass support. To the extent it is in danger at all, it is so because the democratic political process itself, as it is perceived and experienced by the citizen, has the potential of undermining the loyalty, commitment, and confidence of citizens. While there is very little that speaks ‘against’ liberal democracy in theory, there is also very little that speaks ‘for’ its practice. This practice, instead, instills doubts concerning all three items: the rules and operative

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procedures of the conduct of public affairs; the objectives and actual accomplishments of governance; and the reference unit in terms of which the (whose ?) ‘common’ good is conceptualized. The practices of political elites to which the deformation of citizenship must be attributed are, as I said, by no means arbitrarily chosen. They are rather necessitated and imposed upon elites by the nature and dynamics of a globalized political economy, the media, and the institutional logic of competitive party democracy itself. These contexts define strategies, constraints, and opportunities that elites have no choice but utilizing and exploiting. By doing so, they teach a hidden curriculum to ordinary citizens about the nature of democratic politics and the role of citizens in it. It is the corrosive impact of this curriculum and its suggestive lessons of disenchantment, cynicism, and withdrawal that even rational and committed citizens find it ever more difficult to withstand in our ‘disaffected’ democracies.

References Ackerman, B. and J. Fishkin (2004) Deliberation Day. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. J. (1992) “The Problem of Civic Competence”, Journal of Democracy 3: 45 – ​59. Easton, D. (1965) A System Analysis of Political Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Elster, J. (1993) Political Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maier, C. S. (1994) “Democracy and its Discontents”, Foreign Affairs (July/August): 48  – ​ 64. Maletz, D. J. (2005) “Tocqueville on Mores and the Preservation of Republics”, American Journal of Political Science 49 (1): 1 – ​15. Montero, J. R. et al. (1997) “Democracy in Spain: Legitimacy, Discontent, and Dissatisfaction”, Studies in Comparative International Development 32 (3): 124 – ​160. Nye, J. S., P. D. Zelikow, and D. C. King (eds.) (1997) Why People Don’t Trust Government. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Offe, C. and U. K. Preuss (1991) “Democracy and Moral Resources”, in D. Held (ed.) Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity. Pharr, S. J. and Putnam, R. D. (eds) (2000) Disaffected Democracies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, R. D. (1995) “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”, Journal of Democracy 6 (1): 65 – ​78. Rose-Ackerman, S. (2005) From Elections to Democracy. Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scharpf, F. W. (2000) “Democratic Legitimacy under Conditions of Regulatory Competition. Why Europe Differs from the United States”, Instituto Juan March: Estudios 2000/145.

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Schmitter, P. C. (1995) “More Liberal, Preliberal, or Postliberal ?”, Journal of Democracy 6 (1): 15 – ​22. Shklar, J. N. (1991) American Citizenship. The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Tocqueville, A. de (1961) Democracy in America 2 vols, transl. by H. Reeve. New York: Schocken.

11

Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State: A Supply-Side Approach (2013)

1

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore some of the links that exist between three bundles of variables. Two of these are macrovariables that are tied together in the concept of (contemporary) democratic capitalism (Streeck 2010, 2011a): declining and unequal voter turnout. The third is the microvariable of individual citizens’ political partici­pation. Participation is a multifaceted phenomenon (voting, joining, discussing politics, etc.) that requires references to various mesophenomena (political parties, associations) in order to be understood. The question that guides the discussion of these extremely complex relations is how empirical trends in politi­ cal participation – citizens’ overall disengagement with political life (Mair 2006) and the increasingly unequal pattern of that disengagement – can be accounted for in terms of developments taking place at the level of the democratic state and its policies, on the one hand, and the capitalist economy, on the other.

2

Two trends: Declining and unequal turnout

The topic of why people don’t vote – or why they don’t participate in political life in other ways – has a long history in political science. It has attracted fresh scholarly interest since the mid-1990s. Two questions are being asked and need to be answered: first, why are we seeing an overall decline in voting – as well as in other forms of political participation – in most liberal democracies, old ones as well as new ? Second, why is nonparticipation a phenomenon that is far from randomly distributed across the population of eligible citizens, and instead disproportionally affects the less privileged strata of constituent populations ? To the extent that either or both of these phenomena – the average level of participation of the entire (eli© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_11

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gible) population and the distributional patterns of participatory practices across the social structure – are considered problematic from points of view spelled out by normative democratic theory, there are conceivable solutions to each respective problem. The following logic will apply in cases where such solutions are available and attempted: any workable solution to problem (1) – e. g., making voting mandatory or incentivizing it through positive or negative sanctions – would also take care of problem (2), but the inverse is not necessarily true; participatory practices can remain low on average even if they are evenly distributed across structural hierarchies. Whenever we conceptualize a social phenomenon as a “problem,” we need to specify which groups are affected or, more generally, which evaluative perspective would consider the given phenomenon a “problem”, meaning a condition that calls for, or inspires the search for, a “solution.” Thus, we need to understand for whom and according to what kind of evaluative standard our first problem, the low overall turnout in elections (or, for that matter, low rates of other kinds of political participation), should constitute a problem. There are two kinds of answers to this question. One starts with the intuition that citizens, by participating, confer political resources, and that political elites depend on the supply of these resources for the sake of their legitimacy, as well as for the proper functioning of the political system as a whole.1 The more members political parties and functional associations have, i. e., the more people who decide to join, the greater the pool of material resources for these groups (in the form of membership dues) and the more credible their legitimacy-conferring claim to representativeness.2 Conversely, the entire political system would suffer considerable embarrassment and loss of credibility if the turnout on election day were to drop below the level of, say, 30 % of those eligible. Such an outcome would be perceived as signaling worries in large parts of the electorate about either the relevance of the alternatives (candidates, platforms) between which voters are called upon to decide or the perceived fairness of the procedures according to which the system operates, or both. It would also leave the resulting governing coaliNote that the interest of political parties in the overall turnout in elections is at best qualified. Party A, while interested in mobilizing its own constituency as much as possible, will also be interested in Party B’s failure to mobilize its constituency, as the abstention of (potential) B-voters is bound to benefit A. Neither can parties be unequivocally interested in maximizing the number of those who join them as members, since depending on how active these members are, they may exacerbate the party’s problems of internal conflict management. In cases where citizens turn from voting and party membership to less formal modes of politi­ cal expression (civil society associations, movements, protests), such moves could be considered positively unwelcome by political party elites. 2 In most countries, however, party membership has been declining considerably since the 1970s. See van Biezen et al. (2012).

1

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tions vulnerable to criticism that, in the limiting case, they represented just a tiny minority (in this case 15.01 %) of the overall polity, thus considerably weakening a government’s claim to democratically constituted political authority. Political elites must be interested in absorbing the hopes, fears, loyalties and interests of citizens into the institutional channels of “normal politics”, thereby integrating the political community at the level of “diffuse support” for the democratic form of government and strengthening a second-order consensus concerning the rules by which first-order conflict and dissent is to be processed. Absent such support and consent, it is likely that such motivations will seek, and eventually find, their expression in noninstitutional, potentially disruptive forms of participation. High degrees of electoral disengagement and abstention will also undercut political input legitimacy (“Low levels of input legitimacy [can] have a negative impact on the government’s ability to ensure compliance with government regulations” (Quintelier et al. 2011: 399)) and hence the effectiveness of governance. The other way that low electoral turnout can constitute a problem derives from a well-founded empirical generalization. This claims that the further the level of participatory practices deviates from the 100 % maximum, the more unequal the pattern of participation is bound to be. The lower the overall rate of participation, the more socially distorted it will be according to stratification dimensions such as income, education, class, status security, and life satisfaction (Kohler 2006; Gallego 2007; Solt 2010). Distorted patterns of participation, once they are known to exist and anticipated by competing political parties, have a direct impact on both the content of parties’ programmatic platforms and the policy output of governing parties. In particular, parties and governing coalitions will tend to form rational strategies that are biased in favor of those social categories known to participate and that ignore or downgrade those less likely to do so; these political entities will tend to “optimize the allocation of pains to [known] non-voters” (Streeck 2007: 28). “Who votes and who doesn’t has important consequences […] for the content of policies” (Lijphart 1997: 4). In the second step of this developing circular dynamic, those who perceive themselves to be “left out” (due to such strategies by parties and rulers) will probably have ever fewer motives to participate, which in turn will further diminish parties’ willingness to take their interests on board – and so on.3 The net result is a nominally democratic political system that is sys3

Nor is the problem of participatory distortion of a self-healing nature, as several authors seem to imply. There is nothing “paradoxical” (Schäfer, 2011c: 4) or a “puzzle” (as Solt 2008: 57 explains) about the fact that (a) high rates of non-participation are statistically correlated with low level of individual income, education, and security and the fact that (b) the average increase in educational standards and prosperity coincides with growing levels of participatory distortion and patterned political disaffection. To argue otherwise is to do so based on a fallacy of composition and on disregard for the possibility that growing overall inequality,

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tematically biased to favor the middle class and everyone above it, while depriving all those below it of the effective use of their political resources, i. e., the political rights of citizenship. Such a system amounts to a gross de facto violation of the normative standard of civic equality that we associate with the idea of democracy (Schäfer 2010; 2011a). Note that this line of reasoning leads us right to the fusion of the two problems that we have distinguished at the outset. We might now paraphrase the problem by saying that the first phenomenon – overall decline of participation – is both a problem in itself (because of the issues of legitimacy and political integration, as perceived by political elites) and a cause of the problem of distorted participation (our second phenomenon) that it invariably involves.

3

Four diagnoses and associated therapies

To the extent that the second problem – increasingly distorted rather than declining participation – is recognized as a “problem,” there are four broad categories of conceivable answers. The first response is to solve problem (2) in indirect ways by solving problem (1). As noted before, solving the overall turnout problem would offer an (approximate) solution to the distorted participation problem, but not vice versa. If this is so, there seems to be a strong prima facie suggestion for making voting mandatory for all citizens (as influentially advocated by Lijphart 1997), thus imitating arrangements as they are in use, for instance, in Belgium and Australia, where as a consequence turnout rates range in the upper nineties and electoral disproportionalities are effectively neutralized. Lijphart suggests an institutional theory as to why people don’t vote and why some vote less than others: that we get the outcome we observe because the institutional rules in which acts of voting are embedded are insufficiently and unevenly inviting and encouraging. Yet Lijphart’s proposal (which he combines with other participation-facilitating institutional rules such as “voter-friendly registration rules, proportional representation, infrequent elections, weekend voting, and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections” (1997: 1)) meets with a number of objections, partly normative and partly empirical. One normative objection is that it must be considered illiberal to make voting compulsory, as it would deprive citizens of their negative voting freedom, the right to abstain. Compulsory voting would also, it might be argued, illegitimately and undeservedly protect political elites from the embarrassing evidence of their candidates and programs being considered unappealing by large and slowly increaswhich discourages participation, could trump the effect of growing average income and education on participation.

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ing parts of the population.4 Empirically, compulsory voting seems to be on the decline (as is one of the other duties of citizenship, compulsory military service), both as a statutory (or even constitutionally enshrined, as in Greece) duty and in terms of the sanctions applied in case the duty is violated.5 Yet even if enforced by strong sanctions, voting cannot really be made compulsory, only the presence of people at the voting booth; they still remain free to cast invalid or empty ballots (Quintelier et al. 2011). In the present context, however, the main objection is this: even if the participatory distortion in voting could be eliminated through making it compulsory, this would only take care of the evidently smallest (and hence arguably least urgent) part of the overall problem of participatory distortion or inequality. For among all forms of political participation, voting is by far the least unequally distributed (Verba et al. 1995; Gallego 2007; Schäfer 2010; Marien et al. 2010). So Lijphart’s proposed solution would help to tackle the overall problem, but only marginally. A second way to remedy the problem of participatory inequality is to resolve the problem by providing for the random composition of decision-making bodies, including electorates themselves. This amounts to solving problem (2) without solving problem (1). While such random procedures are recommended in much of the recent literature on deliberative democracy and deliberative polls (Fishkin 1995; Offe 2011: 467 – ​69), i. e., as democratic innovations that are being proposed as supplements to the procedures of majoritarian and representative democracy, it is hard to imagine that randomization could serve any meaningful and legitimate purpose beyond such a supplementary function. Randomization would involve a massive disenfranchisement of all those who have not “won” the lottery, and an element of nonrandom (self-)selection cannot possibly be fully excluded (whereas the other desirable function of randomization, that of neutralizing the influence of organized stakeholders and interested corporate actors, can be well fulfilled). In the absence of a strictly enforced equivalent of the institutions of jury duty (which itself allows for a number of opportunities for “opting out”), the social selectivity would just be pushed one step back, from the question who actually casts a ballot to the question of who enters the pool of those among whom 4

To be sure, this deficiency could be fixed if voters were provided with the option to tick an additional box on the ballot that would allow them to vote NOTA (meaning “none of the above”). 5 This apparent trend (with only five EU member states maintaining the duty, sometimes without any sanctions: Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, and Belgium) has, however, a countertrend in the Andean states of Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and (with positively draconian sanctions attached) Bolivia. In these latter countries, sanctions can take the form of monetary fines that in most cases are quite moderate; voters may also conceivably be excluded from the next election if they fail to show up for the present one.

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random selection then takes place, and who, if selected, agrees to perform as decision-maker or deliberator. Greater diversity of decision-making bodies (such as legislatures and party lists) could also be achieved through mandatory quotas, as is the case in many countries with gender quotas. Yet this would provoke, among other problems, the issue of “second-order-quotas”: how many seats should be allocated according to a gender quota (incidentally, a less significant determinant of participatory distortion), and how many according to the (overlapping) dimensions of minority or migrant status, income, education, class, age, etc. ? While all referendums and similar forms of direct democracy operate on the basis of a quorum (a minimum limit which, if not surpassed, makes the poll invalid), one could think here of a combination of quotas and quorums: for instance, a referendum could be valid only with a turnout of at least 50 % – not of the overall constituency, but of those belonging to certain categories by age, gender, ethnicity, or other possible attributes. A third possible solution to the problem of participatory distortion is to try to “activate” the nonparticipants. This is an approach that is based on an implicit behavioral theory that associates outcomes with individuals’ characteristics: some people lack the skills, motivations, knowledge, and other personal features that are conducive to participation, and these deficiencies must be overcome through countervailing incentives – material, cognitive, and normative ones. As far as voting is concerned (remember: voting is the least dramatic of our distortion problems), turnout could be increased through material incentives: after casting his or her ballot, each voter would automatically participate in a lottery in which a significant amount of cash could be won, or a luxury car. Others would prefer an educational approach: civics curricula in secondary schools, for example, could familiarize students with the full range of the portfolio of rights and organizational means with which citizens in a democracy are endowed and encourage the use of these rights as a matter of civic virtue. Or targeted information and mobilization campaigns could be launched (e. g., by public electronic media) to make it understood even to the politically least enlightened and least interested in what is at stake for them, specifically, in upcoming elections and other political decisions, and who is likely to eventually benefit if they fail to participate. All of this is meant to strengthen the “voice” of those who tend to keep silent and to encourage them to make demands.6 The truth, however, seems to be that all of these solutions (except for the lottery for voters) are already being undertaken by schools, media, civil society organiza-

6

One example is the registration campaigns for African Americans of the 1980s. Cf. Piven and Cloward (1988).

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tions, trade unions, religious communities, social movements, and political parties themselves. In the absence of these efforts, the situation might be much worse than it actually is, but that does not mean that additional efforts of this sort will achieve significant improvements in a situation that for a long time has been deteriorating in terms of participatory inequalities. Beyond that, there must be something wrong with the behavioral theory in the first place.7 The democratic motive for mobilizing nonparticipants into participation is, of course, the concern that those who do not vote (or who do not use other forms of civic participation) will be neglected by policy-making elites because the latter have nothing to fear from the former. Yet “it is by no means obvious that politicians would pay much heed to the views of the poor if they did vote. It may be … unfair to push the blame for unresponsiveness, at least implicitly, onto poor nonvoters” (Bartels 2008: 275). Perhaps nonparticipants do well understand this “unresponsiveness” of elites, implying that the former have little to expect anyway that the former have to expect and to hope for to be delivered by the latter. Which leaves us with the fourth and last of my stylized options of how we should understand – and, if possible, act upon – the condition of unevenly distributed political participation in all of its forms. The argument that I shall explore and defend for the rest of this chapter is a “supply-side” argument. Its implicit theory is one that could be called interpretive political economy, meaning an understanding of social action and its cognitive foundations that starts with peoples’ “lived experience” of the interplay of economic and political forces in contemporary capitalist democracies. Those who do not, or do not fully, participate in political life fail to do so because they perceive the state, governments, and political parties as lacking both the necessary means and the credible intent to “make a difference” on matters (such as employment, equality, education, the labor market, social security, and financial market regulation) that form the core concerns of those who do not participate; they fail to participate because they have come to understand that lack perfectly well. Roughly speaking, their “lived experience” is that of living in a disempowered state, or in one that is overpowered by the poderes fácticos of corporate market actors. Their negative response is proportionate to their perception of the state’s disempowerment (cf. Makszin & Schneider 2010). They do not join the game of democratic politics because they are unconvinced that doing so would yield results that are worth their effort and worthy of their recognition, nor do they 7

Only if one were to adopt the perspective of making individual “deficiencies” causally responsible for distortions could one find it “especially disturbing” that the decline in turnout persists even though “levels of education and prosperity (factors that can be expected to increase turnout) have been going up dramatically in Europe, as they have in the United States.” (Lijphart 1998: 5)

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trust that making such efforts could succeed in changing the agenda and priorities ruling the overall political economy. To be sure, the only practical implication that this perspective has to offer is the appeal, addressed to political parties and elites as the suppliers of public policies, to restore, reassert and consistently demonstrate some of their trust-engendering governing capacity.8

4

Nonparticipation: a challenge for democratic theory

How do we then account, in normative terms, for our two issues of (1) a percentage of all relevant social categories failing to make full use of the political resources accorded to them by law in the form of “voluntary” abstention and, even more difficult, (2) the pattern of an empirically uneven underutilization of citizens’ political resources ? As we have seen, the first of these two cases is much easier to cope with than the second, at least if we consider voting alone. Whatever its social causation, and given that every freedom includes the freedom to abstain from its use (family rights include chosen childlessness, property rights include the right to voluntarily donate or destroy what one owns), random non-utilization of political resources can arguably be accommodated within the liberal (if not so the (neo-)republican; cf. Schäfer 2011b) version of democratic theory. To do so, we would have to rely on a rule of thumb that some people will always, independently of their social status, freely develop a taste for forfeiting some of their freedoms. In contrast, problem (2) describes a situation in which the “waste” of political resources is empirically correlated to indicators of individuals’ life chances (such as education, income, labor-market status, age). Here, nonparticipation is evidently not “freely chosen”, or freely chosen in a different sense, as the conditions that are statistically correlated with this choice are themselves not freely chosen, but consist of circumstances that are “given” in a way that, at any moment, is beyond the control of those affected by them. Findings to this effect give rise to the suspicion that social and economic factors operating beyond the system of legal rights can bring about discrimina8

This is also the conclusion that Petring and Merkel (2011: 33) draw in a postscript to a summary of their paper (Merkel & Petring 2011). In that postscript they write: “Instead of engaging in a hopeless struggle against symptoms, the causes should be addressed. Such a causal approach should consist primarily of new educational, social, tax, and economic policies. Demonstrating that public policies are still able to reduce inequalities, tame markets, and subject them to democratic control … could motivate participation by those parts of the citizenry who now have turned away from it [political participation] in frustration.” [my translation]. Interestingly and perhaps symptomatically, this key thought is deleted from the “official” version of their paper (Merkel & Petring 2011) as published by the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which had commissioned it.

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tory and exclusionary effects that are normatively problematic from the point of view of democratic citizenship and civic equality. Even worse, the normative problem for democratic theory is not just distortion itself, but the plausible possibility that distortion breeds on itself and leads to more distortion, or becomes permanent: as people are conditioned to “waste” their rights and political resources, and as competing political elites and political parties come to understand that parts of the electorate are less likely than others to make use of their political resources, those elites will concentrate their platforms, campaigns, and mobilization strategies upon those segments of the citizenry who actually “count” and neglect others, launching a negative and exclusionary learning cycle of mutual alienation between elites and underprivileged citizens. Moreover, these concerns relating to the quality of democracy cannot be put to rest with the argument that the preferences of those who vote and those who do not differ so greatly that, even under strong distortions, the overall outcome of elections would be roughly the same as if participation across social categories had been more even. What is dubious about this argument is the fact that elections (and even more so: other forms of participation) are not just an opportunity to express given preferences; they are, at the same time and in anticipation of such expression, a challenge for citizens to find out about and form those preferences by learning and deliberating about their own choices, as well as discussing them with others. People whose circumstances make voting more difficult miss this kind of opportunity and challenge for preference formation, one which arguably would lead them to form preferences that would differ from those who do vote (Offe 2011). Here another vicious circle suggests itself: the more that people of certain status categories are (self-)excluded from voting and other forms of political participation, the more ill-considered and unreflective their political preferences and opinions are likely to remain or become, as they forgo learning opportunities to form judgments on public affairs. In this sense, undistorted political participation is desirable because it equalizes the challenge for individual citizens to practice and refine their capacity for judgment on those affairs. Yet this is not the only reason why political participation should be undistorted. Indeed, those least endowed with education, income, and security are clearly the ones who lack the individual means and resources to improve their condition (by spending income or making use of labor-market opportunities, for example). Given this lack of individual resources, they would likely turn to the collective resource of democratic state power as the only instrumental means available to them to improve their condition through state-provided services and transfers. In doing so and succeeding, they would benefit from the fruits of such collective efforts more strongly and more directly than the middle class. The opportunity costs of nonparticipation can be safely assumed to be greater for the resource-poor than

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for the resource-rich.9 This would lead us to expect that the poorer, less educated, or more insecure people are about their socioeconomic status, the more eagerly they should seek to put their political rights to use, and the more readily should vote-seeking left-of-center elites focus on mobilizing and educating them to this effect. Yet this is not the case – arguably not just because of a lack of information, but also because of a lack of confidence that political involvement is worth the effort. People lack what in the older literature used to be termed a “sense of subjective political efficacy”10: they live in a highly and increasingly unequal society in which the government is evidently not in control of the resources needed for redistributive measures. Isn’t it conceivable that large parts of the population, rather than lacking the intellectual skills and energies to engage into democratic politics, have come to understand quite well that they live, for all practical purposes, in a kind of “post-democracy,” while the rest of the population lives and partakes in a “twothirds democracy” (to quote the strangely oxymoronic term coined by Merkel and Petring (2011: 19)) ?

4.1 Revisiting Schattschneider The classic formulation of the puzzle of voluntary nonparticipation of less privileged strata is from Schattschneider (1960). He observes the “massive self-disfranchisement” (102) of American voters that occurs through extralegal means, as it is not coerced but voluntary. He tries to understand the “invisible” (98) and “imperceptible” (108) forces that bring about the counterintuitive self-disfranchisement of exactly the less privileged strata within the electorate who would often benefit most from actually making their voices heard. As I read it, Schattschneider’s puzzle goes something like this: starting with a Schumpeterian model of the democratic political process, we must distinguish between elite suppliers in the political market (i. e., competing political parties) and buyers in that market (mass constituencies of voters and “policy-takers”). The ballot is the equivalent of money, 9

One striking illustration of this is a referendum on a school-reform proposal in the city-state of Hamburg that was backed by all political parties. The turnout of the intended beneficiaries of this reform was much lower than that of its middle-class opponents, and the latter defeated the reform. This result can be explained by the combined effect of the losers being poorly informed by the media and the winners having much greater resources to invest in the campaign. Cf. Römmele and Schober (2010). 10 Conveniently operationalized as the percentage of those surveyed who disagreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.” (Madsen 1978)

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through the spending of which buyers purchase what competing elites (promise to) supply.11 The interest of suppliers is twofold: first, and as a common interest of all suppliers, the author suggests, elites will do all they can to endow their (potential) constituency with political purchasing power (or “exchange value”), namely the right to vote. “The expansion of the electorate was largely a by-product of the system of party conflict […] One of the best ways to win a fight is to widen the scope of the conflict, and the effort to widen the involvement of […] bystanders produced universal suffrage” (100 – ​1). Seen this way, political parties would have had a strong incentive to have voting rights granted to hitherto disenfranchised social categories.12 Once any of those elites have attracted sufficient voter support to put themselves in the possession of political power, however, even if only for the time being, they must now start to design the products – bundles of programmatic policy proposals, candidates – that are likely to appeal to buyers (or rather creditors) in the political market – the “use value” of public policies. At this point, the managerial (as opposed to entrepreneurial) logic of cautious economizing takes over, which means the priority of risk and blame avoidance and of keeping the core segments of a party’s constituency reasonably happy. The key organizational objective is to defend one’s market share (i. e., to remain in power after the next election); this must not be jeopardized by ill-advised ambitions, risks, or confrontational moves beyond one’s powers to cope. There are important but potentially dangerous issues that parties will wisely keep off their platforms and agendas; otherwise, they would run the risk of being denounced by opponents for their lack of “realism.” Such reasoning seems to underlie Schattschneider’s analysis when he emphasizes the contradiction that “the right to vote is now [in place] for a generation, but the use of the ballot as an effective instrument of democratic politics is something else altogether” (101). After its party-driven universalization, political parties “attempt to make the vote meaningless” (103). It is this sense of meaninglessness that in turn leads to selective mass abstention caused by the “agenda of politics” chosen (104): “Abstention reflects the suppression of the options and alternatives that reflect the needs of the non-participants,” who consist of “the poorest, the least well-established, least educated stratum of the community” (105). The strategy of risk avoidance by competing (and often also colluding) political parties means 11 In contrast to real money, however, there is no saving or hoarding with political money, which should provide a built-in incentive to actually spend it at the only time when it has value, namely on Election Day. 12 This logic could still be seen at work when the Red-Green coalition government in Germany liberalized the German Citizenship Act (effective 2000), which facilitated the access to full citizenship (including voting rights) to long-term resident foreign workers and their spouses and descendants.

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that “large areas of need and interest are excluded from the political system” (106). Absent the perception of such use value, increasing segments of constituencies simply drop out of political life, following the simple logic of “if you fail to deliver, we refuse to pay.”13 The key theorem here is that the political agenda set up by supply-side strategies in the political market selects “the submerged millions [who] have found it difficult to get interested in the game” (109) and who, as “a body of dissociated people” come to conclude “that politics is simply not a game worth playing” (Solt 2008: 58). “The root of the problem of nonvoting is to be found […] above all by what issues are developed” (Schattschneider 1960: 110). A political agenda is more than just a list of what to do and which problems to address; it is also, implicitly, a scheme of whom to appeal to, protect, rely upon, address – and whom not. “Whoever decides what the game is about decides also who can get into the game” (105). This interaction between the substantive and the social selectivity of strategically established agendas can serve to solve the puzzle of voluntary, noncoerced self-exclusion by major parts of the citizenry: “The exclusion of people by extralegal processes […] may be far more effective than the law” (111). The root of this exclusionary process is the silent complicity of strategic non-decision-making by actors on the supply side of the policy transaction (Bachrach & Baratz 1970), i. e., of leaving “touchy” issues and agents untouched.

4.2 Political vs. social equality In the normative literature, there does not seem to be much disagreement that political equality is the core principle of a democratic political order. Most authors would also agree that political equality must not only be legally (de jure) provided for, but socially and politically implemented (de facto).14 Political equality is not antagonistic to the other (and arguably only ultimate; cf. Honneth 2011) principle of a political order, namely freedom; to the contrary, equality is instrumental for the achievement of the latter. “Political equality is not […] an end we can obtain

13 The obvious problem with this response is that in a dynamic analysis, we can expect a second-order effect where political parties thus rejected will decide even more consistently to drop the interests of the less privileged from their agenda, since the latter do not vote for them anyway and therefore the former will face no loss by ignoring their interests. This dynamic can explain the change away from vote-maximizing, catch-all parties, and their broad bases of support, to clientilistic parties who cater only to special interests and specific segments of the constituency while their agendas ignore the interests of all those who are unlikely to support them in the first place. 14 See recent challenges to these assumptions, however: Berger 2011; Saunders 2011.

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only at the expense of freedom […] it is instead an essential means to a just distribution of freedom and to fair opportunities for self-development” (Dahl 1989: 322). According to Dahl, there are three social conditions that can stand in the way of the achievement of de facto political equality, i. e., the fair distribution of what he calls “political resources” (130). These inequalities are (1) “differences in resources and opportunities for employing violent coercion”; (2) differences “in economic positions, resources, and opportunities”; and (3) differences “in knowledge, information, and cognitive skills” (323 – ​4). Yet these differences are more than just hindrances to a democratic political process: they also distort (according to any conceivable standard of a fair distribution of political resources) the “inputs” that citizens make into that process. Such distributional patterns of coercive, economic, and cognitive powers must also be seen as the “outputs” of previous rounds of policy-making in which those patterns of unequal distribution of political resources were brought into being – whether through political acts of commission or of omission. Since political inequality must thus be understood as a consequence (and not just a premise) of the making of public policy, Dahl goes on to argue that the principle of political equality requires that rulers in “an advanced democratic country would actively seek to reduce great inequalities in the capacities and opportunities for citizens to participate effectively in political life that are caused […] by the distribution of economic resources, positions […] and by the distribution of knowledge, information, and cognitive skills.” (324)

In other words: participatory inequality must be understood not just as an unpleasant and (for democrats) somewhat embarrassing fact of life “out there,” but as a condition that is inherently produced and reproduced by the conduct of public policy and its supply (or lack) of policies that would create an approximate de facto equalization of political resources. What Dahl proposes here is a dualist model of how democratic citizenship relates to public policy. The first and most familiar side of that model is that citizens of a democracy, endowed with their political rights and by means of various procedures of aggregation, representation, coalition-building, etc., shape public policies. The second and more striking side is this: public policies, by “actively seeking to reduce great inequalities” or by failing to do so, conversely shape citizens and the actual use they make of their political rights. More specifically, if governments allow and thereby cause through their inaction income gaps to widen, educational opportunities to become massively unequal, precariousness of labor market status to spread, and the integration of migrants and their descendants to often fail, they thereby create strata of citizens who are “objectively” ill-disposed to make use of

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the political rights and resources with which they are nominally endowed as citizens (Makszin & Schneider 2010; Solt 2008). They also create, among people affected by these conditions, a “subjective” life-world of meanings, lived experience, expectations, fears, and denied recognition, along with accumulated diffuse aggressiveness that alienates them from the supposedly normal practices of political organization and partici­pation. On the basis of these emotional dispositions and cognitive frames, they come to consider their political rights largely useless – and act (or rather fail to act) accordingly. Taken together, these two ways in which citizens are shaped through policies of omission or commission act to create groups that are marginalized and as economically hopeless as they are politically and culturally homeless (Walter 2010: 203 – ​219). It is thus not the case that a high level of inequality and social insecurity will in any way automatically lead to popular demands for policies that provide for redistribution, as Markoff (2011) suggests. It can also be the case that the perceived inability and/or unwillingness of any governing coalition to respond to inequalities through the adoption of redistributive measures have become so evident (given the extent and persistence of problems of poverty, inequality of opportunity, and insecurity) that citizens affected by these conditions have given up on raising their voice and demanding such measures. (Once you learn that the trains are not running any more, it makes no sense to wait on the platform any longer.) “The evidence indicates, however, that higher levels of inequality are not associated with more redistributive spending,” nor even with more loudly voiced demands for such spending. In this way, “economic inequality undermines political equality” (Solt 2008: 57). The first of the two loops in the democratic model (from needs to demands to remedial policies) presupposes not just the presence of democratic political rights, but also the presence of the confidence that democratic government is a reasonably responsive agency, and hence the appropriate address to which demands can be directed. Absent this confidence, demands will be neither voiced nor responded to, in spite of the largely unadulterated presence of these rights. While authoritarian rulers focus on demolishing these democratic rights, “post-democratic” rulers adopt the far less conspicuous strategy of frustrating the confidence that these rights are of much use, thus activating a negative version of the second loop: from failed policies to silenced demands to unaddressed needs.

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5

Two and a half theories about the operation of democratic capitalism

In this concluding section I shall describe in a stylized fashion and contrast three theoretical approaches to both understanding and justifying the realities of democratic capitalism and its (desired) mode of operation. Each of these theories specifies in a consistent and empirically validated way how the state, policy makers, market actors in the economy, and citizens act and should act. The three theories are the social democratic-cum-social market economy theory, the market-liberal theory, and an (as yet incomplete) theory that, for want of a better name, will here be sketched out under the clumsy title of “global financial market-driven postdemocracy.” The latter is incomplete and just “half ” a theory because it is well able to describe the “logic” that governs the realities of contemporary markets and politics but lacks the normative argument (an argument to the effect that the arrangements of the political economy and its mode of operation is actually fair or beneficial) to demonstrate why these realities are justified and sustainable.

5.1 The social-democratic theory of democratic capitalism At the legal and constitutional level, democratic political rights guarantee civic equality – not, of course, the equality of socioeconomic outcomes. Civic equality is normatively premised upon a strict separation and disjunction of (unequally distributed) socioeconomic resources and (equal) political rights according to the principle of nonconvertibility of the former into the latter. Ownership of economic assets should not be allowed to translate to privilege, political power, or a shortcut to access either. Correspondingly, inferior socioeconomic status should not be allowed to deprive citizens of their political voice and its effectiveness. At the same time, it can trivially be observed that the actual use of political resources can have a major impact upon the relative socioeconomic status and status security of citizens, as any democratically legislated tax law can serve to illustrate. This is the asymmetrical linkage between economic and political resources, or spheres of action: with the former being to some extent banned from being converted into the latter, yet the latter being allowed, in fact intended, to have an impact on the former. This formula is the normative bedrock of the “social-democratic” or “socialmarket economy” normative theory of capitalist democracy: political power, reflecting prevailing conceptions of social justice and claiming primacy over the dynamics of markets, can legitimately shape the distribution of economic resources, but not the other way around. The social-democratic theory shares two assump-

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tions with the precepts of the “social market”. First, the economic process is one that is entirely shaped by and embedded in institutional arrangements and politi­ cal decisions that have been framed at the political and constitutional levels. It is public policies that set into motion, license, regulate, and thus provide an institutional framework for market forces, such that the democratic state can then steer the economic process in ways that reliably avoid the twin dangers of devastating economic crises and disruptive social conflict. The second assumption of the social-democratic theory amounts to a theory of worker-citizens’ participation and “voice”: it claims that, given this confidence in the state’s regulatory and steering capacities and given the uneven distribution of life chances of capitalist social structures, there will be a “natural” tendency in all segments of the population, and in particular the less privileged ones, to make active use of the political resources that are granted to them as political rights. In such an institutional arrangement, there is a built-in incentive for citizens to make full use of their rights, as such use offers the prospect of cumulatively limiting socioeconomic inequalities through the “output” of state policies. More specifically, the less privileged strata of the population will have good reason to actually voice their complaints and demands for protective and redistributive policies and greater (job and social) security. This is meant to result in a self-correcting dynamic that generates policies to reduce inequality and thus provide for social and politi­ cal stability.

5.2 The market-liberal theory of democratic capitalism An alternative theory of capitalist democracy, the “market-liberal” theory, describes and prescribes a strictly symmetrical separation of markets and politics. As market power should not translate into political decision-making power, neither should the state and politics be allowed to intervene (more than marginally) into the market-generated distribution of resources. All liberal theories, particularly if combined with pluralist political theory, assume that under such symmetrical differentiation of political and economic spheres, neither of the two will have legitimate reasons to claim primacy over the other. While neither the state nor the market is fully autonomous, the mutual relations and inputs required cannot possibly amount to any relationship of dependency or robust prevalence. This theory, which found its most sophisticated elaboration in the work of sociological theorists such as Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, describes a relationship between the democratic state and the capitalist economy as one of interdependence without primacy. The input that the political system provides to the economic systems is the legal guarantee of property rights, the enforcement of contracts, and

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the provision of infrastructural facilities and services. Conversely, the inputs coming from the economy are taxes on the one hand, and pluralist group pressures on the other. Given a highly diversified socioeconomic structure, none of the organized interest groups that can mobilize political pressure is strong enough to impose binding demands on the political system; pressures also generate counterpressures so as to cancel each other out, leaving the government free to give in and cater to this or that group. Moreover, not all citizens in a “mass society” will actually belong to or identify with any particular group; yet many will belong to more than one group, however loosely (e. g., a trade union and the Roman Catholic church) – a situation that gives rise to the healthy phenomenon of “cross-pressure” at the micro level of voters and serves to mitigate the intensity of societal conflict. Nor does the pressure that one particular group can generate pertain to all policy areas equally, which further increases the freedom of discretion enjoyed by the governments of pluralist societies. What does this stylized liberal theory have to say about patterns of political participation and its motives ? Here the prevailing concern is with the systemic dangers of “excessive” mobilization and participation, which according the social-science doctrines of the fifties and sixties was suspected as a source of instability, if not of “totalitarian” dangers (Huntington 1975). A political culture that leads people to stay passive or indifferent to most issues most of the time, combined with a sense of diffuse loyalty and support for the political system as a whole, is widely considered to be desirable for the sake of stability. A further reassuring feature of liberal-pluralist political theorizing is the axiomatic assumption, derived from Schumpeter, of a deep divide between political elites and nonelites that is modeled on the market transaction. Just as there is the hiatus between producers and consumers in markets, there is a divide between elite suppliers and nonelite consumers of public policies. As dissatisfied consumers would never in their right mind consider invading the place of production in order to make their dissatisfaction heard, but would instead rationally switch by “exit” to a competing supplier who better catered to their needs and tastes, so the democratic citizen is categorically assumed to be able to “exit” by changing to another supplier rather than engaging in verbal (or other) types of conflict with an unsatisfactory supplier within the political elite.

5.3 Postdemocratic capitalism ? Both the social-democratic and the liberal-pluralist theories, as well as their implications concerning levels, kinds, and social distribution of participatory prac-

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tices, are now a largely obsolete matter of the past in both their analytical and normative aspects. They reached their expiration dates following the historical turning points that democratic capitalism experienced in the second half of the 1970s and again after 1989. What we are entirely lacking, however, is a theory or normative justification of the current realities, when economic resources do determine the agenda and decision-making of the political process, while the owners of those resources themselves, and the distributional outcomes caused by markets, are less and less being significantly constrained by social rights and political interventions. To the contrary, the latter are to a large extent put at the disposition of economic “imperatives.” Note that compared to the social-democratic model, the present condition of globalized financial market capitalism-cum-endemic fiscal crisis is tantamount to an inverted asymmetry: markets set the agenda and (fiscal) constraints of public policies, but there is little that public policies in their turn can do in terms of constraining the realm and dynamics of everexpanding market – unless, that is, political elites are suicidally prepared to expose themselves to the second-strike capabilities of the “markets.” Yet it is this logic of a pervasive preponderance of accumulation, profit, efficiency, competitiveness, austerity, and the market over the sphere of social rights, political redistribution, and sustainability, as well as the defenselessness of the latter sphere against the former, that governs the contemporary version of capitalist democracy (or rather “post-democ­racy,” Crouch 2004), and will probably do so for many years to come (Streeck 2011a). This logic, as it unfolds before our eyes and on a global scale, is sufficiently powerful and uncontested, it seems, to prevail through its sheer facticity and in the absence of any supporting normative theory – as a stark reality, naked of any shred of justification. In brief, the operation of this logic begins with the categorical denial of any tension between the rights of people and the rights of capital owners, of social justice vs. property and market justice. To the extent the governments of nation-states are in charge of the former and the addressee of respective demands and complaints, i. e. of “voice”, they are largely deafened by the overpowering and ubiquitous “noise” of the austerity imperative. The urgency of this imperative, and at the same time the difficulty to comply with it, is determined by three factors. First, there is a need to bail out failed (or potentially failing) financial institutions who count governments among their preferred clients. Second, governments cannot manage their financial troubles by raising taxes, because that would constitute a burden on private investors in the “real” economy and would disincentivize their continued (domestic) investment. Third, expenses cannot be cut because increasing parts of the social security system, so far mostly covered by the “para-fiscal” mechanism of contributions, need to be covered out of general revenues (to the extent that transfers cannot be cut) in order to decrease the burden on employers. Cornered in this

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triangle of constraints, the state is no longer a plausible supplier of what all kinds of demand-side actors may desire it to provide. To gain any room for maneuver at all, it is undergoing a creeping permutation from a classical (Schumpeterian) “tax state” into a “debtor state”. That is, expenditures are not being covered out of present revenues, but out of (anticipated) future revenues – the prospective tax base of which, however, is itself being decimated by the increasing parts of state budgets that are spent on servicing debt (rather than on providing services and infrastructure). With Streeck (2007: 32, 34) we can speak of “emaciated state capacity” and the “attrition of its disposable resources.” The endemic fiscal crisis “preempts democratic choice” (Streeck 2010: 5); citizens simply have to get used to the fact that a fiscally starved state is the wrong interlocutor when it comes to demands concerning “costly” policies of redistribution and social protection. This configuration of constraints leaves little space for the processes and institutions that supposedly make up the core decision-making site of democracy, namely party competition, elections, and parliamentary representation and legislation. After all, if decision-making on taxing and spending is off the agenda, a core function of parliamentary government is largely suspended. Instead, policy-making moves to other sites that are typically out of reach of the participant agents of normal democratic politics. All kinds of government-appointed commissions and fiduciary institutions (including central banks) are being endowed with de facto policy-making competencies, often of a supranational kind, as has occurred in ad hoc peak meetings of European (or G-20) heads of governments. These bodies, including the European Commission, are nonpartisan in their composition and involved in transactions behind closed doors that put them by and large outside of the democratic loop of transparency and accountability, as is the case for other instances of multilevel and multi-actor governance that tend to systematically obscure and anonymize the locus of political responsibility (Offe 2009). Public authorities are seen as having lost their grip on key issues of fiscal and budgetary policy, driven instead by rating agencies and the threatening force of the financial markets. Since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s (when symptoms of participatory distortion began to show up in the data), they have also lost much of their control over the quality, price and distribution of public services in the name of efficiency, austerity, privatization, deregulation, private-public partnership, new public management, artificial voucher-driven quasi-markets. As a result, growing numbers of the citizenry (particularly those who are interested in and depend on government social spending and services) have come to understand that partici­ pating in democratic politics is largely a pointless activity. We might speak of a dual control gap: governments lose control over taxation and the financial sector, and in response citizens lose their confidence that the idea of democratic control over government policies is a credible one.

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The obvious question that worries political elites as well as social scientists today is what citizens are likely to do instead. Obviously, it would be risky to expect that citizens’ retreat from politics into a mental state of alienated silence could be a steady state, although the media market does its utmost to make it so. Alternatively, there are four conceivable developments, which commentators and analysts have been debating on the basis of recent political phenomena that can be read as early symptoms. The first is what I call non-institutional “DIY politics” within civil society. Symptoms range from individuals engaging in critical consumption and consumer boycotts, to protest movements such as the Mediterranean indignados, to initiatives of civic engagement that organize through movements, donations and foundations, self-help, and private charity, in part as substitutes for inadequate public services. These forms of political participation, while highly selective in their (largely educated, urban, middle-class) social base, can achieve a great deal of sympathetic public attention and even the rhetorical support of political and economic elites. The second is ephemeral eruptions of mass violence in metropolitan cities, as we have seen in the early part of this century, originating from (mostly) poor urban areas of London, Paris, Athens, and elsewhere. In contrast to the rebellions of 2011 in Cairo and other MENA cities, these eruptions remain politically entirely unfocused and have provided partial cover for the unleashing of acquisitive and aggressive mass instincts. Recent events have put the “return of the violent mob” (Walter 2010: 214) on the social-science agenda. Wolfgang Streeck (2011b: 6) warns “that, where legitimate outlets of political expression are shut down, illegitimate ones may take their place, at potentially very high social and economic cost.” A third alternative is further growth of the right-wing populism that has strongholds in the countries of southeastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece) and has surfaced, to a somewhat lesser extent, in France, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. Key elements of the formula that has been used with remarkable success by rightist populist movements and parties are the strengthening of borders (against foreign goods, foreign migrants, and foreign political influence, e. g. from the EU) as a means to protect the “weak”; the intolerant and often aggressive denial of difference (from ethnic difference to differences of political views and opinions) in the name of ethno-national homogeneity; and the strong reliance on charismatic leaders and successful political entrepreneurs. These parties and movements are the only political agents in the decades since 1990 who have managed to broaden their political base and enhance participation, if not the kind of participation envisaged by liberal democratic theory. Finally, there is the intense, sometimes even desperate search, both in the social sciences (Smith 2005, 2009) and among political parties and their leaders, to

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deepen and enhance political participation through the introduction of new institutional and procedural opportunities that allow and commit people to raise their “voice” more directly, more often, and on more matters than representative institutions and political party competition have so far allowed them to do. While such projects of making democracies more democratic clearly deserve great social scientific attention and imaginative experimentation, political theorists should also look into the social conditions under which interest and political preferences are formed before they are voiced. After all, new procedures may not be sufficient to increase and broaden participation by citizens unless the supply of public policies and its “possibility space,” as perceived by citizens, is prevented from becoming ever more restricted, as in Lindblom’s (1982) “prison” of the market in which the author saw political life incarcerated.

References Bachrach, P. & Baratz, M. S. (1970). Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bartels, L. M. (2008). Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Berger, B. (2011). Attention Deficit Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crouch, C. (2004). Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Dahl, R. A. (1989). Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fishkin, J. S. (1995). The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gallego, A. (2007). Unequal participation in Europe. International Journal of Sociology, 37: 10 – ​25. Honneth, A. (2011). Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Huntington, S. P. (1975). The United States. In: Crozier, M., Huntington, S. P., & Watanuki, J. (eds.) The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press: 59 – ​118. Kohler, U. (2006). Die soziale Ungleichheit der Wahlabstinenz in Europa. In Mer­ kel,  W.  & Alber, J. (eds.) Europas Osterweiterung: Das Ende der Vertiefung ?. WZB-Jahrbuch 2005. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 159 – ​179. Lane, R. E. (1962). Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Lijphart, A. (1997). Unequal participation: Democracy’s unresolved dilemma. American Political Science Review 91(1): 1 – ​14. Lijphart, A. (1998). The Problem of Low and Unequal Voter Turnout – And What We Can Do About It. Working paper. Political Science Series, No. 54. Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies. http://aei.pitt.edu/32418/ (accessed February 29, 2012).

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Lindblom, C. E. (1982). The market as prison. The Journal of Politics 44(2): 324 – ​336. Madsen, D. (1978). A structural approach to the explanation of political efficacy levels under democratic regimes. American Journal of Political Science 22(4): 867 – ​883. Mair, P. (2006). Ruling the void ? The hollowing of Western democracy. New Left Review 42: 25 – ​51. Makszin, K. & Schneider, C. Q. (2010). Education and Participatory Inequalities in Real Existing Democracies: Probing the Effect of Labor Markets on the Qualities of Democracies. CES Papers, Open Forum 2. Marien, S., Hooghe, M., & Quintelier, E. (2010). Inequalities in non-institutionalised forms of political participation: A multi-level analysis of 25 countries. Political Studies 58: 187 – ​213. Markoff, J. (2011). A moving target: Democracy. Archives européennes de sociologie 2: 239 – ​276. Merkel, W. & Petring, A. (2011). Partizipation und Inklusion. In: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (ed.): Demokratie in Deutschland 2011. Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. http://www.demokratie-deutschland-2011.de/common/pdf/Partizipation_und_ Inklusion.pdf (accessed March 1, 2012). Offe, C. (2009). Governance: An “empty signifier” ? Constellations 16(4): 550 – ​562. Offe, C. (2011). Crisis and innovation in liberal democracy: Can deliberation be institutionalized ? Czech Sociological Review 47(3): 447 – ​472. Peterson, S. A. (1984). Privatism and politics: A research note. Political Research Quarterly 37: 483 – ​489. Petring, A. & Merkel, W. (2011). Auf dem Weg zur Zweidrittel-Demokratie. Wege aus der Partizipationskrise. WZB Mitteilungen No. 134. Berlin: WZB. Piven, F. F. & Cloward, R. A. (1988). Why Americans Don’t Vote. New York: Pantheon. Quintelier, E., Hooghe, M., & Marien, S. (2011). The effect of compulsory voting on turnout stratification patterns: A cross-national analysis. International Political Science Review 32(4): 396 – ​416. Römmele, A. & Schober, H. (2010, July 19). Warum die Primarschule in Hamburg ge­ scheitert ist [Online commentary] Die Zeit. Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de on March 1, 2012. Saunders, B. (2011). The democratic turnout “problem”. Political Studies. doi:  10.1111/ j.1467-9248.2011.00914.x Schäfer, A. (2010). Die Folgen sozialer Ungleichheit für die Demokratie in Westeuropa. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 4(1): 131 – ​156. Schäfer, A. (2011a). Der Nichtwähler als Durchschnittsbürger: Ist die sinkende Wahlbeteiligung eine Gefahr für die Demokratie ?. In: Bytzek, E. & Rossteutscher, S. (eds.) Der unbekannte Wähler ? Mythen und Fakten über das Wahlverhalten der Deutschen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 133 – ​154. Schäfer, A. (2011b). Republican Liberty and Compulsory Voting. MPIfG Discussion Paper 11/17. Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Schäfer, A. (2011c). Wahlen und politische Gleichheit. Warum eine sinkende Wahlbeteili­ gung der Demokratie schadet. Paper prepared for the joint conferences of the DVPW, SVWP, and ÖVPW, Basel, January 13 – ​15, 2011.

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Schattschneider, E. E. (1960). The Semi-Sovereign People A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Smith, G. (2005). Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from around the World: A Report for the Power Inquiry. London: Power Inquiry. Smith, G. (2009). Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solt, F. (2008). Economic inequality and democratic political engagement. American Journal of Political Science 52(1): 48 – ​60. Solt, F. (2010). Does Economic Inequality Depress Electoral Participation ? Testing the Schattschneider Hypothesis. Political Behavior 32: 285 – ​301. Streeck, W. (2007). Endgame ? The Fiscal Crisis of the German State. MPIfG Discussion Paper 07/7. Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Streeck, W. (2010). Noch so ein Sieg, und wir sind verloren. Der Nationalstaat nach der Finanzkrise. Leviathan 38(2): 159 – ​173. Streeck, W. (2011a). The crisis of democratic capitalism. New Left Review 71: 5 – ​29. Streeck, W. (2011b). Public Sociology as a Return to Political Economy. Retrieved from http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/streeck-public-sociology-as-a-return-to-political-economy/. Van Biezen, I., Mair, P., & Poguntke, T. (2012). Going, going, … gone ? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research 51: 24 – ​56. Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walter, F. (2010). Vom Milieu zum Parteienstaat. Lebenswelten, Leitfiguren und Politik im historischen Wandel. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Zeit Online. (2011). Verfassungsgericht stoppt Sondergremium zu EFSF-Kontrolle. 28  October 2011. Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/201110/verfassungsgericht-efsf-sondergremium on March 13, 2012.

Teil IV Deliberation

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Micro-aspects of democratic theory: what makes for the deliberative competence of citizens ? (1997)

In this chapter I am concerned with the micro-foundations of democratic politics. The basic unit of the democratic political process is the citizen. The quality of policy decisions and outcomes generated by such regimes, as well as the durability of democratic regimes, will ultimately depend upon the quality of the citizens’ thought and action. To be sure, modern politics is largely a matter of collective representative actors, such as parties and associations. But this fact does not seem to diminish the role of individual citizens, as representative collective actors consist of and depend upon citizens as members, voters, and supporters. As so much depends upon the citizen and his/her competence to adequately perform the citizen role, equally much will also depend on the ways in which the preferences, evaluations, and cognitive orientations that citizens bring to the political process are formed. Civic competence of the sort that is compatible with and sustains democratic institutions, both in terms of the latters’ legitimacy and effectiveness, is neither naturally given nor durable once achieved. Democracies can fail to come into being for lack of appropriate dispositions among citizens, and they can self-destruct because of a decline in civic competence or the breakdown of background conditions that are conducive to it. Becoming a “good” citizen is a demanding project, both for the individuals themselves and for all those professions (such as educators), political elites, and the designers of political institutions involved in the formation of the qualities of citizens. Along the road leading to the formation of a citizen who then plays some “authorizing” role in the conduct of government, there are a number of issues that must be settled. First, there is the question of the reference unit that is adopted by individual agents as guiding their political judgment. This reference unit can be more or less inclusive, ranging from strict concern with the individual himself to the concern with mankind as a whole, with the more likely intermediate reference units of the family, the locality, region, class, occupational group, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_12

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or nation. Second, and after the appropriate reference unit or significant community is chosen, the evaluative question must be settled: is the citizen’s concern with the welfare of the unit, or is it with questions of justice, duty, and obligations ? In other words, what is the appropriate decision criterion, or mix of criteria, according to which political questions are to be approached by the citizen ? Third, knowledge is an important component of the citizenship role. The citizen, in order to adequately perform his role, must be in possession of some knowledge about the outside world, i. e., information concerning available policy choices and their effects. The citizen must also, in addition to an adequate cognitive assessment of the world, be knowledgeable about himself: he must have made up his mind as to which of the possibly conflicting preferences he wishes to follow, thus making sure that “his” will is actually “his own” well-considered preference, the holding and enactment of which will thus not be regretted at a later point or blamed upon some manipulative effort by others. Finally, and as the political action is just a subset of collective action, and collective action just a subset of all action of individual citizens, the citizen needs to avail himself of some cognitive map that allows him to determine whether a problem or issue is actually a “political” one, i. e., one that deserves or requires a worthwhile course of collective action involving political representation and state power, rather than either individual action or associative action within civil society. All these premises (identifications, criteria, knowledge, preferences, and codes) enter into the picture before the political role of the citizen can be enacted; and that role will be performed in more or less adequate and competent ways, i. e., ways conducive to the stability and effectiveness of democratic institutions, depending upon the nature of these rather complex premises. If that much is granted, two questions become central to democratic theory. First, what standards of competence can and must we realistically require of citizens ? Second, what kind of background conditions and institutional frameworks are called for in order to generate this competence and to maintain it over time ? What I intend to do in this chapter is to review some of the answers to these two questions that are being offered in contemporary democratic theory and to explore some of the inherent dilemmas of these answers. All modern theorizing about democracy is self-reflectively divided into three camps. These are (a) the “libertarian” “position emphasizing rights and liberties, state neutrality, and often state minimalism, (b) substantive theories about the common good and the traditions and communal identities from which the obligations of individuals toward the common good derive, and (c) some hybrid “left-liberal” or civic republican position “in between” these two positions which argues that while (b) demands “too much” it is also true that (a) offers “too little.”

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In a shorthand characterization, the last can be described as advocating “less than the ‘good’, but more than the ‘right’.” I will limit myself largely to a confrontation of the first and the third of these positions, the “libertarian” and the “left-liberal,” and their respective requirements and presuppositions concerning the role of the citizen and the criteria of the adequate and competent performance of this role.

The libertarian case In the libertarian tradition, both markets and (democratic) politics can be described and justified as preference-aggregating machines. People are provided with the means of communicating (through money or through the vote) what they prefer most, and the aggregate result is then accepted by the theorist, and eventually by the people themselves, as the optimum of social choice. This is the core of the theory of exogenous preferences, which centers on the freedom of choice according to “given” preferences. These preferences are seen to form the ultimate independent variable of economic and political processes and are advocated as the legitimate ultimate determinants of these processes. The classical Utilitarians believed that there is a fixed set of (in Bentham’s case: fifteen) “simple pleasures” of which all observable preferences, as revealed in action, could be somehow derived. This anthropological assumption has been dropped by today’s neoclassical economists who find it difficult to either descriptively or prescriptively impose any constraints upon the variability of preferences. Having lost their foundation in some construct of human nature, preferences become amorphous by content and a-rational by their origin. In analytical terms, they must be treated as “exogenous,” and in normative terms they must be taken for granted and accepted as they “are,” i. e., as they reveal themselves in behavioral terms; preferences are inherently beyond explanation and evaluation. The only thing we can know about them is that they must be respected as the legitimate expression of a person’s freedom. Citizens cannot be expected to have particular preferences, nor arrive at them in a particular way, in order to qualify as democratically competent citizens. The strength and, at the same time, the controversial nature of this liberal-utilitarian axiom, reside in its negative and polemical implication. Not only does it say that what happens in markets and politics is the aggregate outcome of individual preferences. It also claims as its normative precept that “I” know best what is good for me, whatever it may be, and nobody has the right to interfere with my freedom of choice as long as the latter is made within the limits of the law. “Any rule or command that prohibits a person from choosing some preference order is morally unacceptable […] from the point of view of democracy” (Riker

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1982: 117).1 This is clearly meant to include preference orders which suffer from one of three potential deficiencies: they may be based on demonstrably false assumptions about the world (as in magical thinking), they may immorally disregard the well-being of others (as in racist preferences), or they may be excessively short-sighted and ill-considered. It is hard to specify to what extent preferences and political choices must be “competent” in these three dimensions, i. e., must be fact-regarding (“informed”), other-regarding (“fair”), and future-regarding (adequately “far-sighted”). Consistent libertarians, at any rate, seem to be remarkably tolerant of preferences that exhibit extremely low levels in these three dimensions, perhaps with an implicit reliance on some version of learning theory that suggests that such deficiencies are self-healing. For the bottom line of this approach is something like this. First, it takes a strongly polemical position against all kinds of paternalism and other attempts to dictate or constrain preferences. On a normative plane, the approach is “permissive” to an extreme degree. Second, and on the positive plane, the approach is “agnostic” as to the causes of those preferences that we observe as motivating the behavior of actors; preferences originate from within the individual, and hence nobody other than the individual is causally and also morally responsible for them. Taken together, there is the dual negative proposition that we can neither prescribe nor explain preferences. Of course, the view of preferences as individually given does not preclude the possibility that preferences undergo spontaneous changes. Actors may hit upon experiences, evidences, opportunities, arguments, etc., which may lead them to change their preferences by some form of “learning.” But such learning is in no way to be conditioned or enforced by agents other than the actor himself.2 The only thing that the liberal theorist demands from the holder of preferences is that any individual preference order be transitive (i. e., if a > b and b > c, then also a > c), and perhaps also that different preference orderings are compatible with each other, which is to say that it makes little sense to express a preference for, e. g., higher overall government expenditures and general cuts in taxation. Fur1 Bentham himself coined the term “ipsedixitism” (from ipse dixit) for this doctrine, cf. his Works: vol. III, 293. 2 Note, however, that in politics there is not an automatic mechanism of “punishing” ill-chosen preferences and choices, as there is in markets. For instance, if I stick to a preference for inefficient modes of production, the market will put me out of operation and/or enforce upon me efforts of adaptive learning; it is not clear that such learning pressures operate in politics as well, at least not on the level of the individual voter. This is so because outcomes in politics are too distant in time from the expressed preferences to allow for much learning; also, synergetic effects may make it difficult to detect which preferences of which actors were “mistaken” in view of the outcomes.

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thermore, one might demand, following Gary Becker (1976), that preference orders should be chosen in such a way as to make best use of “consumption capital.” But all these demands are just designed to impose a certain discipline upon action, filtering out the unreflective modes of action that sociologists describe as affective, habitual, or traditional. In no way do they relate to the problem of interindividual compatibility of preferences or their aggregation into some general will. If the conceivable and, by implication, admissible range of preferences is that broad, and if no self-restraint can be expected to govern their formation, the resulting situation is that of a veritable state of nature. Within the libertarian framework, all behavior is driven by preferences, all preferences must be taken as authentic, and all of them are equivalent in the sense that the observer is not entitled to pass judgment as to which preferences are “true” or in any sense worthier than any other preferences. The last of these assumptions implies, apart from its normative agnosticism, that a society can be realistically imagined in which all preferences are in fact recognized as equivalent. That would obviously be a society without any trace of what sociologists and anthropologists understand by “social integration.” But the full extent of the artificiality and the lack of realism of this assumption becomes apparent only if we take into account that “systems” integration is equally absent in such a society. This can be demonstrated in the following way. Following Dworkin, preferences can be subdivided into “personal preferences” and “external preferences,” the former consisting of a ranking of states that affect “me” and the latter of states that affect others as well. External preferences have a relational aspect; they rank states of the world that affect not just “me,” but me in relation to how others are affected. Such external preferences can be located on a scale that extends between the polar cases of “altruism” and “sadism.” On such a scale, the following types may be distinguished: most preferred are outcomes in which a) (all or some) others win at my expense (strong altruism or altruistic redistribution) b) others win regardless of the consequences to me (indifferent altruism) c) others and I win (positive-sum games) d) I win regardless of dire consequences to others (competitive individualism, sauve qui peut) e) others lose even if I do not win (sadism). It appears impossible to conceive of a society (or more precisely: a relatively durable social order) in which case (e) preferences and at least some of the case (d) preferences are admitted as equally worthy of tolerance and recognition as all of the personal preferences and the external preferences of cases (a) to (c). For such

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a society would suffer from symptoms of rampant disorganization – unless, that is, we have strong reasons to believe that “ anti-social” preferences of the types (d) and (e) do not significantly occur in practice. A (deceptive) way out of this dilemma of wishing to insist upon the utilitarian equivalence postulate while still wishing to take into account realistic minimum requirements of a social “order” is suggested by Harsanyi (1977: 647) who proposes to exclude from the universe of preferences “all clearly anti-social preferences, such as sadism, envy, resentment, and malice.” But utilitarian liberalism of the kind we are modeling here has no basis for being consistently selective among preferences, and the attempt to introduce such selectivity in an ad hoc fashion is more a symptom than a cure of its basic deficiency. For, as Fishkin (1988: 170) points out, “this kind of exclusion of some preferences based on our moral evaluation of their appropriateness represents a sharp departure from the utilitarian tradition which has generally avoided specifying the substantive content of preferences.” Thus, libertarian political philosophers seem to be stuck in the dilemma that they must either violate their neutrality postulate concerning preferences or make strongly optimistic, though weakly founded, assumptions concerning the inherent benevolence of human beings. The objection that not all preferences are compatible with the notion of social order or orderly social life is, however, further dealt with by liberals and libertarians by referring to the rule of law and its protection of (inalienable, or at least constitutionally entrenched) rights. The law is invoked to render ineffective those preferences that are considered inimical to social order, e. g., my preference to live by way of theft on your resources rather than my own. (Note, however, that the law that constrains the range of effective preferences is itself contingent upon the aggregate effect of voter preferences, as any “positive” law may by definition undergo change through legislation.) At any rate, within the theoretically limitless universe of possible preferences and at any given point in time, the law defines a range of preferences that actors may well “have,” but are not allowed to enact or pursue, thus leaving a feasible set of non-prohibited preferences. All the preferences, the realization of which is not explicitly prohibited by law, must be recognized and treated as equal in both markets and politics. No one is allowed to censor, manipulate, repress, or privilege certain preferences, unless they are opposed to the rights of particular others (as currently defined by law), as this would amount to paternalism or, still worse, tyranny. Even this modified position is hardly tenable. This is so for the two reasons that preferences, even within this remaining permissible set, (a) are evaluated and (b) are (and are known to be) caused, both of which qualities make it difficult to relate to preferences as something being “given” from within the individual, be it in analytical or normative terms. Let me elaborate on these two points.

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(i) Approved vs. disapproved preferences. First, it must be claimed to be a universal social fact that people take an evaluative perspective on other peoples’ (as well as their own, see below) preferences. Members of social collectivities – ranging from families to nations and beyond – prefer other members to have certain preferences and more or less strongly object to the “bad tastes” of having other than the preferred ones. They develop and apply fairly precise notions on whether preferences are “virtuous,” “acceptable,” “unreasonable,” “alien,” etc. The universe of tastes that occur in a society is always embedded into a hierarchic (though normally contested) code of “good” vs. “bad” tastes. Such approval or disapproval of the preferences of others is not only (and not always) due to the negative or positive externalities that the pursuit of a particular set of preferences may (be believed to) entail. Even those preferences (some might even say: precisely those preferences) that do not conceivably lead to any violation of interests of others, such as some sexual, religious, or esthetic preferences, may be subject to disapproval. Seen from the point of view of individual actors, preferences are held, revealed, and pursued by them in the awareness that they are evaluated, approvingly or disapprovingly, by at least some (in that sense “relevant”) others. Strict neutrality (of the state) may be desirable from the point of view of political theory, but it is most certainly not a fact of social life and its pervasive limits of toleration of difference. In analytically exogenizing preferences as “given” and immune from social evaluation, economists abstract from this phenomenological reality that preferences are in fact inherently the object of the social evaluation by others. Economists and political theorists who operate on the assumption that “all preferences must equally be respected” and similar heroic abstractions should at least show some awareness of the fact that this neutrality is not widely shared in any society. A society in which any legally non-prohibited preference would be equally tolerated, permitted, and considered worthy of the same measure of respect as any alternative preference (if only it does not violate the rights of others !) is (perhaps) a libertarian Utopia, but not an observable reality anywhere. Arguably, it would still be a contradiction in terms, as it amounts to the notion of a “society” without social norms (or conflicting sets of social norms) which serve as evaluative criteria for the preferences actors pursue and which are known by actors as such criteria. (ii) Causal knowledge about the origin of preferences. Nor is it, secondly, plau-

sible to insist upon the a-rational and individual nature of preferences. After all, preferences that we observe are by no means randomly distributed across historical time and social space. In fact, we can fairly reliably predict at least some of the preferences of a person if we know his or her family background, national identity, economic position, associative involvement, age group, educational background, etc. Preferences emerge from and are shaped by a formative context, or

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background conditions. The hardly controversial sociological fact is that preferences are, among other things, contingent upon the kind and amount of information to which a person is exposed. These contexts are not just accidental to or distorting of individually given preferences; they are necessary background conditions in the absence of which individuals can be shown to be unable to develop any preferences at all, i. e., fail to become individuals. This is illustrated by the fact that anomic conditions of social change, such as they are experienced, for instance, after the breakdown of state socialist regimes, leave many individuals profoundly uncertain about the question what their political preferences and interests “are.” Furthermore, preferences emerge contingent upon the institutional and other opportunities provided for their realization. For instance, in the absence of museums it is hard to imagine that a person develops a preference for impressionist over romantic paintings. Thus, information, opportunities, and structural settings, as well as cultural traditions, will allow us not only to explain and predict, but at least to some extent also change the shape and distribution of preferences, thus rendering implausible the “agnostic” and “exogenizing” libertarian perspective.

Left-liberal responses Taken together, these two objections to exogenous preference theory appear to lend support to the following activist-interventionist syllogism of “preference engineering”: 1) as “all of us” approve of certain preferences of others and disapprove of other preferences, and 2) as we know that preferences are malleable and can be changed by manipulating their causal determinants, 3) there is nothing wrong with trying to manipulate, rather than treating and respect as “given,” preferences by changing their causes, thereby optimizing the stock of existing preferences. In the words of Cass Sunstein (1991: 10): “Respect for preferences that have resulted from unjust background conditions […] hardly appears the proper course for a liberal democracy.” Such conclusions go evidently much too far from a libertarian point of view. The libertarian, as I model the position here, is well prepared to assent to the prohibition of that segment of preferences that, if permitted, would turn out, according to the preferences and insights of constitution makers and legislators, to be inimical to social order and peaceful civil life. But the remaining feasible set should not be constrained further – neither by moral considerations, nor social norms of

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approval or disapproval, nor the practical application of causal knowledge about what determines preferences and how a different set of preferences within parts or all of the population might be engineered. Although most theorists and certainly many citizens share the intuition that something must still be wrong with this theory of state neutrality, negative political freedom, moral relativism, and abstract individualism, an alternative is less well formulated and less easy to come by – unless, that is, we are willing to resurrect “given” communal traditions, religious or otherwise, as binding and attach to them a somewhat fictitious authority. The key problem of contemporary leftliberal political theorizing is to develop arguments which, while respecting individual freedom of preference formation and the pursuit of preferences in the realms of markets, politics, and private life, also provide justification for a wide range of taste-shaping and taste-discriminating interventions by democratic governments which are seen as valuable for themselves or instrumentally indispensable for the sake of maintaining and furthering such collective values as solidarity, welfare, autonomy, deliberation, and democracy itself. The intuition that those authors start with, which I group together here under the name of “left-liberalism,” is derived from the writings of Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. It consists, in the words of Kymlicka (1989: 19), in the belief “that people not only want to act on their choices, they also want to get those choices right.” But who tells them what the right choices are ? As no political authority is entitled to do so, the citizen him/herself will have to be involved in a process of continuous self-evaluation and self-examination of choices. The inner split within the citizen, the separation of the examiner and the examined that is suggested by the idea of self-examination leads to a notion of a “multiple self.” The person is envisaged as a unit that consists of different departments or hierarchical levels, one of them specializing in making choices according to preferences and the other in evaluating and perhaps rejecting the choices made in the name of second-order preferences concerning the “right” choices. To be precise, this ideal does not derive from any substantive notion about what the criteria (such as solidarity and justice) of self-evaluation should or would be, and their desirability for “everyone else.” The ideal is rather supposed to be the fulfillment of the actor’s own desire “to get those choices right,” his interest in his autonomy. But it is hardly realistic to assume that this happy coincidence of citizens making free choices and citizens making (what they themselves desire to be able to consider as) right choices were an automatic occurrence. The potential for critical and conceivably painful self-examination must be encouraged and assisted, and conditions must be created under which this dynamic of preference development is most likely to unfold. What are these formative conditions and mechanisms, and can they at all be intentionally created ? I now want to explore the burdens of argument that such

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an “activist” approach to preferences must shoulder. According to this approach, preferences are no longer treated as exogenous and given, but rather as malleable and subject to various kinds of social and political formative mechanisms through which the individuals’ capacity for self-examination is enhanced. If preferences are thus to be seen as the raw material of social and political life, who is entitled to self-consciously shape and transform them, and on the grounds of which kind of justification, by what means, and within which limits ? It is this set of questions to which I now turn. A representative example of the state of the art of dealing with these thorny questions is an essay by the legal scholar and philosopher Cass Sunstein (1991). It starts with the recognition of the fact that modern societies are “modern” exactly in the sense that the claim to a monopolistic definition of “good” preferences, be it based upon religious or other doctrines, has evaporated. “A constitutional democracy should not be self-consciously concerned, in a general and comprehensive way, with the souls of its citizens” (1991: 34). As conceptions of the common good diverge and cannot be brought into a hierarchical order, modern societies are liberal by default. More seriously, not only has the authority disappeared to tell the “true” conception of the good from other conceptions of the good, but also the authority to determine whether some set of opinion and behavior on the part of a social agent should at all pass for a particular “conception of the good,” or whether it is simply a manifestation of selfish, myopic, and opportunistic private interests. There are two questions here that must be distinguished. They can be depicted on a horizontal and a vertical axis. The horizontal dimension represents the problem of the (as left-liberals would argue, perfectly) legitimate plurality of conceptions of the common good. The vertical dimension measures formal qualities of political preferences, demands, or proposals. At the one extreme of this latter scale is a type of preferences that can seriously lay claim to being a thoroughly considered and deliberatively explored conception of the good, while at the other extreme we find utterances of political preferences which are just dressing up as having anything to do with concerns about the public good, while in actuality being inspired by nothing but private self-interest or the unenlightened and capricious picking of preferred courses of action. On the horizontal dimension, propositions of the following kind would be represented: “Conduct of life X is morally better than conduct of life Y.” On the vertical axis, we deal with this kind of propositions: “Procedure A to arrive at preferences and choices is better than procedure B.” The first dimension, as it were, concerns the outcome of the debate, and the second the level of the debate. While it is probably fair to say that left-liberals are “liberal” (i. e., take a non-discriminatory position, or do not pretend to be able to rank in somehow binding ways X and Y) in the first dimension, as they recognize and respect various conceptions of the good as equally worthy of re-

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spect and consideration in a pluralist society, they are still by no means neutral concerning procedural qualities of the debate itself (i. e., they do most emphatically rank A over B). In contrast, “libertarians” are, in addition, non-discriminatory in the vertical dimension, too. The latter do not claim to have an analytical procedure to determine (and hence dismiss the question as irrelevant) whether a set of preferences can count as an instance of (granted, the many conceivable) seriously reasoned and autonomously formed conceptions of the good or whether it is just the outcome of thoughtless, irresponsible, and opportunistic inclinations. Libertarians, that is to say, would almost instinctively suspect efforts to introduce that vertical distinction and, by implication, to “raise the level of the debate,” as just a pretext to manipulating it and leading it toward a preconceived substantive outcome, thus violating the standards of neutrality and freedom. Left-liberals take an uneasy position on preferences in general (and political preferences in specific) that can be described, as suggested above, as “less than the ‘good’, but more than the ‘right’.” The “good,” in a world of “ethical irrationalism” (Max Weber) is not only hard to define, but also full of dangerous consequences in case it is believed to be identifiable and if it subsequently gains control over public policies (cf. Goodin 1992: chapter 9). In other words, while rejecting “objective collective interests” or the “common good,” substantively defined, as rather meaningless (as well as potentially dangerous) constructs that also include some of the precepts of communitarian political theorists, left-liberals still wish to insist that citizens must be called upon to elevate their preferences beyond the level of unreflective private desires before they deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate inputs of the political process, the right of any person to speak freely notwithstanding. “Collective decision-making ought to be different from bargaining, contracting, and other market type interactions” (Cohen 1989: 17). It is, they claim, exactly the vicissitude of the sphere of politics that not every expression of preferences can be granted equal dignity, while in markets every dollar carries equal weight, whether it is spent by the most careless or the most sophisticated consumer. Although we cannot, contra communitarian or neo-Aristotelian positions, acquire certainty about what is good in substantive terms, we can well be certain, contra the libertarians, that no political preference deserves to be taken seriously unless there is some evidence that it has been processed and supposedly enriched through efforts such as self-examination, reflection, and deliberation which is called for in order to make it respectable as “serious,” i. e., autonomously arrived at. The object of this deliberation is a “public conception of common good” (Cohen 1989: 19), which differs from the strategic achievement of mutual advantage in that the latter, but not the former, may well involve exploitative disadvantages strategically imposed upon third parties within the collectivity. As we have lost solid substantive

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criteria of good politics, what we must insist upon all the more strictly and rigorously are those formal qualities of political communication and preference formation. Though no one has the authority to determine what the common good is, we still can insist, without violating liberal principles of freedom, that inputs into the political process pass a rigorous test of the formal qualities of being some version of the common good. Correspondingly, a good citizen is not defined by what his desires are, but how he has arrived at his desires and how seriously he has weighed them against other desires of his own and the desires of others in essence: how believably he is guided by the second-order desire to pursue “right” desires. The appeal of this intermediary position in democratic theory is significantly increased if it is complemented by arguments effectively demonstrating that either of the two contenders amounts to a veritable impossibility. Concerning liberalism, the argument (mainly derived from the debate dating back to Arrow’s social choice theory) is the following (cf. Miller 1993: 78 – 81). Even if (and especially if) all preferences are admitted to the democratic aggregating game, there is no uniquely fair and objectively adequate rule by which these preferences could in fact be aggregated. Whether we pick majoritarian or proportional procedures, chances are that we get either less or more than the one and only “will of the people,” or its collective preference. And even if there were an objective and unobjectionable aggregating rule, it would not be strategy-proof, as it would provide both the opportunity and a strong incentive to misreveal preferences in order to make an option (and the associated distribution of costs) win that would lose in case everyone voted sincerely. As a result of this exercise in social choice theory, we are left with the sobering conclusion that democracy as a pure aggregating machinery of “given” individual preferences is a logical impossibility. “Social choice theory seems to undermine the liberal view of democracy in a systematic way” (Miller 1993: 80). For it would suffer, should it ever be seriously applied, from a dual arbitrariness. First, the arbitrariness in the choice of aggregation rules (none of which is self-evidently fairer than conceivable alternatives, and none of which can be selected by democratic means for logical reasons, as the aggregation rules must be fixed before democracy, as it were, “can begin”) and, second, the (strategic) arbitrariness in the individual voter’s revelation of his or her preferences under these aggregation rules. As a result, if only “given” preferences are to count in politics, in fact other things than these preferences will actually count ! Unqualified libertarian democracy is not a deficient or second-best solution – it is no solution at all. No less compelling is the argument against “substantive” conceptions of the good and the belief in the feasibility of a democratic process that would aim at some “one best way” of solving a problem or even “the true common good” to be revealed by the vote of the people (or the decision made by its avant-garde). All

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modern political theory must come to terms with what Weber termed the ethical irrationality of the world, or the basic contestability of any public policy decision and the value premises from which it derives. “Epistemic” theories of the common good, or anti-relativist theories based on some substantive conception of the moral and political good, presuppose the existence of “a correct judgment about what a collective ought to do” (Coleman and Ferejohn 1986: 16), and the search for a uniquely correct judgment simply does not appear very promising in modern societies, even if the search is undertaken in the name of finding not one definition of the common good that is valid for all of mankind, but in the more modest spirit of finding one particular set of values that should govern the public and private life of one particular political community. But still, public policy decisions must be made, and on a wider range of issues and with more direct consequences for the life of citizens than ever. How can such decisions be defended, and how can citizens be justly expected to comply with them ? What are, in other words, the sources of legitimacy of political decisions ? The only conceivable answer is that these decisions follow from a serious, open, public, exchange of arguments in which not “given” and unrefined preferences, but careful and informed deliberations are the basis for a judgment supported by all or by a majority. Again, formal qualities of the debates leading to decisions provide the latter with legitimacy, not the brute exercise of individual freedom or the invocation of some authoritative doctrine or tradition. To be sure, these are arguments not for the feasibility and justification of the “intermediate” democratic position that we have termed “left-liberal”, but against its two major competitors. If we want to defend a position that defines demanding requirements as to how citizens should arrive at and hold their preferences in order to be recognized as worthy citizens, and how these preferences should be processed in order to count, there are obviously a number of difficult arguments that need to be made. If we were to adopt the intermediate position, two weighty consequences seem to follow, one for policy and one for politics. As far as public policies are concerned, political authorities can derive a mandate from the deliberation principle that some preferences, although they are strongly held by private actors in some fields of public policy, do not deserve to be admitted to the policy-making arena, as they fall, as narrow-minded “special interest groups” as opposed to encompassing and “responsible representative collective actors”, under the verdict of insufficient deliberation. Whenever policy makers hit upon preferences that they find impossible to accept as serious, well-considered, or authentic preferences resulting from autonomous choice, they may feel entitled to adopt taste changing policies designed to eradicate “bad tastes” through education programs, media policies, the imposition of punishments and rewards, propaganda, prohibition, etc. As far

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as politics is concerned, an analogous line of thought would suggest that existing preferences must not only be aggregated through the channels of collective choice, but also refined and “laundered” in the process through appropriate mechanisms of debate, confrontation, justification, testing, publicity. For instance, in order to screen out what in today’s terminology would be named “populism,” the makers of the German Constitution have thought it wise to assign a special supervisory role to the (partly state-financed) political parties in forming the “will of the people.” Taken together, these two considerations would suggest an activist approach to the formation of political preferences. Far from being the ultimate determinant and independent variable of political life, they can and in fact must be shaped through public policies, and they must be selectively, if certainly not arbitrarily, admitted to the political process according to some standard of worthiness. But note that these institutional designs aimed at screening out “special interests” and “populist demagogues,” while emphasizing the distinction (depicted by our vertical axis) between ill-considered and well-considered preferences and the greater worthiness of the latter, still do not rely on the liberal principle of self-examination of preferences; for the examining is done by elites and institutional arrangements and traditions, not individual and collective actors themselves. This automatically raises the question of who should be in charge of the task of taste-shaping and preference selection ? These practices of intentional taste-shaping raise concerns about standards of political liberty as much as concerns about political equality, as people might ask why it is that some political preferences pass as sufficiently refined while others are, perhaps in ways that appear arbitrary, rejected as insufficiently reflective. What, then, are conceivable reasons for adopting, on the part of political elites, what I have called activist approaches to the formation of preferences, be it by either inculcating desired preferences through educational and media policies or by discriminating against holders or representative associations of undesired ones ? One justification for installing preference filters in policy and politics can either be derived from the claim that the causal determinants of collectively undesired preferences are unjust and hence call for improvement through compensatory educational efforts for justice-related reasons, or that the consequences of these causes, namely the undesired preferences (such as addiction) are themselves the causes of unjust negative externalities and hence call for correction for consequentialist reasons. At any rate, Sunstein (1991: 5) finds the notion dubious “that a democratic government ought to respect private desires and beliefs in all or almost all contexts.” In some contexts, that is, we seem to be entitled to take a discriminating position to other peoples’ preferences. The cases in which good reasons seem present for doing so, as he demonstrates, are in fact numerous.

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First, many preferences are mere reflections or derivations of existing opportunities and incentives, and these premises are in part put in place through legislation and other acts of government itself. After the government has licensed gambling, it also has the right to regulate access to it, for instance by age. When, as in this case, preferences are an artefact of legal rules which condition the coming-into-being of these preferences, the rules cannot be justified by reference to preference (Sunstein 1991: 8). Second, some preferences are contingent upon unjust conditions that could have been changed by government action, but which government has so far failed to change. It makes perfect sense to claim that such preferences, e. g., the widespread preference of young people from poor minority neighborhoods to drop out from high school rather than finishing it, should not be taken as given, as “respect for preferences that have resulted from unjust background conditions [which have prevailed so far due to government inaction, we might add] and that will lead to human deprivation or misery hardly appears the proper course for a liberal democracy” (Sunstein 1991: 10). Third, all preference phenomena of addiction, akrasia, myopia, and future discounting seem to call for the determinate overriding of preferences – not only because some of these preferences might arguably derive from unjust background conditions, but because they violate the own best long-term interests of people who pursue them. Inversely, counter preferential policies are also mandated when not only collective “bads” are to be prevented, but also collective goods are to be generated such as would normally be insufficiently appreciated as such – as in the case of subsidies for arts and history museums and other “merit goods,” including mandatory social insurance. Fourth, legitimate reasons for making an effort to change preferences, change the background conditions, or curtail the rights to pursue them may be present if the uninhibited pursuit of such preferences will result in damage inflicted upon others, as in the widely used paradigm cases of pornography, the use of free speech for racist purposes, and violence in the media. Finally, counter-preferential government action appears unproblematic if contributions to the production of collective goods must be authoritatively enforced because there is, as in the case of taxation and the enforcement of other laws, no spontaneously agreed-upon solution to collective goods problems. These arguments provide reasons for why political elites can legitimately ignore or override even those preferences the pursuit of which is not contrary to the law. But the validity of the five arguments which provide a rather compelling license for governmental preference overriding or preference shaping is different from a sixth argument. So far, we have been considering “welfarist” arguments, which basically say that it is demonstrably “better” for people if some of their pref-

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erences are made the object of selective or even taste-changing policies or if they are altogether banned from the policy process. Now a new type of argument is being employed, an argument which claims that, even in the absence of unjust causes or undesirable consequences of empirical preferences, only those preferences deserve to be respected which flow from a deliberative and reflective process of autonomous preference formation. Such autonomous preference formation is said to flow from decisions “reached with a full and vivid awareness of available opportunities, with reference to all relevant information, and without illegitimate or excessive constraints on the process of preference formation” (Sunstein 1991: 11). This proposition, to put it mildly, is demanding a lot, namely preferential treatment in the political process of those citizens who are accomplished in the practice of autonomy and republican virtue, or who have built for themselves the reputation of such accomplishment. It also excludes a lot, namely all those whose preferences, as registered both in markets and in democratic politics, are (or at any rate can be suspected to be) of a more mundane nature, having to do with private life and the satisfaction of private desires and subjective welfare. The proposition thus seems vulnerable to the charge of a moralizing republican elitism due to the privileged role it assigns to an elite of politically virtuous republican aristocrats whose public-spirited judgments are beyond the suspicion of petty interest politics. As Sunstein states: “Consideration of autonomy will argue powerfully against taking preferences as the basis for social choice” (1991: 12). The thrust of this argument seems to be that all those preferences might be censored or ignored which do not result from a formative process in which highly reflective and autonomous self-censorship plays a prominent role. This appears to leave the author in need of an argument pointing out what he would prefer to enter into social choice other than preferences. It is as if citizens were to be divided into two classes – the many striving after the satisfaction of their preferences and the few (“more fundamentally”) trying “to ensure their autonomy … in the process of preference formation” (Sunstein 1991: 12). Cohen anticipates this kind of objection (which he terms “sectarianism”, 1989: 27 ff.) and tries to refute it. A political conception, in his view, would be “objectionably sectarian only if its justification [emphasis in original] depends on a particular view of the human good […] [or] a conception of the proper conduct of life,” but not so if it just favors the ideal of active citizenship. I read this to mean, using the above horizontal/vertical metaphor: as long as we do not fix a point on the horizontal axis, we may still fix a lower limit on the vertical axis, without being “objectionably sectarian” – the obvious implication of this phrase being that there could be such a thing as unobjectionable sectarianism. What worries me in these formulations is the apparent transition that is being made by the author from a (“welfarist”) censorship over those preferences that are causally constrained or less than rational in terms of their consequences (for the

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actor himself or other actors), and which for that reason must be either changed or ignored, to a critique of preferences due to their origin from conditions other than those that can be unequivocally considered as fulfilling demanding standards of “deliberation,” “autonomy,” and “collective self-determination.” No doubt, as it is imprudent in terms of individual and collective welfare to pursue preferences that violate standards of welfare, government is free to ignore or even actively try to change such preferences. But is this also true regarding preferences which are quite neutral in terms of their welfare effects, but just happen to differ from those that disinterested and virtuous citizens might adopt as the outcome of a deliberative collective judgment ? I doubt it. My reasons for this doubt are twofold. First, the attempted analytical uncoupling of the “prepolitical desires” of the bourgeois from the “collective judgment” of the citoyen, as well as the proposal to make public policies contingent upon the latter alone, is exclusive. Perhaps for lack of inclination or resources (such as time), some people (arguably a majority) will not only fail to pass the test of the reflective making of “collective judgments”; they will not even, or so the libertarian theorist will be inclined to argue, develop an adequate understanding, taste, or ambition for that ideal – and still insist that their voices, though representing their possibly unrefined and “prepolitical” desires, be heard in politics. Conversely, they will certainly resist, invoking egalitarian democratic rights and principles, the division of the citizenry into “worthy” and “unworthy” ones. Second, apart from being anti-egalitarian, the division of the universe of human preferences into those that are “prepolitical” and those that originate from “citizens” in the fullest sense of the word is itself a somewhat arbitrary intellectual operation that does not appear to justify the serious consequences attached to it. The underlying criterion of adequate citizenship competence lacks the precision that we would like to see if so much comes to depend on it. For instance, Sunstein declares it an indicator of citizen competence and virtue if “people seek […] to bring about a social state that they consider to be in some sense higher than what emerges from market ordering” (1991: 15). Another criterion is the presence of “altruistic or other-regarding desires.” Thirdly, people qualify as citizens if they “have wishes about their wishes” (i. e., meta-preferences). And finally, they must be capable and willing to engage in precommitments. The problem with this checklist is that it is only on the basis of additional criteria or insights that it can conceivably help us to tell the “citoyen” (or citoyen-like preferences) from the “bourgeois”. For instance, it may be mandated by the most unscrupulous pursuit of “prepolitical desires,” such as the desire to extract monopoly rents through the formation of a cartel, to engage in elaborate precommitments in order to avert defection of the members of the cartel. Upon closer inspection, the criteria that Sunstein offers do not really help us to tell dismissible “selfish” from truly and virtuously “polit-

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ical” preferences – without implicitly relying on additional criteria, perhaps even of a substantive sort. And whose right it should be to establish and apply such additional criteria (such as, in the German case of conflicts concerning civil service Berufsverbote, or ban on public sector employment, the requirement of a “commitment to the free democratic basic order”) is again an open question. The standard response to this liberal dilemma which also Sunstein endorses is educational. On the one hand, or so we can state the dilemma, not all preferences can count equally. But on the other, nobody can claim the authority to privilege those that count (because they derive from the virtues of the citizen) over those that do not because they are selfish and “prepolitical.” The solution is perfection through compulsory education, including education in the rights and obligations of citizens. Thus, Sunstein advocates “a mild form of liberal perfectionism. Such a system would see the inculcation of critical and disparate attitudes towards prevailing conceptions of the good as part of the framework of liberal democracy. Liberal education is of course the principal locus of this concern” (1991: 20). Again, the objection to this solution is twofold. On the one hand, a strong version of civic education may do “too much,” i. e., turn into some form of indoctrination rather than stimulate the capacity for autonomous judgment. More relevant is probably the other objection, which, however, may apply at the same time: it may do too little, as formal schooling competes with a variety of other agents of political socialization, such as parents, peer groups, the media, the market, and representative political actors themselves, and not all of them can be trusted to adhere to the ideal of deliberative preference formation. In a society in which, as in the US, average twelve-year-olds have spent more time in front of the TV set than in the classroom, the potential of formal schooling for developing demanding citizenship competences may well be questioned. Civic education is also likely to do “too little” because, as it is limited to a relatively short and early period of the life course, its effects are likely to be superseded in adult life by other and more durable formative effects. There seems to be a further bifurcation here within the discourse of contemporary democratic theory. The first bifurcation is that between libertarian and left-liberal perspectives, with the latter introducing the standard of reflectiveness, deliberation, and self-examination into the prerequisites of democracy, while the former takes preferences at face value. Now the second bifurcation is between those that give this distinction of “raw” vs. “deliberative” preferences an elitist, educational, and moralizing twist, while more democratic and universalist approaches remain underexplored. To be sure, an alternative to left-liberal republican elitism is not readily available. It would consist in the design and strengthening of institutions that effectively transform the privilege of civic-republican elites into a social and mental property shared by all citizens. Given this theoretical perspective, the

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unresolved design problem is to devise institutional arrangements which would provide both the opportunity and the encouragement “to get their choices right” and thus to fulfill their interest in autonomy not just to reflective elites with an inherited taste for deliberation, but to the citizenry as a whole.

Institutional background conditions favoring a taste for deliberation ? What the ideal deliberative procedure (Cohen 1989: 21) requires the citizens to accomplish is exceedingly demanding. They must develop certain commitments and attitudes and must then act in accordance with these mental routines of preference formation. “They share […] a commitment to coordinating their activities within institutions that make deliberation possible […] For them, free deliberation among equals is the basis of legitimacy.” At the same time, “they have divergent aims, and do not think that some particular set of preferences, convictions or ideals is mandatory […] The participants regard themselves as bound only by the results of their deliberation […] Their consideration of proposals is not constrained by the authority of prior norms or requirements” (1989: 21 – ​2). They are also expected to be able to resist the omnipresent temptation “to disguise personal or class advantage as the common advantage” (1989: 24). The preferences that they avow must be of a quite uncommon sort in that they must be autonomously formed and self-consciously based on principles, that is, neither “adaptive” nor reflexively fatalistic (in which case, termed “accommodationist” by Cohen (1989: 25), the logic would be something like “I know that it is wrong, but I also know that I cannot change a world that leaves me no other options than doing the wrong thing”). Even if it were agreed that the ideal of a deliberative democracy is the only consistent model of democracy applicable to a modern (i. e., pluralistic or inhomogeneous) society, as its two competitors, libertarian democracy and substantive definition of the common good, must fail for the reasons given above, it does not follow that the only remaining model is in fact the one that actually can be implemented. The difficulties that stand in the way of its realization may be simply too great, or the means and ways to overcome these difficulties insufficiently known or tested. To be sure, acting according to the demanding standards of deliberative political action may be intrinsically rewarding for the individual citizen who derives some “process benefit” from doing so, but it also involves costs and risks for him or her. This style of behavior has collective good qualities in that if “I” am the only one to play by the rules of this deliberative mode of political participation, while “everyone else” pursues his or her private preferences, I find myself in the

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worst possible position: not only will the deliberative discovery and implementation of the common good not be served, but also my private well-being will suffer in the process, due to the costs of missed opportunities. Thus, deliberative practices make sense only if they are widely adopted; however, if they are as demanding as we have reason to imagine they are, they are quite unlikely to be that widely adopted. If everyone thinks that everyone else is unlikely to adopt the deliberative mode of acting in politics and that, moreover, both the endurance and the sincerity of those who have (or pretend to have) adopted it is deemed questionable, this perceived unlikelihood of the deliberative mode becomes virtually self-fulfilling. With these considerations in mind, the (enlightened) libertarian would conclude that the left liberal deliberative democrat’s plans do make a lot of sense in theory, but not so in practice, as it amounts to asking too much from the ordinary holders of preferences. What I am now interested in is the range of responses available to the left-liberal democrat who is also, at the same time, aware of the less attractive features of civic republican elitism. The burden of proof he must accept concerns the realism of both the necessary and the sufficient conditions of the deliberative mode of arriving at and “having” preferences. The necessary conditions are relatively easy to prove. Citizens must consciously pursue their desire of ” getting their choices right” through a continuous examination of their preferences. The sufficient conditions are harder to specify. They involve cultural/religious, economic, and institutional background conditions that are conducive to the activation of multilayered, complex, or multireferential preference structures. Focusing on institutions, Cohen (1989: 26) emphasizes that “a central aim in the deliberative conception is to specify the institutional preconditions for deliberative decision-making.” Thus, he calls for “deliberative institutions” which “would make deliberation possible.” He insists that it would be an error to believe that “free deliberation could proceed in the absence of appropriate institutions,” as “the institutions themselves must provide the framework for the formation of will.” Similarly, it is claimed that the citizen cannot achieve adequate democratic competence by his or her own means, i. e., in the absence of supportive background conditions: Normative individuation requires supportive context. To reestablish the foundations of normative individuality in self-knowledge, self-identification, and self-responsibility, it is imperative to strengthen the “intermediate associations” that buffer individuals against the conditioning effects of impersonal association-at-large (Norton 1991: 155).

When writing on political life in North America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville specified the institutional factors that were conducive to the civic spirit prevailing in the North American settler society: democratic equality, strong local govern-

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ment, and also religious traditions transferred from the Old Continent. The author was himself aware of the ambiguities of some of these background conditions that would subvert, as he feared, rather than maintain those aristocratic virtues within a democratic setting. But today, within urban, open, highly stratified, mass media-mediated, bureaucratic modern (or “post-modern”) societies we have even less of a tested answer than Tocqueville as to what structural and institutional conditions provide the most fertile ground for the habits of heart and mind that would provide for a mass base of the democratic form of government. Note that we have now come full circle. For we are now focusing upon, as it were, the macro-foundations of the micro-foundations of democracy, namely democratic citizen competence. In conclusion, I wish to discuss some of the quite ambiguous, features of the associational and institutional preconditions to which a decisive role is assigned by various theorists in fostering and supporting adequate citizen competence. On the one hand, the “good” citizen is seen to be the “embedded” citizen who has been, from his early childhood on, exposed to the formative impact of communal and associational ties and traditions that have taught him his obligations to his fellow citizens as well as the practice of taking into account, in a benevolent, cooperative, and deliberative spirit, their interests and potentially conflicting points of view. Family ties, civic associations, local political systems, religious, ethnic, and cultural communities are seen to perform this indispensable function of public-regarding and eventually “republican” political socialization. On the other hand, this associational and communitarian approach to the problem of citizen competence encounters the dual objection of lack of realism of its premises and of undesirability of its consequences. In a nutshell, the presence of the associational conditions mentioned before cannot be presupposed in “modern” (and even less so in “post-modern”) societies; and even where they are found to be present, they operate in much less attractive ways than envisaged by the above assumptions concerning their enabling and competence-fostering effects. As to the first of these two objections, the history of liberal political theory has clearly abandoned the early contractarian conceptions of an explicitly constituted political community to the more modern and individualist conception of systemic integration that operates “behind the back” of individuals, namely through the anonymous and impersonal forces of the market and the law and its enforcement. At the same time, self-consciously constituted communities capable of inculcating the republican virtues of deliberation and benevolence are no longer reckoned with. As to the second objection, associations and primordial communities, to the extent they survive the disorganizing process of individualization and rationalization, are discredited for their inherent propensity to cultivate not civic virtues, but, to the contrary, collective selfishness, particularism, or “amoral familism.” They

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obstruct the proper course of democratic government, operate as exploitative coalitions, or can easily give rise to exclusive, xenophobic, and authoritarian forms of the exercise of political power. Which leaves us with the difficult task to specify in theory – and study in empirical and practical terms – those seemingly rare hybrids of associative institutions that (a) do have the potential for cultivating democratic citizenship competence and that (b) are sufficiently available and viable under the structural and functional conditions and requirements of “modern” societies. The nature and viability of such supportive institutional background conditions is an open question of democratic theory, as well as, I wish to submit, its most important one. Instead of trying to answer it in any conclusive way, let me end with a conjecture about what kinds of association are plausible candidates for the role of catalysts of civic virtues in democratic participation. Associations can be analyzed in terms of two questions. First, open vs. rigid criteria of membership: are individual citizens free to enter the association, regardless of “primordial” characteristics and their location within the matrix of societal division of labor, and correspondingly to leave them at will ? Second, hierarchical vs. discursive formation of consensus: is agreement authoritatively enforced or is it defined (and continuously changed) through arguing and debate, in the course of which the leadership of the association itself is held accountable for its course of action ? The rather unsurprising hypothesis that is suggested by the combination of these two variables is that those associational forms are more promising as catalysts of demanding versions of preference formation than any of their alternatives in which openness of membership and discursive forms of consensus building are combined.

References Arrow, Kenneth J. Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd edn. New York: Wiley, 1963. Becker, Gary. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Bentham, Jeremy. Works. Edinburg: 1834 – ​1843. Cohen, Joshua. “Deliberation and democratic legitimacy”, in A. Hamlin and Philip Petit (eds.)., The Good Polity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Coleman, Jules L. and John Ferejohn. “Democracy and social choice”, ethics 97 (1989), 6 – ​25. Drysek, John. Discursive Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Fishkin, James S. “Reconstructing the social contract: towards a new liberal theory.” Ms, Stanford, 1988. Goodin, Robert E. Motivating Political Morality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

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Harsanyi, John C. “Morality and the theory of rational behavior”, Social Research 44 (1977), No. 4, 623 – ​656. Kymlicka, Will. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Manin, Bernard. “On legitimacy and political deliberation”, Political Theory 15 (1987), 338 – ​368. Miller, David. “Deliberative democracy and social choice”, in David Held (ed.) Prospects for Democracy. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Norton, David L. Democracy and Moral Development. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Riker, William H. Liberalism against Populism. San Francisco: Freeman, 1982. Sunstein, Cass. “Preferences and politics”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991). No. 1, 3 – ​34.

Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalized ? (2011)

Liberal democracies, and by far not just the new ones among them, are not functioning well. While there is no realistic and normatively respectable alternative to liberal democracy in sight, the widely observed decline of democratic politics, as well as state policies under democracy, provides reasons for concern. This concern is a challenge for sociologically informed political theorists to come up with designs for remedial innovations of liberal democracy. In this essay, I am going to review some institutional designs for democratic innovation. I shall proceed as follows. The first section addresses the question of the functions of liberal democracy. What are the features and expected outcomes of democracy which explain why liberal democracy is widely considered today to be the most desirable form of political rule ? The second section looks at the institutional structure and the constitutive mechanisms of democratic regimes. In each of these sections four relevant items are specified and discussed. Thirdly, I shall provide a very condensed summary of critical accounts concerning democracy’s actual failures and symptoms of malfunctioning. In the final section, I distinguish two families of institutional innovations that are currently being proposed as remedies for some of the observed deficiencies of democracy, with an emphasis on ‘deliberative’ methods of political preference formation.

Four functional virtues of liberal democracy The question is not often asked, as its answer appears quite obvious: What is democracy good for ? In fact, there are several answers, corresponding to different schools of political theory. A minimalist answer is the negative one: There is simply no normatively sustainable principle available in modern societies according to which any unequal distribution of political rights (i. e., a set of aristocratic, dy© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_13

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nastic, imperial, ethnic, religious, or party-totalitarian privileges) and, following from that, anything but the universal accountability of rulers to the entire (adult) citizenry could any longer be defended. This is the intuition that guided Tocqueville’s (1988) analysis of democracy in America (with its implications, as the author saw them, for Europe) as well as the cautious political egalitarianism of John S. Mill (1861). Hence the equality of political rights of all citizens (as opposed to subjects) is the default position of democratic theory (a default position that, nota bene, still allows for two remaining exclusions: that of children below voting age who do ‘not yet’ enjoy political rights, and resident foreigners who may – or may not – be on their institutionally prescribed path to the acquisition of full citizenship (‘naturalisation’). Yet beyond these two categories of outsiders (outsiders in time and outsiders in space, as it were), all ‘full’ members of the political community enjoy equal political rights – simply because no consensual criterion is available by which an unequal distribution of rights might be justified. Political equality is thus ‘good for’ forestalling any attempted relapse into a stratified system of political rights. Yet equality of political rights and universal accountability of rulers can also be advocated on positive grounds. I wish to further distinguish three such grounds. The first (and the oldest) one is Immanuel Kant’s ([1795] 2006) defense of the republican form of government (with still limited political equality and accountability, according to him) on the grounds of international peace: ‘Republics’ will never conduct wars against other republics – arguably one of the most robust hypotheses in the history of the social sciences. Second, a strong reason for the adoption and defense of the democratic form of government was advanced in the first wave of European democratization after the First World War. It is, as it were, the domestic equivalent to Kant’s hypothesis; it states that ‘territorial’ representative party democracy (together with strong elements of ‘functional’ representation through interest associations of major socio-economic categories such as employers, investors, trade unions, the agrarian sector, the civil service, etc.) will serve to institutionalize not just the condition of legal peace among individuals under the rule of law but also, thirdly, political peace among major kinds of collective interest; the latter is accomplished through the provision of institutional outlets for the organized expression and negotiation of class and other conflicts of interest. The mechanism through which democratic equality would lead to the peaceful and stable (rather than revolutionary and disruptive) processing of conflict, its accommodation, and change was thought (e. g. by Max Weber in his political writings from 1917 to 1919 and by Hermann Heller (1933) [1983]) to reside in the voting and bargaining powers with which those inferior in socio-economic power were to be compensated for their relative powerlessness through the constitutional provision of political resources – an arrangement that eventually would lead to a ‘balance of

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class forces’ (Otto Bauer). The socio-economic power of investors and employers would be neutralized, at least in part, by the political power that lower classes can derive, under a democratic constitution, from their quantitative majority. If every interest were given a ‘voice’, nobody would have any reason to ‘exit’ to radical antisystemic opposition. By virtue of its procedures, democracy is able to reconcile conflict to the extent which is necessary for the maintenance of stability, and to do so more effectively than any other form of regime. After this hypothesis of democratic stability was brutally falsified in major parts of continental Europe in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the early 1930s, it was revived after the Second World War through an institutional arrangement and policy orientation that became known as the post-war ‘Keynesian Welfare State’: Political democracy, or so the basic tenet of this period can be summarized, is a stable political arrangement because (and to the extent that) it is capable of organizing an ongoing distributional positive-sum game in which all sides involved – capital, labor, the public sector together with its social policies and social services – will simultaneously be able to gain, provided, that is, the material foundation of such encompassing social progress, namely continuous economic expansion, can be maintained or, if need be, effectively stimulated. This hypothesis – democracy is desirable because it generates balanced distributional progress – held remarkably true in the West throughout (roughly) the third quarter of the 20th century, i. e. the so-called ‘golden’ post-war period. In this period, there were no permanent losers in rich democracies. It came, however, at least in Europe, to an abrupt halt in the mid-seventies. Two books, James O’Connor (1973) and Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975), noted and analyzed in quite influential ways the ‘crisis of democracy’ or, respectively, of ‘the state’ that ensued when this hypothesis, too, turned out to be dubious. Reasons for skepticism were provided by the evidence of lasting high levels of unemployment, which had been building up in European democracies since the mid-1970s, declining growth rates, and the massive increase in income and other inequalities that most OECD economies had been experiencing since the mid-nineties. The confidence in a productivist partnership between the state and social classes that would immunize democracy against the consequences of economic crisis was soon dismissed and actively rejected by the market radical regimes of monetarist economic policies associated with the names of Reagan, Thatcher, and more generally the ‘Washington consensus’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. However, it must also be mentioned that representative democracy and universal access to political rights have in fact played a major role in preventing or reversing severe social regressions in at least some countries of the post-colonial developing world, with Indian democracy as the outstanding example. As Armatya Sen (1999) has powerfully demonstrated, there has not been a single major famine or other socio-economic disaster in a democ-

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racy, whereas such disasters were allowed to take their course in party dictatorships (such as during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in Mao’s China). Throughout the Cold War, representative democracy (i. e. its defining features of the constitutionally enshrined division of powers, accountable rulers, electoral competition, and civic and political rights) has served to corroborate the claim that ‘the West’ is not just economically superior to state socialism owing to its far better performance in terms of economic growth and mass prosperity, but also morally superior as a regime of political freedom and equality of rights. The combined institutional arrangements of political democracy and organized capitalism performed so well (relative to the political and economic realities of Soviet-style ‘really existing’ socialism) that nobody in his right mind could conceivably opt for the latter. Yet after the eventual breakdown of (all European cases of) state socialism in 1989 – ​1991, the function of liberal democracy and its ‘social’ market economy as a political immunizer against ‘Communism’ was no longer needed (which explains, for instance, the breakdown of the Democrazia Christiana in Italy in the early 1990s). Instead, the thorny problem of orchestrating democratic transitions and democratizing former Soviet-ruled states appeared not just on the agenda of the transition countries, but on the Western agenda as well, including the project of enlarging the EU to the East. This new and historically unprecedented problem was not just to stabilize democratic capitalism in the West, but to initiate the building of democratic capitalism from the outside in regions where state socialism had vanished. Today, as the accomplishment of the latter task is clearly far from complete, given strong symptoms of democratic deficiency in the region of even the ten new EU member states of post-communist capitalism (to say nothing about their neighbors to the East), and as the accomplishment of the former task is outright questionable after the experience of the 2008 financial market crisis and its aftermath in both old and new member states, the blessings of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism are less evident (both to the outside observer and the internal participants) than they, arguably, were at any point since the Second World War. Before leaving the question of what democracy is ‘good for’ (and here entirely skipping the question of how the political and economic realities of the European Union can be reconciled with democratic principles) we should at least mention a fourth theory – namely the republican theory of democratic politics and its claim that the opportunity to participate in the collective affairs of the political community will actually have a virtuous formative impact upon citizens. This impact is thought to enable him or her to be a ‘good’ citizen, i. e. a citizen both able (through enhanced understanding of public affairs) and willing (through the perceived moral obligation to transcend narrow and short-sighted interests) to serve the common good of the political community as a whole. As I will try to show at

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the end of this essay, it is this argument in support of the democratic regime form that has powerfully re-surfaced in debates on the reasons for and the future of liberal democracy.

Four defining structural features of liberal democracy I propose a definition of liberal democracy (LD) here that consists of four basic elements: stateness, rule of law, political competition, and accountability. (1) Stateness – We need to realize that LD is a regime form that (so far) is tied to states. Democrats may advocate supranational or even global forms of democracy, but that amounts to a project that is, for the time being, evidently far from being realized. At present only states (in their turn defined by the coincidence of a territory, a people, and an effective apparatus of political rule) can be democratic. Democracy remains thus, for the time being, plainly parasitic on statehood. It is also the case that statehood always precedes democracy in historical time. For democracies appear to be always ‘successor regimes’, following upon non-democratic regime forms in a process of democratic transition, or democratization, of a pre-democratic (military, authoritarian, theocratic, totalitarian, colonial etc.) regime ruling over the state’s territory and population. Another link between stateness and democracy is this: In order for a state to be democratic in any meaningful way, it must possess a minimum of what is now often referred to as ‘state capacity’ or ‘governing capacity’. State capacity is the quality that allows a state, for instance, to protect its citizens from military or economic harm, to extract and allocate significant fiscal resources, defend the territory as well as its own monopoly on violence, establish and maintain an educational system, legislate and enforce regulatory laws, provide a measure of social and physical security and welfare, and manage succession crises – all this without being significantly obstructed by so-called factual powers, be it criminal gangs and Mafia organizations, separatist ethnic mobilizations, armed forces of civil war, networks of predatory corruption, external political forces on which governing elites are dependent, or hostile religious movements. In other words: In order for a state to be a democratic state, it must be capable of delivering collectively binding decisions and an extensive variety of (often fiscally costly) public goods. If it is unable to do so (and to do so continuously over time and territorial space !) we speak of a ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ state. The latter is defined by its deficient governing capacity relative to the kind and volume of problems that must be solved by the state to ensure social integration and the systemic stability of societies. More specifically, governing capacity (the opposite of ‘ungovernability’) is deficient if the state suffers from three all-too-familiar, as well as causally tightly interrelated, ‘absences’:

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the absence of borders (to control the outward flow of capital and the inward flow of goods and people); the absence (owing to the often giant and generally increasing levels of public debt) of fiscal resources available to fund public policies that serve any version of the public good; and the absence of jobs, which would allow the entire working-age population to participate, under acceptable terms, in the production and distribution of economic output. If that is right, it would be a mistake to associate only impoverished third world countries and their feeble and often corrupt governments with the condition of ‘state failure’. States with industrially advanced economies that are fiscally starved or in which elites subscribe to a doctrine of economic market liberalism and the radical retreat of ‘bureaucracy’ and regulation also can suffer from the syndrome of state failure and ungovernability. These conditions threaten to render democracy largely pointless, particularly if, as in the EU, major parts of remaining governing capacities are being transferred to supranational agencies (such as the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice, the European Commission) which are operating beyond the reach of effective democratic accountability mechanisms. Neoliberal states are regimes whose policy agenda is so restricted that the substantive concerns of the ‘people’ remain largely bracketed out from it and have no access to the making of public policies, as major areas of public interest (urban development, health, education, the environment, transportation, utilities, etc.) are taken off the agenda of political authorities in the name of privatization, deregulation, marketisation, competitiveness, and efficiency. Here, the universalism of political rights comes to stand in stark contrast to the more and more limited uses to which citizens can actually put their rights, given the restricted nature of the collective functions states are financially able, and governing elites politically willing, to perform. The discrepancy between the political rights non-elites enjoy and constraints imposed on political elites’ agendas by the factual powers of global financial markets and other supranational wielders of economic, political, and military power can cause citizens to turn away from democracy in one of two directions: they either give up the belief that political rights can be instrumentally useful for promoting their interests and improving the well-being of the political community as a whole – the familiar and today widespread attitude of distrust, apathy, political disaffection, and cynicism (Crouch 2004; Torcal and Montero 2006); or, even worse, they may come to conclude that political rights, having become a blunted sword, must be beefed up with additional and non-representative political resources, such as outbursts of populist mobilization and violent protest directed at alleged ‘enemies’. As to the former alternative, it is worth keeping in mind the apparent paradox of ‘participatory inequality’ (Lijphart 1997): it is precisely the less privileged strata of the population who would most benefit from the use of their

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political rights if state capacity were less constrained and who are most likely to drop out of participation, given their experience of and frustration over those constraints. As to the latter, the quest for additional political resources can also lead to large segments of the population resorting to non-institutional, disruptive, and more or less violently aggressive modes of political contestation which defy the official procedural rules of making collectively binding decisions. The two conventional criteria of the strength and stability of democratic states are legitimacy and effectiveness. (Lipset 1981) By legitimacy we mean the quality of the holders of state power to have their decisions complied with (without the more than marginal use of coercion) even by those who see their interests and values damaged by those decisions. By effectiveness we mean the capacity of ‘getting things done’, solve problems, and implement plans and projects. A democratic state is stable and resilient (or ‘consolidated’) if and to the extent that its legitimacy and effectiveness are continuously enacted, demonstrated, and therefore taken for granted by all relevant actors, inside and outside of the state in question. But such ‘taken-for-grantedness’ is never irreversible: Democratic regimes can ‘de-consolidate’ and reach a point of self-subversion which may end in the suicidal subversion of democracy by (apparently) democratic means. Moreover, the two are related to each other in tight interaction: A state that fails to ‘get things done’ (e. g. because of widespread corruption or the deficiency of fiscal resources) will lose its legitimacy, and the loss of the latter will further undermine its capacity to govern. (2) rule of law – Democratic states are states with a (mostly written) constitution, which provides for (at least) two ways in which the exercise of state power is limited. One of these ways is to endow citizens with a bill of equal rights which cannot be legally infringed upon by governing authorities. These rights include personal rights (protecting the integrity of body and soul/conscience), economic rights (property and contract), political rights (of assembly, media communication, association, participation, etc.) and often also ‘positive’ social rights (social assistance, social insurance, regulatory intervention into markets, the state-supervised provision of services such as health and education). Democracies are ‘liberal’ to the extent the substantive range of possible democratic decision-making is strictly limited and governments are effectively hindered from interfering with the political and civic freedoms of citizens. For instance, the citizens’ equal right to democratic participation is not itself at the disposition of those participating in the democratic process; i. e. it cannot be denied to minorities by majorities. Liberal democracies establish a precarious balance between collectively binding rules that are the outcome of democratic decision making (ordinary laws) and rules which are (at any given moment, at any rate) immune from such outcomes. The other limitation of overall state power (to which I shall return) is the division and mutu-

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al constraint of (legislative, executive, federal, juridical,) state powers, with one of the most inconspicuous (though highly consequential) constraints being the temporal limitation of government (meaning that the tenure of elected office is always ex ante time-limited and elections are periodic). (3) Democracies organize political competition and institutionalize the nonviolent conduct of political conflict between contending groups (parties) aspiring to government office. Winning contested elections is the procedure through which rulers gain their governing power – which means that elections generate losers (i. e. defeated parties and their supporters) who are expected to recognize the victory of the winner as legitimate – as a binding fact, if only for the time being, namely until the next election day. The identity and configuration of contending political parties is in part an artefact of the electoral system (with majoritarian electoral systems of the ‘single member plurality’ (SMP) type normally leading to a two-party system), in part a reflection of social cleavages (of class, religion, regional or national identities) and their organizational representations (trade unions, faithbased organizations). Democracy is the scene of ‘democratic class struggle’ (Lipset 1981), as well as other kinds of struggle for political power – struggles the outcome of which has (unless the state’s capacity and agenda is severely constrained, as just discussed, by fiscal and/or ideological limitations) significant implications for people’s life chances and the distribution of their capabilities. Yet not all political competition, as carried out in electoral campaigns, is of such a substantive sort. Political sociologists distinguish between three types of competitive struggle: First, the struggle over alternative ideological and programmatic positions and goals of political parties, with the core issue being the extent to which market forces vs. interventionist regulatory and distributive policies as well as social rights can and should be relied upon. Second, the struggle over alternative answers to current issues, such as ‘should we withdraw our troops from Afghanistan ?’ or ‘should we diminish our dependency on nuclear energy by investing in renewable sources of energy ?’. Third, the struggle between persons competing for the trust and electoral support of constituencies that they need for their access to leadership positions in government. Most comparative and historical research on the development of these three kinds of competitive contestation supports the generalization that parties increasingly fail to offer (and voters fail to appreciate) distinctive and encompassing programmatic positions and instead appeal to increasingly ‘volatile’ voters by taking positions on (and claiming superior competence for the management of) specific issues such as tax, environmental, labor market, economic, or health policy. Another trend is the growing preponderance of the ‘personality’ of contending political elite figures, with the design of the image and public appearance of personalities becoming increasingly the professionalized business of media and communication experts.

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The ongoing surveying and measuring of public opinion trends also allows professional political communication experts to design, on behalf of the parties and elites they serve, a promising synthesis of these dimensions of political competition. There is in many OECD countries a clear tendency, and not just in the presidentialist systems, to personalize political conflict by giving (arguably undue) emphasis to the third of the above dimensions of conflict, namely leadership personality. This shift of conflict may not only have to do with the ‘end of ideology’ and the secular approximation of social democratic forces to market-liberal views and programmatic outlooks, but equally to the media-based nature of the competitive struggle of politics. The archetypes of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the drama of a ‘fight’ among concrete persons can appeal to the passions in ways that are hard to match by ideological stances and positions taken on controversial policy issues. Not only are persons, as compared to issues and programs, more easily (and more economically) portrayed and represented by print and electronic media alike; the ‘like/dislike’ (or ‘trust/distrust’) code of personalized conflict is also the more easily and deeply engrained into citizens’ memory, while loyalties, judgements, and preferences concerning policy issues and overarching programmatic ideas are more demanding to establish in any durable fashion. It often seems that the vehemence of personalistic political competition is the greater the smaller the actual differences between the contending parties are concerning their programs and policy platforms, as all major parties try to cater to the ‘median voter’ and the practice of state craft is degenerating into mere stage craft. As a stylized extrapola­tion of the trend from program competition to issue and finally personality competition we may envision a condition in which the electorate makes collective decisions at best on who governs while losing control over, even a cognitive grasp concerning, what governing elites (will) actually do, in substantive policy terms, with the mandate to govern granted to them by their constituency. The personalization/presidentialization of politics often culminates in the ‘populist’ confrontation of personalities combined with moralized identity issues sometimes bordering on culture wars. This confrontation is designed to pose us, the good, honest, decent, hard-working, and deserving people, as represented by a trustworthy leader (self-styled as ‘one of us’), against them, the evil, suspicious, corrupt, unproductive, and undeserving if not positively dangerous opponents. Populist politics are thus both unifying and divisive. They try to unify people on the basis of simple moral truths (which are held to be self-evident and do not require much of an effort of argument and reasoning) and do so by opposing ‘all of us’ to categories of people that need to be stopped from inflicting further damage on ‘us’. Populists and populist parties pick either of two kinds of foes. One is the ruling political elite (the ‘political class’) itself, together with its bureaucrats, alleged cronies, and other beneficiaries of more taxes, more centralization, and more regu-

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lation. This libertarian, often anti-statist variety of populism defends not just free markets, but also the autonomy of local communities and regional identities. This kind of populism is currently most clearly represented by the American ‘Tea Party Movement’ and its vehement opposition to big/central government and big spending. The other variety of populist divisiveness frames the ‘otherness’ that is to be opposed not in anti-elite, but in anti-minority terms: the category of people that is to be opposed are foreigners and foreign powers, migrants and refugees, ethnic minorities, and people on welfare. The dynamics that are at work in either of these variants of populism often lead to the crossing of the conceptual border line between adversaries or opponents more or less respectfully competing under mutually recognized rules for political power and enemies involved in a struggle in which the confrontation is over the denial of the other side’s rights and the legitimacy of its presence. It is the attempted fusion of these two kinds of ‘otherness’ – others at the top (the centralized taxing state) and others at the bottom (migrant minorities) – that makes up the success formula in the rhetoric and politics of populist leaders (a fusion that has gained electoral strength in Europe in countries as different as Norway and Hungary) that can eventually challenge the viability of liberal democracy as it calls into question and actively undermines the fundamental democratic principle of requisite stateness and the equality of political rights. (4) accountability – My last defining criterion of the institutional structure of liberal democracy is the presence of mechanisms which serve to hold ruling elites accountable for what they do, including what they fail to do. There are three kinds of such accountability enhancing institutional devices. First, in a vertical perspective and through the mechanisms of periodic general elections, party competition, and the investigative reporting of free media, citizens have the opportunity of removing governing elites and majority parties from office if they are dissatisfied with their performance and policy decisions and, nota bene, if they have reasons to expect that a respective alternative governing elite is likely to deliver more desirable outcomes. Absent such a credible alternative, accountability mechanisms in terms of policy run idle or are limited to alternative makers of basically identical policies. Second, wrongdoings of incumbent governments can be exposed as such, through horizontal accountability mechanisms, by parliaments and parliamentary committees as well as by constitutional (or ‘supreme’ or ‘high’) courts. Third, much of correction of (putative) failures, errors, and malfunctioning of government policies takes place through the ongoing and inconspicuous influence of organized interests and their veto power (which consists in an often ambiguous mix of threats, warnings, and conditional promises). The use of such power is typically focused upon alleged negative impacts certain government policies (such as fiscal reforms) are claimed to have upon macroeconomic key variables such as growth, employment, competitiveness, and fiscal and monetary stability.

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Yet governing elites can also defend themselves against and escape the consequences of being held accountable for undesired results of their policies and decisions. ‘Blame avoidance’ is known to be a dominant tactical motivation of incumbent governments. (Rosanvallon 2008) As the opposition party often does not have more desirable policy alternatives to offer, replacing the incumbent government by one that is led by the opposition is often not a promising move from the point of view of voters. In our age of ‘globalization’, frustrating policy outcomes can be blamed on forces that are allegedly beyond the control of national governments – for instance, forces such as the financial market crisis. Margaret Thatcher’s famous TINA argument (‘there is no alternative’) is often endorsed by economic orthodoxies that unfold, with a questionable claim of scientific objectivity, in all kinds of consultative bodies and in the media. Also, in an age of ‘governance’ (usually understood as the multi-actor and multi-level configuration of policy actors), it is hard to see who exactly is to blame for negative results and how to locate a responsible actor. Finally, governments have numerous means (among them the subtle forms of control over the media, government-sponsored information campaigns, the tactical timing of decisions, clientelism, keeping failures secret or obstructing their public uncovering) to immunize themselves against accountability mechanisms.

Diagnostics of democratic failure and the need for democratic innovation According to the diagnosis of prominent democratic theorists, we are in the midst of a second transformation of democracy (Dahl 2000; Warren 2003), with the first one being the transition from direct (agora, town hall) democracy to party-dominated representative mass democracy. There is now a recent and abundant literature on the ‘crisis’ of democracy (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Rosanvallon 2008), even ‘the end’ of democracy (Guéhenno 1993), the ‘end of politics’, or the rise of ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004) and the para-statist making of public policies by transnational corporations and their inhouse conversion of economic into political power (Crouch 2008). One of the context conditions that triggered these perceived challenges may have been the breakdown of state socialism. As long as state socialism existed, Western democracies could content themselves with claiming (and in my view rightly so) that they performed normatively as well as economically ‘better’ than their authoritarian counterparts. Yet, that counterpart having become obsolete, they now have to demonstrate (and to provide compelling argument) that they are ‘good’, i. e. normatively sustainable, on their own terms. What needs to be shown in a persuasive

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way is that the institutional structures and mechanisms of liberal democracy (as summarized above) are actually capable of delivering the functions (as discussed in the first section) for the performance of which liberal democracy is held to be the most desirable form of political rule. This demonstration is not an easy task, to put it mildly. Causal narratives on the crisis of democracy include economic globalization and the absence of effective supranational regulatory regimes; the exhaustion of left-of-center political ideas and the hegemony of market-liberal public philosophies, together with their anti-statist implications; and the impact of financial and economic crises and the ensuing fiscal starvation of nation states which threatens to undermine their state capacity. For reasons of limited space, I shall mention in a stenographical manner only some of the trends and symptoms that have led authors to speak of the ‘crisis’ – or creeping deconsolidation – of liberal democracy. In most liberal democracies there is a secular decline in electoral turnout. (Dalton 2004). Also, class-specific turnout rates in general elections are drifting apart, with the least well-to-do showing the lowest interest in voting in elections, and even more so in engaging in the more demanding participatory practices of joining (movements, political parties, associations) and donating (of money, expertise, time).1 This trend is accompanied by a sharp decline in citizens’ trust in politicians. Both in new and in old democracies, apathy, cynicism, and a sense of powerlessness are on the increase. Many of the terms that have been used to describe the situation of widespread political alienation start with a ‘dis’: dissatisfaction, disenchantment, disappointment, the sense of the people being disempowered by elites, depoliticization, and disaffection. (Torcal and Montero 2006) In sharp contrast to the decline of European democracies in the inter-war period, however, such alienation has not given rise to explicitly anti-democratic movements. People remain democrats, if ‘frustrated democrats’. (Dalton 2004) Similar trends have been documented concerning all kinds of associations in general (again, with a class bias) and membership in political parties in particular. It has been argued that contemporary democracies are in fact ‘post-liberal’ in that they are populated, at the level of the inputs of demands and preferences, by two categories of citizens: first, ordinary ‘natural’ citizens – individuals who vote and participate in various ways – and second, a poorly legitimated class of ‘secondary citizens’ which consists of associations, pressure groups, lobbies, and similar agents of functional representation. (Schmitter 2000; Crouch 1

In addition to my triplet of voting/joining/donating as modes of democratic participation (see further below), one might think of ‘knowing’ (i. e. having access to a reasonably correct picture of the collectively relevant situation and to methods that ensure the truth of the picture). But a discussion of the conditions of adequate – and unbiased – ‘cognitive participation’ would have to focus on the media and their political function, a discussion I have to skip here for reasons of space.

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2008) By employing the organizational weapons of threats, warnings, and conditional promises, the latter can gain a measure of (highly non-transparent) control over public policy that the multitude of individual citizens can hardly match.

Two families of remedies Lipset’s characterization of democracy as ‘democratic class struggle’ emphasizes the essential aspect of contestation in the democratic process – the struggle for power among competing representative elites. Yet democratic politics does not just consist in the drama of competition, contestation, and open political conflict (a drama that is eventually to be decided at bargaining tables and by the casting of ballots in elections and the counting of votes). It also consists in the less conspicuous and less easily dramatized process in which citizens form judgments, interests, opinions, and preferences about the matters that affect them and the political community as a whole. The distinction between these two stages is important for democratic political theory; it is the same distinction as that between trying to persuade my opponent in a public exchange of information and argument and outnumbering my opponent through mobilizing support for ‘my’ party or cause more effectively than the other side is able to. Democratic politics proceeds in cycles that involve both of these stages; we get a one-sided and defective picture of the democratic political process if we think of it only in terms of expressing preferences through voting and elections and not also in terms of the formation and revision of those preferences. (Goodin 2004) The two families of democratic innovations proposals focus on each of these two stages, the expression and the formation of the political will of citizens. The conflict of political wills and preferences as it is expressed in the voting booth is thus preceded by a process of will formation, in which not numbers and the logic of aggregation, but well-informed interpretations of reality, arguments, and reasons can play a decisive role – but so can stereotypes, prejudice, resentments, and the unthinking acceptance of strategically designed messages sent to mass constituencies by competing political elites. The theoretical claim here is twofold. First, people do not have opinions and preferences (contrary to the reifying assumptions underlying much of survey research); instead, opinions and preferences are essentially in flux and constantly being formed, reproduced, validated, tested, abandoned, adapted, revised, upgraded, and reflectively enriched in the light of new information and experience. On most matters and issues, most people do not have an opinion and policy preference at all most of the time – until, that is, they are challenged to form one (for instance, in spontaneous reaction to being asked a question in a survey, with the implicit expectation communicated being that one ‘should’ or ‘normally does’ have a view

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on the matter in question). Second, the process of opinion and preference acquisition is not exclusively an internal and monological one, but always takes place in communication and interactive dialogue with others. Opinions and preferences are thus social constructs, or the joint outcome of ‘my’ own capacity and willingness to observe, to learn, and to reason, and of the information and social relations, constraints, expectations, and opportunities in which such learning and reasoning is embedded. We might even argue that it is quite irrational to hold beliefs and preferences which are strictly ‘individual’ ones, i. e. are formed under conditions of ignorance or disregard about what others, be they opposing ‘my’ views or concurring with them, hold to be true and desirable. For I know my preferences only after I know the preferences of others on whose cooperation I depend (or whose preferences I need to defeat) in order to realize ‘our’ preferences and interests. The external context of the ongoing internal process in which opinions and preferences are formed can range from coercive, repressive, or manipulative control over the information that is accessible and the preferences that are sanctioned as permissible, to, at the other end of a theoretical scale, egalitarian, open, encouraging, and challenging situations in which individuals are free to rationally consider, knowing and pondering the points of view of others (with whom they may end up agreeing or disagreeing), which beliefs and preferences they choose to form and adopt, and why. It is this latter set of qualities which is summarily referred to, in the broad current of democratic theory that has emerged since the early 1990s, as ‘deliberative’. Coming back to the two stages of democratic inputs – the stage of the formation and the stage of the expression of policy preferences – we must note two asymmetries between them. First, before we can express an opinion or preference, it must have passed through some formative stage (whatever its ‘deliberative’ qualities), whereas there is no ‘must’ in the opposite direction: a policy preference, once formed, may well be silenced when it comes to will expression, which may be due to the fact that there is no representative actor (political party, governing elite) who can be expected to ‘listen to’ and to whom it would make subjective sense at all to address one’s expression of will.2 The other asymmetry is this: At the stage of 2 The widely documented finding that (a) electoral participation (‘turnout’) is low (i. e. abstention is high), (b) further declining in many ‘disaffected’ liberal democracies, and (c) increasingly distorted in terms of socioeconomic and educational inequalities (which thus translate into inequalities of political representation) has led scholars to recommend the introduction of mandatory voting, thus eliminating citizens’ option to abstain and hiding the gap between preferences and their expression (Lijphart 1997). Yet if voting were to be made mandatory, at least some voters would find themselves coerced to cast their ballot in favor of parties of whose merits and credibility they are not persuaded. This problem could be remedied by introducing the following rule: If n parties or candidates compete, the voter is giv-

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the expression of political will, the institutional frameworks of the process – political parties, elections, voting procedures – are all precisely defined and formally prescribed and monitored. In contrast, and while constitutional guarantees (freedoms of opinion, the media, assembly, association, etc.) play an indispensable role as providers of possibilities and opportunities (as do civics curricula and other state-organized educational facilities), much of the actual formation of opinions and political preferences is (and must be according to liberal principles) an institutionally largely uncharted space in which powerful yet informal social processes of family life, work life, the experience within local faith-based and secular communities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, consumption and lifestyles, media use, etc., play a decisive role in the formation, validation, and change of political views and preferences and thus the ‘social realization’ of those constitutionally guaranteed rights. The difference between the stages of the formation and the expression of political views and preferences consists in the gap concerning their degree of legal institutionalization. Statutory (and partly also constitutional) laws exist in all liberal democracies specifying the equal right to vote (i. e. express preferences) of all citizens, the right to stand in elections as a candidate, and the procedures according to which individual votes are aggregated in order to form operating representative institutions. These equal rights are, however, being made actual use of according to highly unequal patterns, namely according to inequalities of socio-economic and educational status, among others. In contrast, not even such nominal equality is institutionally provided for when it comes to the formation of preferences – the process in which citizens find out about the policy options that are available, each other’s arguments and preferences, the composition of potential alliances, and what, in the light of such information, may be deemed as good (or better) for ‘all of us’, and the remaining disagreements pertaining to this question. Again, prevailing patterns of social inequality seem to condition the highly unequal access to such opportunities of deliberative learning and clarification, with those cut off from relevant communicative and associational resources being not even able to indicate, with any measure of inter-temporal or substantive consistency, where they stand. Others in secure and privileged socio-economic positions have no doubt concerning this issue, as they are less affected by cognitive uncertainties and motivational cross pressures. It would not be implausible to assume that members of the foren n + 1 choices (boxes to mark on the ballot), the additional one standing for the option of NOTA (‘none of the above’). The perception of political elites’ deficient responsivity, as suggested by the evidence of fiscal and institutional conditions constraining state capacity, can in turn contribute to a depoliticizing sense of political alienation and powerlessness, which discourages the efforts to acquire political opinions and preferences in the first place.

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mer category, being confined to a condition of structural uncertainty concerning their own interests and preferences (Lukes 2005), are likely to abstain from participating in political life; only those who know what to say will raise their voices. These are empirical questions that I cannot pursue here any further. What should have become clear in our discussion of the two stages of political will formation is that liberal democracies suffer from a condition of vast underutilization, both quantitative and qualitative, of the political resources that are nominally available to each citizen. By quantitative underutilization, I refer to the fact of increasing overall non-participation, increasingly patterned in line with social inequalities. By qualitative underutilization, I refer to the malfunctioning of the mechanisms (the media, the educational system, political mass parties) which supposedly can transform ‘raw’ and unreflective political views and impulses into ‘refined’ and more enlightened awareness and preferences. Current debates on democratic innovations focus upon either of them and try to devise appropriate remedies. After very briefly pointing to some proposals related to how participation and citizens’ involvement can be enhanced in quantitative terms and at the stage of preference expression, the final part of the essay will address some aspects of the hotly debated issue of how the quality of democratic participation might be improved through adopting deliberative procedures and institutions to upgrade the process of preference formation. Strengthening the voice of citizens and the expression of their will: modes of aggregation of ‘given’ individual preferences Apart from the basic prerequisite of knowing about political issues, alternatives, and institutions, individual citizens can actively participate in politics through three main channels: voting (in general elections), joining (associations, parties, or movements; participating in political discussion), donating (money, time, expertise). All three are affected in contemporary democracies by either a manifest decline of their usage or/and an increasing class bias. That is to say, the middle class and those above it vote, join, and donate more often and more extensively than those below it in terms of income, wealth, socio-economic security, and education. In order to overcome those biases, a variety of measures have been proposed to facilitate, incentivize, and equalize the expression of political preferences. These include changing the electoral system to a single transferable vote (STV); making voting mandatory (as in Australia, Belgium; Lijphart (1997)); allowing for direct democratic and plebiscitary legislation (with the practices of Switzerland and California serving as a model); enhancing devolution and increasing the autonomy of local governments; democratizing the funding of interest associations (Schmitter 2000); allowing for vicarious voting of parents (one extra vote for every mother per son and every father per daughter; Hinrichs (2002)); introducing gender

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(and perhaps other, for instance birth-cohort) quotas in the operation of parties, parliaments, and governments (Phillips 1995); making the number of representatives contingent upon the turnout of constituencies (cf. participatory budgeting in Brazil; Santos (1998)); opening the option for voicing dissent by introducing the NOTA option into the electoral process; making membership fees (more strongly) tax deductible; and reforming political and campaign finance according to the three principles of capping overall expenditures, making ‘plutocratic’ donations either more anonymous to recipients or transparent to voters (and thus supposedly self-limiting), and financing campaign and political party expenditures out of public revenues (cf. Nassmacher 2009; cf. Ackerman and Ayres 2004). (For overviews of these and similar proposals for innovation, see Fung and Wright (2003); Schmitter and Trechsel (2004); Smith (2005, 2009)). Improving will formation through deliberation There are two premises, or philosophical starting points, of any theory of deliberative democracy: First, the pursuit of any preference that is consistent with the law is legitimate under liberal principles. These principles deny the holders of state power the right (as it was claimed by the holders of power under state socialism) to denounce citizens holding certain (critical) preferences as suffering from ‘false consciousness’, thus providing a pretext to repress allegedly hostile intentions deriving from it. At the same time, we also need to keep in mind that preferences are not given and ‘natural’, but formed and motivated through cognitive and moral considerations, which in turn can be hampered by interests and passions, as well as by communicative conditions that hinder the reflective probing of one’s preferences (Offe 1992). The institutional facilitation of such probing could contribute to the partial or full neutralization of what Steven Lukes (2005) has called the ‘third’ – and least conspicuous – face of social power, namely the power to hinder others to find out what their interests are. Moreover, the prevalence of myth, resentment, ignorance, short-termism, the fetishization of personality and community, and aggressive impulses against elites or minorities can, if they become driving forces behind the perception of political realities and preference formation, seriously jeopardize the viability of liberal democracy. In this sense, political views, values, and preferences are not strictly a ‘private’ affair of individual citizens, as their pursuit can generate negative externalities that affect the rights of others and ultimately those of ‘all of us’. To the extent this is so, we may well claim a public interest in enhancing the overall quality of preferences, mediated through an improvement of the social contexts of preference formation as they demonstrably contribute to such enhancement. A second premise is this: To repeat, the formation of political (as well as other) preferences is not just a matter of intra-personal, information-gathering, consid-

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eration and reflection alone, as in the monological process of ‘preference laundering’ (Goodin 1982) taking place in some forum internum. Rather (and as argued above), it is a social process in which people find out, preferably in the course of a non-strategic exchange of information and practical reasoning, what other people consider true and desirable and fair for ‘all of us’ – a process in the course of which the preferences with which people have entered the exchange may undergo revisions. (Whether or not such revisions will verge on consensus is bound to remain an open question for empirical observation.) The rule governing such deliberative exchange is something like this: You know what you want only after you know what others want, and after knowing and considering the reasons on which those others base their preferences. In practical terms, learning about other people’s preferences and their reasons for holding them can encourage the formation and clarification of one’s own preference on the matter under joint deliberation, provided the exchange takes place with a minimum level of respect and mutual assurance. The institutional location in which preference formation as a social process takes place is the ‘life world’ of everyday interaction or, more specifically, the ‘third sector’ (Goodin 2003) as a residual sphere that is constrained yet not governed by the media of money and formal authority. The sociological distinctiveness of this ‘sector’ consists in the fact that its organizational forms (foundations, movements, local initiatives and associations, faith-based organizations, etc.) are at the same time non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and non-profit organizations (NPOs). That is to say, what they do is not predominantly guided by criteria of legal correctness (as in public administration) or the ambition to gain law-making powers (as in political parties); and neither is it primarily guided by an economic calculus of profitability. Instead, the activities of NGOs/NPOs are dominated by normative intentions and the values to which such intentions relate. Yet, while acting outside of the realms of market competition, political contestation, or hierarchies of authority, such organizations can have a direct impact upon both economic and political processes. (Goodin and Dryzek 2006) The question of by which methods such an impact can be institutionalized in democratic polities (Offe 1997) has led to numerous experiments, institutional innovations, and the empirical observation of the nature of deliberative preference formation and change. (Smith 2009; Warren and Pearse 2008) Since the early 1990s, the philosopher James Fishkin (1991, 1995, 2009) has experimented in many countries and settings with the method of ‘deliberative polling’. This method is designed to generate evidence of the ‘hypothetical’, or counter-factual, will of the people, as opposed to empirical preferences of individuals as they are mirrored by conventional methods of survey research. It shows what people would end up believing and wanting had they had the opportunity

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to think about, with others and under conditions promoting ‘enlightened understanding’ (Dahl 2000) and mutual respect, what they ‘really’ want. The hypothesis, confirmed in many cases, is that the experience of informed deliberation enables participants to clarify, revise, and upgrade their own preferences. In order to demonstrate the amount and the direction of preference revisions, Fishkin’s method measures the distribution of opinions and political preferences before and after a relatively short period of deliberation in which a randomly selected group of citizens is invited to participate. When institutionalized – for instance, in the form of ‘national issues conferences’ preceding national elections or even in the form of an annual ‘deliberation day’ (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004), this would arguably have a major impact upon political elites: for as a result of deliberative polls, elites are provided with the opportunity to know what the well-considered, as opposed to the ‘raw’ and unreflected, ‘will of the people’ is.

The effects of deliberation We can distinguish four qualitative effects that the use of deliberative procedures can have upon political life. First, the experience of deliberation can have desirable consequences at the individual level of participants. (Fishkin 2009: 133 sequ.; Mutz 2008: 530) These include, among others, better information on the issue at hand, including the improved awareness of oppositional arguments; an increase in political tolerance and the willingness to compromise, as well as an increase in generalized social trust; an increase in the willingness to participate through voting and civic engagement, and as a result, a greater sense of political efficacy; greater consistency of opinions. A second effect can consist in the exercise of an informal authority (or a kind of ‘soft power’) that originates from deliberative procedures once they are institutionalized as part of the political process. As (and to the extent that) the media will report on the consensual results and remaining disagreements of deliberating fora and mini-publics, outside observers, elite as well as non-elite, will be provided with the opportunity to learn from the difference (if any) between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ poll results in which direction and to what extent the post-deliberation (‘refined’) preferences will change relative to the ‘raw’ pre-deliberation ones. The authority of people having passed through deliberation derives precisely (and somewhat paradoxically) from the fact that the participants of deliberative fora are randomly selected ordinary citizens who, representing only themselves rather than parties or interest groups, have neither the intention nor the organizational means to acquire political power themselves. It is the very absence of power ambitions on the part of the deliberators that can increase their ‘recommending

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force’ (Fishkin 1995: 162; 2009: 134). The effect of spreading knowledge about the policy preferences of deliberating (rather than power-seeking) ephemeral bodies will predictably make life more complex for political elites, who, after such polls and the due publication of their outcomes in the media, are then publicly known to know that the so-called ‘will of the people’ (as registered by ordinary opinion surveys to which they like to refer for legitimation purposes whenever it suits them) may in fact be a mere artefact of the prevailing non-deliberative conditions of preference formation. The public can thus learn that this ‘will of the people’ is highly malleable and contingent upon contexts of communication. This learning is driven by a demonstration effect: if people actually had the time, expertise, and appropriate communicative framework to think seriously and competently about issues on the political agenda, chances are that they would change their original views and preferences. Third, there are strong indications that deliberative institutions have not just the potential for widening the range of substantive policy options by bringing to evidence what people want once they have been put in the possession of pertinent information and after having debated arguments for and against the alternative policy options. They also have the potential to widen the social inclusion of participants (and contrary to so much of the anti-intellectual polemics against the idea of deliberation being an idiosyncratic leisure time activity of the educated middle class that is en vogue among conservative academics). Such potential for greater social inclusiveness can be assumed on two grounds. First, to the extent that the principle of random selection of participants can be implemented and self-selection reduced, participants will include categories of people who normally do not vote, join, donate, or even know much about political issues.3 But, second – and in a perspective on such forms of non-participation that was first and classically stated by Schattschneider (1960; cf. Offe 2006; Solt 2008) – there are theoretical arguments and empirical findings suggesting that non-participation and the associated waste of political resources is ‘endogenous to the failures of democracy’ and of ‘normal politics’ (Neblo et al. 2010: 566, 568) rather than being caused by individual characteristics such as a person’s class membership or level of education. The implication of this perspective is of course that if different and additional forms of participation were available, non-participation might well be reduced. Neblo and his co-authors produce strong evidence that deliberation is in fact such an additional, participation-widening procedural device. ‘It is pre3

The random composition of deliberative fora would also increase the diversity of the points of view brought forward, which in itself can add to the informal authority claimed in the previous paragraph. The more diverse the members of a group are, the more immune the results of deliberation are to the suspicion of being biased by special interests.

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cisely people who are less likely to participate in traditional partisan politics who are most interested in deliberative participation.’ ‘Younger people, racial minorities and lower-income people expressed significantly more willingness to deliberate. […] The kinds of people attracted to the deliberative opportunities offered are fairly distinct from those drawn to partisan politics and interest group liberalism.’ (Neblo et al. 2010: 567, 571, 574) Finally, there are also indications that while the composition of participants in deliberative procedures is designed to approximate randomness, the actual preference change that can be observed in the before/after surveys interestingly does not reflect a random alteration of opinions and attitudes. Instead, deliberative procedures, if conducted under conditions of randomness of participants’ characteristics and thus of maximal diversity, generate qualitative outcomes concerning attitude changes and consensual policy recommendations which are not evenly distributed on a conservative-progressive (or ‘liberal’ in the American sense) dimension of political views and preferences. This finding can be accounted for with a weak and a strong explanatory intuition. The weak one suggests that the very setting of deliberative fora – highly diverse individuals hitherto unknown to each other involved in an exchange of views and arguments on issues of public policy and trying to find solutions preferred by all participants – select against purely self-serving claims and propositions. As the statement ‘I am for policy X because it serves my interest’ is unlikely to carry much persuasive power (and perhaps even discredits the speaker because of his or her undisguised selfishness), there is a built-in incentive to present policy preferences, even if they are driven by self-interest, as being adopted for the sake of values or reason – a rhetorical move that can subsequently trap the speaker in a dynamic of self-destructive hypocrisy: once you have started to present your interests as being congruent with common interests or shared values, you have started to force yourself to remain consistent and continue to argue in those terms, which may well lead to actually betraying (in either of the two senses of the word) the interests that were motivating the operation in the first place. Yet there is also reason to consider a strong explanation of how those deliberative procedures may translate into specific, non-random substantive outcomes. As Gastil, Bacci and Dollinger (2010) have shown in an analysis based on attitude changes generated in 65 deliberative polls, there is evidence supporting the presence of a conversion mechanism which translates the procedural equality of the deliberative setting ‘into a general orientation toward equal social relations in policy solutions’. (Gastil, Bacci and Dollinger 2010:  8) The authors’ main finding is that participants, while not re-describing themselves in overall ideological terms of ‘liberal’ vs ‘conservative’, still undergo systematic shifts in preferences and beliefs; after participating in (single and relatively short) deliberative fora, participants were ‘more likely to support statements

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that promote cosmopolitanism [and to] oppose those that favor a more nationalist and parochial view of public affairs’. As exposure to the hypothesized causal effect of participating in deliberation was just quite ephemeral, it does not come as a surprise that deliberation was found to ‘weakly’ promote ‘agreement with egalitarian and collectivist worldviews’. (ibid.: 20) Future research must provide us with more robust answers to the question of whether or not we can claim that the institutionalization of deliberative procedures would shift policy preferences and political views in ‘sustainability oriented’, ‘cosmopolitan’, and overall egalitarian and left-liberal directions – directions that are marked by greater fact-regardingness, future-regardingness, and other-regardingness. To the extent that this intuition can be further confirmed through rigorous analysis, the institutionalization and practical use of deliberative will formation (as a complement to the conventional channels of will expression, namely voting and bargaining) could itself become a promising political project rather than remaining a matter occupying political theorists and empirical researchers.

Structures of deliberation Having so far discussed some possible and desirable functions that deliberation can perform, let us, again, move on to the appropriate institutional structures in which these functions might be performed. Deliberative ‘mini-publics’ (Goodin and Dryzek 2006; Fung and Wright 2003) must ideally conform to three criteria: they must be democratic, both substantively and socially open and unbiased, and consequential.4 The first of these criteria, the democratic or rights-egalitarian character, can be fulfilled in two ways. One is ‘open access’ to an assembly: whoever wants to be present has the right to come and to presents his/her point of view. This applies, for instance, in the case of participatory budgeting or the ‘deliberation day’ proposal of Ackerman and Fishkin (2004). The drawback of such self-selection is the presumably significant social selectivity that manifests itself in terms of (i) who shows up and (ii) who takes the floor and speaks and for how long. The answer to both of these questions is likely to be: overwhelmingly members of the educated middle classes plus representatives of parties and interest groups. Moreover, if the assembly is large, deliberation according to the rules of a ‘mini-pub4

Two additional criteria are discussed by Smith (2009): procedures must be affordable and transferable to a variety of political issues, i. e. not limited to the most basic issues having to do with electoral systems and the problem of ‘choosing how to choose’, as in the famous case of electoral reform in the Canadian Province of British Columbia. (cf. Warren and Pearse 2008)

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lic’ is hardly possible. Therefore, and as an alternative to ‘open access’, advocates of deliberative procedures have typically opted for the random selection of participants and the technique of (stratified) sampling which is intended to make the composition of the mini-public as much as possible a mirror image of the constituency. In this way, an inappropriate role of political party delegates and bearers of functional representation (i. e. interest associations) can be avoided. It must be said, however, that self-selection (and the biases contingent on it, for instance age, education, rhetorical skills) cannot be fully avoided; after all, before a random selection can take place, people must declare their readiness – or else would have to be brought under the equivalent of jury duty or mandatory military service – to actually perform their role in the deliberative body should the lot decide that they are called upon to do so. Yet if the findings of Neblo et al. (2010), referred to above, turn out to be robust, deliberation would provide incentives for self-selection of participants to whom conventional channels of participation and representation do not appeal, thus neutralizing the distortions caused by middle class self-selection. Although both of these ‘democratic’ methods of constituting a deliberative body – open access to assemblies and random selection of participants – clearly have their problems, the variety of experience, opinion, and points of view present in either of them is arguably still greater (and less affected by strategic interests in gaining and maintaining power) than it is in the case in ordinary representative assemblies. Secondly, deliberative structures should be substantively and socially open and unbiased. Although deliberative settings will hardly ever achieve the criteria of an ‘ideal speech situation’, there can be a considerable approximation to it through the role of facilitators, or moderators. Participants are asked and constantly reminded by the facilitator to speak out, to listen to others, to behave respectfully, to discipline their political passions, to declare their personal interests related to the issues under discussion, to learn about the issues and alternatives they are dealing with, to respond to the queries and arguments of others; to try to persuade others of their points of view through spelling out reasons; and to arrive at a policy recommendation which reflects, as far as possible, their shared understanding of what conforms to a notion of the common good. In that communicative process, the three virtues, referred to above, will typically be insisted upon by moderators and mutually appealed to by participants: fact-regardingness, other-regardingness, and future-regardingness. As to fact-regardingness, the typical question is: Do we know enough and do we make consistent and unbiased use of that knowledge, in order to develop an adequately informed recommendation on some policy question ? Other-regardingness concerns the readiness to take into account the interests, values, and rights of others and issues of social justice pertaining to the way a proposed policy affects interests in favorable or unfavorable

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ways. And future-regardingness is the ability to look at and evaluate the long-term consequences of the solutions proposed and to deal with issues of their sustainability. In order for a group of deliberators to live up to these demanding standards (and usually under severe time constraints), the group must be small in order to allow for a full presentation of arguments and opinions of its members. Also, and in order to enforce the above rules of deliberation, the facilitator must assume the role of enforcing roughly equal participation and an adequate input of information (which is usually provided by a diverse group of experts who are made available for lectures and questioning). Perhaps hardest to realize is the third criterion: Deliberations of mini-publics must be (known by participants beforehand to have a reasonably reliable prospect to be) consequential, i. e. are guaranteed to have some measure of political impact. This impact can be entirely informal, but even that presupposes that political elites and members of legislative assemblies take mini-publics seriously, and that the media report on the process and outcome (recommendations) of deliberation. ‘Planning cells’ (Dienel 1997) and ‘citizen juries’ (Coote and Lenaghan 1997) are cases where the promised impact was to an extent formalized: sponsoring (local) governments made a formal commitment to provide reasons in public should they choose not to follow the recommendations given by deliberating mini-publics. Again, the most far-reaching commitment was one that the government of British Columbia made, namely the commitment to hold a referendum on the Assembly’s proposal (however one with strong super-majoritarian conditions, which ultimately caused its failure by a narrow margin). At any rate, if the participants cannot rely on the expectation that what they do and come up with has at least some chance of ‘making a difference’ in public policy, and that their common efforts are recognized as valuable (according to some proposals, also through the payment of a nominal fee paid to deliberators), their readiness to participate, to spend time on learning and understanding, and to properly deliberate will soon be exhausted.

Conclusion I introduced this essay by saying that contemporary liberal democracies are ‘not functioning well’. Apart from the question of normative standards concerning the characteristics and criteria of a ‘well-functioning’ democracy that this proposition suggests, it can also be read as an empirical generalization: Many – and probably an increasing number and highly diverse sorts of – people converge on the belief, expressed in words and even more often in their patterns of behavior and (in)action, that the way democracies function and the political outcomes they gener-

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ate are often frustrating, disappointing, short-sighted, unfair, and thus seriously deficient. Rather than this disappointment leading to widely advocated rejection of liberal democracy and its principles, there is an ongoing and vivid democratic meta-discourse on possible improvements, extensions, and innovations of the democratic mode of organizing political rule. In this discourse, participants have focused on various stages of the overall democratic political process. One focus can be described by the question how ruling elites can be prevented from violating the limitations of their office through effective constraints that would make them act in more accountable ways. The proposal to strengthen the political role of courts and fiduciary institutions is sometimes made in response to this concern. Another focus is the institutional method by which the multitude of expressions of individual preferences of citizens is to be aggregated and condensed into a single (and time-limited) collective preference. Answers to this question emerge from debates on the pros and cons of electoral systems and the virtues and vices of direct-democratic popular legislation. These two foci have remained almost entirely outside of the present discussion. Instead, I have concentrated on a third and a fourth issue. The former is the issue of actual political participation: how many people are entitled to make use of their democratic rights, how many do actually do so, how often, and concerning what categories of substantive matters. Here belong all democratic innovations that are intended to encourage more, and more evenly distributed, participation through voting and joining and other forms of expressing preferences and choices. Finally, there is the issue of how the preferences that are to be expressed and aggregated come into being in the first place – the formative phase of beliefs and preferences concerning political life. It is at this stage where deliberative modes of forming and revising preferences can come to play a role. I have argued that the practice of giving reasons, as well as the practice of listening to, respecting, and possibly adopting reasons that others give in an open-ended and disciplined face-to-face setting can be institutionalized. To that end, participation in such settings would have to be randomized and thereby changed according to egalitarian principles; time, place, and topics of deliberation organized in formal ways; the mutual recognition of dissenting voices guaranteed; the civility of discourses and the availability of relevant information assured; and the public visibility of outcomes, consensual or otherwise, provided for. Institutional forms in which this happens are not a substitute for, but a complement to all those more familiar procedures of democratic politics which regulate the expression and aggregation of preferences and the accountability of office holders. Individual beliefs and preferences are logically prior to their expression and aggregation. Yet beliefs and preferences, the ultimate ‘raw material’ of the political process, cannot be treated as individually ‘given’ but are, as social constructs, in constant flux. Also,

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they are highly incomplete, as most people simply do not know what to believe or which of the alternative decisions to prefer most of the time. Deliberation is the process in which they find out; if properly conducted, it can also be a process in which the three virtues of taking the facts, the well-being of others, and future developments into consideration will be cultivated.

References Ackerman, Bruce and Ian Ayres. 2004. Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ackerman, Bruce and James S. Fishkin. 2004. Deliberation Day. New Haven: Yale University Press. Coote, Anna and Jo Lenaghan.1997. Citizens’ Juries: Theory into Practice. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Crouch, Colin. 2004. Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Crouch, Colin. 2008. ‘What Will Follow the Demise of Privatised Keynesianism ?’ The Political Quarterly 79 (4): 476 – ​487. Crozier, Michel J., Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki. 1975 The Crisis of Democracy. New York: NYU Press. Dahl, Robert A. 2000. On Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dalton, Russell J. 2004. Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices. The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dienel, Peter C. 1997. Die Planungszelle. Eine Alternative zur Establishment-Demokratie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Fishkin, James S. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation. New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James S. 1995. The Voice of the People. Public Opinion and Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fishkin, James. 2009. When the People Speak. Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fung, Archon and Erik Olin Wright (eds.). 2003. Deepening Democracy. Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. London: Verso. Gastil, John, Chiara Bacci and Michael Dollinger. 2010. ‘Is Deliberation Neutral ? Patterns of Attitude Change during “The Deliberative Polls”.’ Journal of Public Deliberation 6 (2). Retrieved 1 February 2011 (http://services.bepress.com/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1128&context=jpd). Goodin, Robert E. 1982. Political theory and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodin, Robert E. 2003. ‘Democratic Accountability: The Distinctiveness of the Third Sector.’ Archives Européennes de Sociologie 44 (3): 359 – ​369.

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Goodin, Robert E. 2004. ‘Input Democracy.’ Pp. 79 – ​100 in Power and Democracy, edited by Frederik Engelstad and Oyvind Osterud. Aldershot: Ashgate. Goodin, Robert E. and John S. Dryzek. 2006. ‘Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics.’ Politics and Society 34 (2): 219 – ​244. Guéhenno, Jean Marie. 1993. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion. Heller, Hermann. (1933) 1983. Staatslehre. Tübingen: Mohr 1983. Hinrichs, Karl. 2002. ‘Do the Old Exploit the Young ? Is Enfranchising Children a Good Idea ?’ Archives Européennes Sociologiques 43 (1): 35 – ​58. Kant, Immanuel. (1795) 2006. ‘Toward Perpetual Peace.’ Pp. 67 – ​109 in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Rethinking the Western tradition, edited by Pauline Kleingeld. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1997. ‘Unequal Participation. Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma.’ American Political Science Review 91 (1): 1 – ​14. Lipset, Seymor M. 1981. Political Man. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power. A Radical View. London: Palgrave. Mill, John S. 1861. Considerations on Representative Government. Mutz, Diana C. 2008. ‘Is Deliberative Democracy a Falsifiable Theory ?’ Annual Review of Political Science 11: 521 – ​538. Nassmacher, Karl Heinz. 2009. Political Finance. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Neblo, Michael A., Kevin M. Esterling, Ryan P. Kennedy, David M. J. Lazer and Anand E. Sokhey. 2010. ‘Who Wants to Deliberate – and Why ?’ American Political Science Review 104 (3): 566 – ​583. O’Connor, James. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: Saint Martin’s Press. Offe, Claus. 1992. ‘Bindings, Shackles, Brakes: On Self-Limitation Strategies.’ Pp. 63 – ​ 94 in Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, edited by Axel Honnth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe and Albrecht Wellmer. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Offe, Claus. 1997. ‘Microaspects of Democratic Theory: What Makes for the Deliberative Competence of Citizens ?’ Pp. 81 – ​104 in Democracy’s Victory and Crisis, edited by Axel Hadenius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Offe, Claus. 2006. ‘Political Disaffection as an Outcome of Institutional Practices ? Some Post-Tocquevillean Speculations.’ Pp. 23 – ​45 in Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies. Social Capital, Institutions and Politics, edited by Mariano Torcal and J. R. Montero. London: Routledge. Pharr, Susan J. and Robert D. Putnam (eds.). 2000. Disaffected Democracies. What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries ? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Anne. 1995. The Politics of Presence: The Political Representation of Gender, Ethnicity and Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santos, Bonaventura de S. 1998. ‘Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy.’ Politics & Society 26 (4): 461 – ​510.

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Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1960. The Semi-Sovereign People. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Schmitter, Philippe C. 2000. ‘The Prospects of Post-Liberal Democracy.’ Pp. 25 – ​40 in Kontingenz und Krise, edited by Karl Hinrichs, Herbert Kitschelt and Helmut Wiesenthal. Frankfurt: Campus. Schmitter, Philippe C. and Alexander H. Trechsel (eds.). 2004. The Future of Democracy in Europe. Trends, Analysis and Reforms. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Sen, Armatya. 1999. Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf. Smith, Graham. 2005. Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from around the World. Retrieved 1 February 2011 (http://www.powerinquiry.org/publications/ documents/BeyondtheBallot_000.pdf). Smith, Graham. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solt, Frederick. 2008. ‘Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement.’ American Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 48 – ​60. Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1835, 1840) 1988. Democracy in America. New York: Vintage. Torcal, Mariano and J. R. Montero (eds.). 2006. Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies. Social Capital, Institutions and Politics. London: Routledge. Warren, Mark E. 2003. ‘A Second Transformation of Democracy ?’ Pp. 223 – ​249 in Democracy Transformed ?, edited by B. C. Cain, R. J. Dalton and Susan E. Scarrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, Mark E. and Hilary Pearse (eds.). 2008. Designing Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision (2017)

One core question of political theory is how best to make collectively binding decisions: who should make those decisions, and by what rules and procedures ? The modalities of decision-making are not just something to be determined at the founding, or “constitutional” moment, of a political community once and for all times by some pouvoir constituant (constituent power). The question of whether our rules and procedures are still “good enough” or whether they are in need of amendments and adjustments is an ongoing challenge in the background of any political process, and certainly one that qualifies as democratic. Yet how should we decide how to decide ? The difficulty of any conceivable answer to this question derives from its tricky recursive logic. For the answer, in order to be recognized as valid and binding, must itself be decided upon – but how and by whom ? If we were able to deduce the “right” mode of decision-making from a robust theory of a divine order, as in an ideal-typical theocratic regime, the problem would go away. Conversely, if we had a scientific theory about whose decision-making competencies and methods would yield optimal policy results and rational problem solutions (as was the claim of “scientific” state socialism), the problem of deciding how to decide would also evaporate and the one best way of running a country and its economy would reveal itself beyond any doubt. Given the modern obsolescence of either of these certainties, we need to face the fact that neither constitutional methods of arriving at decisions nor the resulting decisions themselves (that is, policies), are capable of having unquestionable validity. At best, political procedures can be consistent with widely shared normative premises of fairness, and policy outcomes can be regrettable – or not. Any account of what we mean by liberal representative democracy will, rather uncontroversially, include the following features: Liberal democracy is a political system applying (at least, so far) only to nation-states and their subnational territorial components. The right to rule derives, directly or indirectly, from periodic © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_14

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and contested elections through which the composition of legislative assemblies and governments is determined. It is premised upon the dichotomy between rulers and ruled, or (elected) elites and (voting) nonelites. Citizens, regardless of other resources they control, enjoy equal political rights and freedoms (voting, communication, association) as a matter of constitutional guarantee. Rule of law and division of powers constrain the use of state power and its monopolistic exercise, thus making its use at least minimally accountable. As an empirical generalization, we can add that democracies are constantly challenged and self-scrutinizing political systems that face on-going controversial demands for their own revision, development, and improvement. Democracies are continuously being renegotiated. They are quintessential political systems “on the move,” driven by issues of the legitimacy of rule and its effectiveness. In the course of the last forty years of theoretical self-reflection and empirical observation of the stability, modes of operation, and trajectories of change of liberal representative democracies, many propositions have been advanced that converge on the diagnosis of a “crisis,” or the creeping deformation, of liberal representative democracy. This multifaceted crisis exists in the absence of explicitly nondemocratic (totalitarian, theocratic, or otherwise authoritarian) counter-models and theoretical doctrines of how political rule should be conducted. To over-simplify: The vast majority of contemporary mankind believes in and endorses (some version of the above) democratic principles and promises.1 At the same time, large minorities and sometimes majorities of inhabitants of existing liberal democracies are dissatisfied with, and feel left out by or alienated from, the democratic routines and practices they experience. We may thus say that abstract liberal democracy is celebrating its near-global victory, while concrete and existing democracies are widely looked at with discontent and frustration over failures of both the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic rule. More specific, liberal democracies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have experienced symptoms of stress and malfunctioning over the last generation that have activated a global discourse of political theorists and practitioners to suggest innovative remedies. What are the deficiencies or illnesses to which these remedies are targeted ? To generalize, symptoms of this dissatisfaction include the following. 1) Apathy and other forms of nonparticipation and political alienation are on the rise and are undermining the increasingly nominal equality of political rights.

1

This generalization does not apply to the Chinese case of industrial capitalism presided over by a “Communist” party. But that model is neither intended for export nor appealing to elites or masses of Western societies.

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The least advantaged strata of populations (by education, economic, and class status, and also by age, gender, and minority status) show the strongest features of (self-)exclusion. As many people in these categories do not vote or participate through membership in parties and other formal organizations, a vicious cycle is set in motion by which elites of such organizations find little strategic incentive to respond to the interests and values of the marginalized groups. At the upper end of the socioeconomic hierarchy, investors, financial institutions, employers, and a host of organized interests enjoy de facto privileges of shaping political agendas and constraining the resources that elected governments have available for the conduct of policies. 2) Political parties and elites have suffered from a rapid loss of trust concerning both their willingness and ability to respond to nonelites and to promote desired kinds of social and economic change. The “monitory” tactics of commercial and social media, with their “gotcha” incentives, further discredit elites. As major socioeconomic problems (such as low growth, precariousness of employment, widening inequality, social exclusion, and international conflicts) have come to be seen as beyond the reach of any conceivable government, the perceived political purchasing power of the ballot declines. In many cases, the parameters set by the political economy of capitalist democracies have enforced a convergence of major political parties that makes them virtually indistinguishable in terms of programs and ideology. The result tends to be restricting competition to the appeal of leading personalities. 3) If political mobilization and contestation occur at all, they do so, to a rapidly growing extent, in rightist populist ways; by appeals not to shared interests or some version of the common good, but to primordial and ethnonational identities and “moral majorities,” and in confrontational opposition to established elites, outside groups, minorities, and everything “foreign,” including, in the EU context, Brussels as the location of its executive branch. The kind of social protection populists offer derives not from constituted state power to achieve collective goals through policies, but from territorial borders of nation-states. Populist movements and parties are, in many cases, not instrumentally focused on policy, but expressively focused on the politics of protest, obstruction, and the assertion of some kind of identity against a distrusted “establishment” and political class, as well as minorities and foreign or supranational powers. They also focus on “strong” leaders whose space of action must not be unduly constrained by liberal constitutional and other inhibitions, thus giving rise to the oxymoronic phenomenon of illiberal democracy and more-or-less soft forms of electoral authoritarianism. Its preferred form of legitimation (of both leaders and policies) is by reference to plebiscitarian acclamation and referenda, which allegedly are best suited to reveal the true, authentic, unified, and uncorrupted will of the people – a will that, in reality,

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is often but a mere artifact of media and party campaigns confronting the “establishment,” foreign forces, and minorities. 4) The space left to maneuver for governing elites, and hence the extent to which they can relate at all responsively to popular interests and demands, is increasingly limited by the international political economy (globalization) with its neoliberal imperatives of competitiveness, austerity, debt consolidation, and tax competition, giving rise to a condition now often described as “postdemocracy.” Parameters that determine peoples’ life chances and living conditions – whether in their roles as workers, consumers, savers, or citizens receiving state-provided services and transfers – are set by technocratic supranational elites at places and levels that have largely escaped the reach of national policy-making and its democratic accountability, while nation-states suffer from a decline of their “governing capacity,” facing conditions in which they by themselves are unable to provide for their citizens’ socioeconomic, civil, and military security and the integrity of their physical environment. The battle cry of rightist populism is: “Let us, the people decide” and take control out of the hands of untrustworthy national elites and illegitimate supranational forces. The arsenal of plebiscitarian methods (which, to be sure, are sometimes also advocated by some non-populist forces) includes referenda on policy issues, citizen initiatives to hold such referenda, and agenda initiatives to force legislatures to address certain policy issues. The use of survey research for identifying popular preferences and then elevating them to the status of policy priorities on leaders’ platforms can sometimes be seen as cases of social science – assisted populism. Thirty-six of the forty-seven member states of the Council of Europe have by now adopted one or all of these direct-democratic devices as part of their constitutional repertoire. In 2012, the EU itself introduced the European Citizen Initiative as a device of supranational direct democracy. In recent years, these instruments of direct democracy have been applied to policies as varied as whether to permit or ban the construction of minarets, restrictions on migration, the public use of a minority language, the acquisition of agricultural land by foreigners, same sex marriage, the (retroactive) imposition of inheritance taxes, and the introduction of a basic income. For example, in the context of the recent failed military coup in Turkey, President Erdoğan has gestured at holding a referendum on re-introducing the death penalty. The target groups of these referendum campaigns may be Muslims, migrants, sexual minorities, wealthy heirs, foreign real estate speculators, European institutions, criminal enemies of the state, or ethnolinguistic minorities. Although Switzerland has the oldest and most famous tradition of direct democratic legislation in Europe (usually preceded in that country by extensive and reasonably balanced public debates on issues), these practices have spread in more limited forms to other countries in Europe, with hot spots

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in the rightist populist regimes that have emerged in many of the post-Communist polities. In Hungary, a national referendum on a mandatory EU migrant quota was held (and lost by the government due to insufficient turnout) in October of 2016. Yet probably the most consequential referendum held in Europe to date appeared in precisely the European country where parliamentary representative democracy was born: The United Kingdom. The Brexit referendum of June 23, 2016, asked citizens to vote on whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union or remain a member state. Note that this referendum was called for, but not initiated by, a rightist populist political party. To the contrary, it was politically designed by David Cameron, a Conservative yet pro-European prime minister, who intended to curb the growing political influence of the populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), thus turning, he hoped, the means of populists against their ends. To the surprise of most observers, that plan failed when a narrow majority of voters actually voted Leave. Was it a wise decision to let the question of Britain’s EU membership be decided by referendum ? In addressing this question, I shall refrain from discussing the substantive political question of whether Brexit is a “good” move, confining myself to the issue of whether the method used in making the decision was an adequate one. Here is a rough summary of the events. In the 2014 general elections to the European Parliament, UKIP, the British anti-EU political party, won a relative majority of 27.5 percent of the vote, with most of its votes taken from those defecting from the Conservative Party. Recognition of this growing threat prompted incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Cameron to commit himself in January 2013 to holding a referendum on the Brexit issue by the year 2017 if he were re-elected in the national elections of May 2015. His decision was a concession to the rightist populist demand to let “the people” express its will directly, rather than being represented by untrusted elites suspected of being corrupted by their own or other special or “foreign” interests. Populists are to be classified as “rightist” when framing the people in terms of nativist ethnic belonging versus some strange, foreign, and (as such) threatening enemy. Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum was intended to serve the dual purpose of 1) increasing British bargaining power in ongoing negotiations with EU partners (who were seen as averse to further UKIP gains and the prospect of Brexit and hence ready to grant concessions to the British government on the key issues of Euro-mobility and “ever closer” integration) and 2) immunizing the Conservative electoral base against further defections of voters, as Eurosceptic Conservative voters were now offered the option of expressing their Leave preference without having to switch to supporting UKIP. Both of these purposes were, to an extent, achieved, the second more fully than the first. The turn to plebiscitarian methods (which are foreign to the United

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Kingdom’s constitutional traditions) came at the price of undermining the authority of Parliament, the members of which opposed Brexit by a large majority. Having won the 2015 elections and being bound by his referendum promise, Cameron initiated the EU Referendum Act, which was passed by the House of Commons in December 2015. When the referendum was eventually held on June 23, 2016, the result was 51.9 percent Leave versus 48.1 percent Remain, with the citizenry sharply divided along class, age, and regional lines, but not equally sharply along party lines. Given a turnout of 71.8 percent of all eligible voters, roughly 37.3 percent of the electorate will have caused (if it actually comes to that) Britain’s exit from the EU by a margin of just four percentage points.2 When making their decision on referendum day, citizens were largely left with their own individual means of will formation (their beliefs and preferences) and without much clear guidance from the political parties as to which of the alternatives, together with their entirely unknown implications, to choose. The two major parties were either openly divided (Conservatives) or deeply ambivalent (Labour) about what to recommend to their voters. Yet the only party that was clear and committed on the issue (UKIP) had no chance of achieving the parliamentary representation through majoritarian British electoral law to follow its option through. The division of pros and cons was almost orthogonal to the major party cleavage. Similarly divided were the media, with some of the tabloid press engaging in a vehement denunciation of the EU, often with little regard for the truth of their claims.3 Moreover, both camps relied heavily on fear as a negative economic motivation: the Leavers feared losing control over the fates of “our” country to “Brussels” (or of having to compete with foreign migrant labor for jobs),4 and the Remain camp feared the adverse economic consequences (jobs, trade, investment, The day after the referendum, Philip Stephens, chief political commentator of the Financial Times, commented in undisguised horror: “Who would have thought pragmatic, moderate, incrementalist Britain would tear down the political temple ? This week’s referendum result was a revolt against the status quo with consequences, national and international, as profound as anything seen in postwar Europe.” Philip Stephens, “How a Cautious Nation Came to Tear Down the Political Temple,” Financial Times, June 24, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/b90a7278-3a02-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7. 3 The ironic label “post-truth” has been attached by several commentators to populist movement practices. This label is not only deserved by the generous use populist campaigns have made of outright lies, but also, as in the Trump campaign, by their anti-intellectual aversion to expertise and educated intelligence. 4 Princeton economist Ashoka Mody has put it well: “Cameron misjudged […] by making an economic case for remaining in the European Union rather than attempting a serious political argument for Europe – one based on shared values.” Ashoka Mody, “Don’t Panic. Britain’s Economy Can Survive Just Fine Outside the European Union,” Independent, July 4, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/dont-panic-britains-economy-can-survive-just-fine-outside-the-european-union-a7118736.html. 2

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exchange rates) of Brexit. Appeals to the advantages, political attractions, prior commitments, hopes, and promises of remaining were rarely advanced, implying that there were few. Left in a state of disorientation and anxiety, and being informed by the media and polling organizations that the contest would be a tight one (suggesting that every vote or abstention could make a big difference), voters were left to rely on their gut feelings, rather than an informed judgment, on the merits of the two alternatives.5 The dichotomy of a referendum further induced the voters to ignore the numerous intermediate solutions that might have been worked out through bargaining following the formal declaration of Brexit. One of the damages the reliance on the plebiscitarian method can do stems from its one-sided fixation on voting at the expense of the two other modes of democratic political communication: arguing and bargaining.6 Plebiscitarian procedures thus impoverish the tool box of democratic politics by eliminating the space for post-voting reasoning and compromise-finding in the institutional framework of representative democracy. They privilege the fast, impulsive snapshot reaction generated by passions and visceral instincts over the more time-consuming balancing of interests and the typically lengthier process of persuasion through argument. As a consequence, consistency is not required: voters can simultaneously opt for lower taxes and greater expenditures, or for cheaper gas and stricter environmental standards. Not only were the two major parties split in their preferences between Remain and Leave, but voters were also “cross-pressured” at the individual level. Many voters were motivated by the issues of immigration and “sovereignty,” with the support for the Leave alternative fueled by an identity-based opposition to having to adopt “foreign-made” EU laws (“let’s take back control of our country”). Yet, at the same time, many of the same voters “regarded the economic impact of leaving the EU negatively. […] No less than 40 [percent] reckoned that Britain would be worse off economically if it left the EU. […] The two central issues of the campaign were seemingly pulling voters in opposite directions.”7 Fears for the economy, based on socioeconomic interest, provided a reason for voting in favor of Remain. In this implicit debate of identity versus interest, the elderly and 5

There is more than a grain of truth in Edmund Burke’s famous claim: “Your representative owes you […] his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” In the case of Brexit, it was the plain cowardice of representatives facing a populist challenger that caused this sacrifice. Edmund Burke, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” November 3, 1774. 6 Jon Elster, “Arguing and Bargaining in Two Constituent Assemblies”. Journal of Constitutional Law 2 (2), (March 2000), 345 – ​421 7 John Curtice, “Brexit: Behind the Referendum,” Political Insight 7 (2) (2016), http://pli.sagepub.com/content/7/2/4.full.pdf+html.

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the less-educated considered EU membership both a cultural and economic threat and hence gravitated toward the Leave option, while the best-educated, younger (below age forty-five) voters welcomed diversity within Britain because they could “compete with ease in an internationalised labour market.”8 How has the Brexit referendum performed in realizing the democratic principle of equality of political rights to make one’s voice heard ? Good democrats know that those affected by the law must have a voice in making the law. Yet voting rights in the Brexit case became effective only by passing three filters: First, in the United Kingdom, you must be a citizen, not just a resident, to be eligible for voter registration in national elections/referenda. Millions of mainland EU citizens residing in the United Kingdom were thus not allowed to register and vote. That would be immaterial had the referendum been on a “purely British” issue. But here the category of people most directly affected by Brexit are exactly those migrant workers from member states residing in the United Kingdom. After Brexit, these migrant workers are likely to be deprived of some or all of their socioeconomic rights as EU citizens.9 Second, you must register in order to be admitted to the voting booth. “Many people chose not to register to vote because they feared the debt collection agencies that are allowed access to the electoral register.”10 As many as seven million eligible adults were not registered to vote in the United Kingdom in 2016, perhaps in part due to that deterrence effect. Third, you must vote. Thirteen million registered voters did not turn out. They were disproportionally young, renters, members of ethnic minorities, and recent movers. Older people voted in greater proportion. They generally voted for Leave, while among those aged eighteen to twenty-four, 73 percent voted (if they voted) for Remain. But the youngest age groups also had the largest share of abstainers. Again, a paradox shows up in that those affected by the outcome for the longest time span (the young), had the lowest impact on that outcome, and those least affected the greatest impact.

8 Ibid. Wolfgang Streeck has argued that “the losers under neoliberal internationalism [globalization] place their hopes on their nation states.” Wolfgang Streeck, “Where Are We Now ? Responses to the Referendum,” London Review of Books 38 (4) (July 14, 2016), http://www. lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now#streeck. This causal explanation of the outcome commands a great deal of empirical plausibility. But equally great is the temptation to exclaim, with the words of the great Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, “What an error !” 9 A reciprocal loss of socioeconomic status rights applies to British citizens who were economically active in EU member states and, after Brexit, are now relegated to the status of third country nationals. 10 Benjamin D. Hennig and Danny Dorling, “In Focus: The EU Referendum,” Political Insight 7 (2) (2016), http://pli.sagepub.com/content/7/2/20.full.

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So much for the democratic egalitarianism of voting in referenda. In regular elections, contending political parties provide some guidance to voters and tend to make an effort to mobilize in demographically balanced ways. Now another problem of referenda is that there is no way to make sure that the answer voters give is actually their answer to the specific question they are asked: in this case the question of EU membership or not. Chances are that the answer the Leavers gave was the answer to an entirely different question, such as: “Do you want to seize the opportunity to send a hostile message and cause trouble to the hated political establishment – be it the national or the one in Brussels ?”11 If this is the question being actually answered (and answering “yes” is less inhibited because of a widespread belief that the Remain camp would win anyway), there is no reason for voters to stick to their answer for even a single day after the vote. When surveyed immediately after the referendum, “7 [percent] of those who voted Leave feel like they did not make the right choice,” while no less than 29 percent considered their vote instrumentally futile as the two goals of the Leave campaign could not, in fact, both be accomplished in the upcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU: namely, the interest-related goal to stay in the single market and enjoy its economic advantages and the identity-related goal to limit freedom of movement of EU citizens and to “take back control.”12 Concerns of interest and those of identity seem to have pulled voters in different directions. Given its vast and highly uncertain short-term as well as long-term repercussions of the largely unanticipated referendum outcome (for Britain and for the geopolitical role of the EU and its prospects for further disintegration), over four million voters signed a petition in the days after the referendum that called for 11 This was widely seen by commentators to have happened in a Dutch referendum held on the highly technical as well as politically rather marginal issue of a Dutch Approval Act on a European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, which was held in The Netherlands on April 6, 2016. The outcome was a turnout of 32.8 percent, with 61 percent voting against the Act. In an interview after the referendum, the members of the rightist nationalist Citizens’ Committee EU that had successfully campaigned for holding it admitted not caring about Ukraine, but rather were against the EU political system. See Wilmer Heck, “Oekraïne kan ons niets schelen,” NCR, March 31, 2016, https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/03/31/oekrainekan-ons-niets-schelen-1606419-a969298. 12 See James Crouch, “Voters React to Post-Referendum World,” Opinium, July 1, 2016, http:// opinium.co.uk/voters-react-to-post-referendum-world/. The thought that voting for Brexit means “taking back control” is plainly delusionary, at least in the short and medium term. Article 50, which is still binding for the United Kingdom, stipulates that “the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with [the UK].” In the interest of the Union to prevent the Brexit decision from becoming a template that other member states might follow, the EU is likely to opt for the harshest possible terms in negotiating Britain’s exit arrangement, thus “taking control” over the economic fates of the United Kingdom to an unprecedented extent. The Lisbon Treaty, Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union, December 13, 2007.

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holding a second referendum, thus indicating a widespread sense of regret, as well as alarm, over the outcome. Yet such a repetition would seemingly have required another Referendum Act as its legal basis. It would have opened the horrifying perspective of an endless chain of further referenda on the outcomes of prior referenda: vote until the outcome seems right ! If the first is seen by voters as ill-considered and in need of self-correction, why should the second fare better ?13 How can the decision to let the relative majority of those participating in the referendum decide on a complex, highly consequential yet, at the same time, most unpredictable national issue be justified as the “right” procedural decision – rather than as the (eventually failed) opportunistic calculus of a leading politician to maintain his power over his party and the country ? In other words: what is this outcome’s procedural source of validity and normative bindingness ? The procedural design of the Referendum Act was ill-considered. It failed to make use of the several safety valves that can be applied in referenda in order to strengthen the normative bindingness, or legitimacy, of the outcome: that is, its prospects of being durably and universally recognized as reasonable and hence valid, rather than as a regrettable collective misstep. For one thing, a quorum, or minimally required turnout of voters, could have been stipulated, such as a 75 percent requirement. The stipulation of such a threshold, however, might have provided the opportunity for the Remain side to sabotage the referendum by launching an abstain campaign. Another possibility might be a supermajority requirement, such as a 60 percent threshold for the winner.14 Adopting such a supermajority rule would avoid deciding a matter of this magnitude by a slim and possibly even accidental and unstable majority. A third safety measure could have been the use of federal constraints. Given that the United Kingdom is a multinational political entity, one or more of its constituent nations – Northern Ireland, Wales, and in particular Scotland (where the Remain vote achieved a substantial majority) – could 13 There is, however, a strong argument for having a second referendum at a later point. As the proponents of Brexit had no plan (and could not have one) concerning the many and very different versions of what is going to happen next in re-embedding Britain into the international political economy, the eventual outcome of negotiations with the EU must also be subject to a (dis)approval by voters. As Simon Wren-Lewis has cogently argued: “I cannot see the logic in saying people should have a direct say in whether to leave the EU, but no direct say on what to leave for [emphasis mine].” Simon Wren-Lewis, “Why We Must Have a Second Brexit Referendum,” Social Europe, August 29, 2016, https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/08/must-second-brexit-referendum/. 14 As one commentator notes, “it is highly unusual [in mature democracies] that, particularly on issues of great constitutional significance, a simple majority of those who happened to vote on a particular day should be regarded as binding.” Brendan Donnelly, “After Brexit: The Light at the End of the Tunnel is Several Oncoming Trains,” Social Europe, July 18, 2016, https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/07/light-end-tunnel-several-oncoming-trains/.

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have been procedurally protected from defeat by a (narrow) overall national majority by granting Scotland autonomy rights concerning the issue of EU membership. In fact, the referendum result has strengthened Scotland’s claim for national autonomy, thus putting into political jeopardy the very unity of the United Kingdom. Finally, a test vote (as sometimes taken in party groups of legislative bodies) could have been provided, the result of which would have informed voters about dispositions of their fellow citizens and encourage them to revise or assert their own dispositions accordingly in the second (and only valid) round. Applying some or all of these provisions could have been justified by the fact that the Brexit referendum was a one-shot and highly consequential decision, which will create consequences that are certain to be felt in the long term. In contrast, the “normal” democratic procedure of holding contested elections is defined by its periodicity, meaning that governing authority is granted pro tempore and that losers of an election will have another chance in four or five years’ time, with both competing parties and members of the general public given a learning opportunity to revise platforms and preferences during the interval. An election constitutes both a government and an opposition of losers, while a referendum constitutes a fait accompli that can no longer be challenged.15 If after an ordinary legislative election, policies are considered to have gone wrong, there is someone to blame (and punish) in the next election, whereas the voting public can only blame itself (that is, nobody in particular, since the vote is secret and nobody can be held accountable) in case the results of a referendum turn out to be widely seen as mistaken. A further provision that was, in fact, deployed in the Brexit referendum was the procedural stipulation that the government is not strictly bound to implement the result, but can treat it as merely advisory. As sovereignty resides in Parliament, it is, arguably, that representative body that must eventually decide whether or not to endorse and implement, through its law-making, the referendum decision. In theory, the only thing that even the most sovereign body cannot do is abdicate its own law-making powers and transfer them to another body, such as the multitude of citizens voting in a referendum. It seems to follow that a prime minister cannot self-bindingly promise voters that he or she will follow their expressed preferences as if they constituted an act of legislation. Absent a parliamentary or at least executive ratification of the (presumed) popular will as expressed in a referendum, such a referendum cannot be binding. For example, the invocation of Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) (the article that prescribes the first step of the procedures of actually exiting the Union) must be an act of Parliament or at 15 “The 48 [percent] of voters […] who wanted to remain in the European Union now suddenly find themselves substantially unrepresented in the British Parliament.” Ibid.

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least, if “royal prerogative” were to apply (which is bitterly contested), a decision of the prime minister, who in turn might be seen as in need of winning the legitimacy of her or his decision through an endorsement through regular elections (rather than a nonelectoral accession to office, as in the case of Prime Minister Theresa May). These manifold ambiguities and disputes illustrate the extent to which the “will of the people” is a largely elusive substance contingent on the procedures by which it is being assessed. Holding a referendum has not been, in the instance of Brexit, a way to settle a question, but an inadvertent move to open a constitutional Pandora’s box. The attempt to fight populism by adopting its own plebiscitarian weapon has not only misfired, but has had a destructive impact upon the principle of representative government. To be sure, a parliamentary validation of the referendum decision might well be the result of principled argument and proper deliberation, weighing the merits of the “advice” the voting public has offered against alternative policies. Yet the sovereignty of Parliament, in the sense of having the last and decisive word, has largely been rendered nominal by the referendum and the legislature’s prior decision to hold that referendum. By adopting the EU Referendum Act, thereby (seemingly) passing its legislative responsibilities to the “people,” the Parliament has virtually destroyed its recognition as a body to be credited with the capacity to form policy on the basis of informed, considered, and balanced argument. It has eschewed its responsibility to do so, thereby confirming, in a way, the caricature populists paint of members of the “political class.” If Parliament abdicates its law-making authority on as weighty an issue as EU membership, what should prevent it from doing so on other issues in the future ?16 Having unleashed the plebiscitarian forces voicing fear of foreign control and foreign migrants, neither the political parties nor the members of Parliament could henceforth afford to advocate any solutions to future UK-EU relations that could be denounced as defying the referendum’s “advice.” Politicians cannot be expected to commit electoral suicide by refusing to follow the “will of the people,” the expression of which they themselves had allowed for, even if only as part of a power game. These problems (and not an electoral or parliamentary defeat) made 16 This question touches upon the thorny issue, not to be dealt with in the present essay, of what kind of policy issues are “safe” to be processed by plebiscitarian methods. Referenda on constitutions can arguably enhance the self-binding effect and thus the constitution’s validity and longevity. The adoption of legal rules, the consequences of which are easily understood, predictable, and largely uncontroversial (such as local referenda on opening hours of stores), would also seem unproblematic. The same can surely not be said of the plebiscitarian adoption, now common in several EU countries, of rules that discriminate against moral, ethnic, migratory, sexual, religious, or criminal minorities (as in the current initiative of the Turkish president to hold a referendum on the re-introduction of the death penalty).

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the committed Remainer David Cameron disappear from the scene of UK national politics in a matter of weeks, while the most prominent Leave protagonist, Boris Johnson, moved up to the position of Britain’s Foreign Secretary. The new prime minister’s signature tautology – “Brexit means Brexit,” being void of any information about what Brexit means – ratifies the unconditional surrender of representative to plebiscitarian will formation. It also gives carte blanche to rulers to define the meaning ex post. As constitutional scholars Richard Gordon and Rowena Moffatt have stated with unfathomable yet inconclusive juridical wisdom: “In practice, the […] referendum outcome will bind the government. In theory it is advisory but in reality, its result will be decisive for what happens next.”17 At the time of publication, the answer to this question is by no means settled by the referendum, but remains a pending case before the highest court of the country. Given all these premises, dilemmas, and consequences, the Brexit referendum must be considered a clear and unambiguous lesson on what democracies ought not to do. Holding referenda with a 50 percent majority on important substantive policy issues with substantial yet unknown long-term results is a misguided remedy to the ills of liberal democracy. Referenda encourage the accountability-free expression of poorly considered mass preferences and de-emphasize requirements of consistency, compromise-building, and the reflection on consequences. By inviting citizens to leap into the dark, they create irrevocable facts and preclude learning. They often betray minimal standards of rational policy formation, traces of which are institutionalized in even the most corrupted practices of parliamentary debate, party competition, and mass media reporting. They anonymize the locus of accountability. If these critical generalizations are only partly right, the urgent question is: can we think of better and smarter – more reliably “regret-avoiding” – modes of making highly salient decisions ? Otherwise, we may regret decisions that fail to take sufficient account of the future, other people, and the facts.18 How can we minimize these forms of rational regret while maintaining the basic tenets of liberal democratic theory: namely, equality of civil and political rights, freedom of opinion, and the division of state powers ? The remainder of this essay will consist of a short and schematic account of what should be done instead on the basis of deliberative democratic theory.

17 Richard Gordon and Rowena Moffatt, Brexit: The Immediate Legal Consequences (London: The Constitution Society, 2016), 7. 18 Future-regardingness, other-regardingness, and fact-regardingness can serve, taken together, as a standard of political rationality. See Claus Offe, “Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalised ?” in Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration, ed. Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss (Colchester, United Kingdom: ECPR Press, 2016), 73 – ​98.

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Apart from large literatures on new social movements, civil society, and social capital, a major conceptual and theoretical innovation in democratic theory over the last generation has been the idea of deliberative democracy. Compared to conventional approaches in democratic political theory, deliberative theory performs a dual shift of emphasis. In one shift that has become increasingly popular among theorists, and even to some degree in practice, deliberation is brought to the public through a partial move from territorial representation to aleatory,19 or randomized, representation – an analog to jury selection through sortition in the common law countries. This use of randomly selected citizens also serves to partially dissolve the conventional dichotomy of ruling elites representing voting yet ruled nonelites. Few suggest replacing current political institutions with such bodies; they are intended to complement existing institutions to help correct their known deficiencies. The second shift moves from an ideal of maximizing the citizens’ expression of political preferences (in participatory democracy, as many people as possible should have a chance to voice their preferences on as many issues as possible and as directly as possible) to maximizing the citizens’ capacity to form preferences and judgments on public affairs they will not later regret. How can preference formation be improved so as to make the citizen preferences that will later be translated into policies by governing elites more regret-proof ? The first of these two major reorientations of democratic innovation involves complementing the universe of the adult permanent legal residents of the territory of a state (or municipal entity or province), who are the ultimate source of popular sovereignty, with a small body (“mini-public” or “deliberative panel”) of persons that is (as accurately as possible) statistically representative of the whole. Constituting active citizenship by lot is an ancient idea, dating back to the times of Athenian democracy (and found, to some degree, in Renaissance Italian city republics), that fell into discredit in the course of the French and American revolutions with the crypto-aristocratic notion that the people can be represented only through elected bodies and leaders.20 Lotteries as a procedure of recruiting people for public roles are typically regarded as risky because they rely on highly optimistic assumptions concerning both the readiness and the competence of those chosen by 19 See Hubertus Buchstein, “Elective and Aleatory Parliamentarism,” in Parliamentarism and Democratic Theory, ed. Kari Palonen and José Maria Rosales (Opladen, Germany: Budrich, 2015), 255 – ​278; and David van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (London: The Bodley Head, 2016). Some also use the word “sortition” and others “the lot” to describe this feature of representation through random selection. 20 Rousseau was still convinced that a democracy must be built on a mix of territorial and aleatory representation. See chapter three of book four of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762).

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lot to perform the needed public roles. Yet both the readiness and competence objections can be dealt with through appropriate institutional precautions. The readiness of randomly selected candidates to assume the tasks assigned to them by lot can be enhanced through a compensation that follows a rule of thumb such as “no loss, no gain,” with a cap of, say, 150 percent of the median income, depending on the complexity of the issue under consideration. To enhance that readiness, the duration of the time in “office” might also be limited to a maximum of six months, for example. Nevertheless, civic duty to participate in deliberative mini-publics will probably remain hard to enforce, and participants who see themselves as being coerced will likely not properly perform. Techniques of stratified sampling may offer a solution in case the characteristics of the sample deviate far (by gender, age, socioeconomic, educational, and minority status) from those of the constituency as a whole. The logistical problems of organizing faceto-face deliberation sessions on national legislation in geographically large countries might be alleviated by first selecting (possibly, again, by lot) two municipal units from which the samples are to be drawn. Although in composing that sample a measure of self-selection cannot be avoided, the statistical representativeness of members of the mini-publics thus selected should be much superior to that of the composition of ordinary legislative bodies. The relatively small size of deliberative panels (probably fewer than one hundred candidates) must be big enough to allow for representativeness on all relevant variables, yet small enough to allow for serious and inclusive face-to-face arguing under the supervision of a trained facilitator. The virtue of lottery representation would consist not only in providing a political role to ordinary citizens, but in denying such a role to political parties and organized interests. Unlike the parties and interest groups, randomly selected citizens are unlikely to have the interest or the capacity to entrench themselves in their public role of deliberators. Even thornier than the issue of readiness to participate is the issue of competence. Members of issue-specific deliberative panels need to acquire a measure of understanding and expertise, as do members of legislative bodies, in order to arrive at minimally reasoned conclusions. Such expertise can be provided by an adequate number and diversity of recognized experts made available to members of a mini-public as providers of information. Concerns about deficiencies in the knowledge and experience of members of deliberative mini-publics are further reduced by the fact that no political decision-making power is vested in them. Deliberative panels would perform a purely consultative function,21 helping citizens form preferences that they would then express in elections and possibly referenda. 21 See Patrizia Nanz and Claus Leggewie, Die Konsultative: Mehr Demokratie durch Bürgerbeteiligung (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2016). See also He Baogang and Mark E. Warren, “Author-

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And citizens must be provided access to those recommendations through the reporting of print media, brochures, and (public) electronic media. The role of deliberative bodies should be strictly advisory, addressing both elites and voters. That role should also be limited to the specific issue of public policy about which a deliberative panel is commissioned to elaborate a recommendation. The lay policy-makers who jointly author such a recommendation may conclude with a consensual recommendation or with majority and minority positions. In the latter case, a second order consensus on what stood in the way of a consensual recommendation should be provided. The two panels may also disagree in their consensual recommendations. If the recommendation is both consensual within panels and identical between the two locations, this is likely to translate into the highest degree of persuasiveness and impact on electoral outcomes. This impact is due to the enlightened vicarious judgment that “people like us” have formed on the issue at hand. The more consensual the recommendation within and between panels, the stronger its influence ought to be and probably will be on the decisions that voters and elected representatives will make. The premise from which theorists of deliberative democracy by sortition start is the assumption that citizens do not simply have political preferences and attitudes, including preferences and aversions to particular policies. Rather, they continuously form these preferences in a process of ongoing confirmation, revision, and learning. Most of the time and on most issues, most peoples’ preferences are incomplete, inconsistent, insufficiently informed, contingent, fluid, and subject to relations of trust, as when we adopt the point of view of others because we happen to feel confident about the adequacy of their judgment. The capacity of forming thoroughly considered judgment can today no longer be vested in individual representatives (as Burke claimed), but must emerge from the discursive confrontation of diverse members of an organized body. The key democratic act of voting is about the expression of preferences, whereas the activity taking place in randomized deliberative panels (as well as, mostly implicitly, in many other theaters, such as peer groups, schools, religious communities, media, the arts, consumption, and not least the political process itself) is that of the formation and (de)consolidation of those preferences through learning. The presence of deliberative panels – and the public perception of the conclusions they arrive at – allows ordinary citizens to get an idea about what happens when “people like us” spend time and energy on refining their preferences, finding out for themselves and others what they hold to be the right position on particular policy issues. The role of the citizen deliberators

itarian Deliberation in China,” Dædalus 146 (3) (2017) for the spectrum between advisory/ consultative deliberative panels and empowered ones.

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will be strictly limited to that of an advisory agency assisting citizens (including elected and appointed officials) in the process of their will formation. For such reflexive preference learning to take place at the level of mass constituencies, deliberative panels need to be institutionalized: that is made part of the rules regulating the process of legislation. To illustrate, one conceivable institutional design would be the following. A deliberative panel would come into being at the initiative of at least 20 percent of the members of the state or federal legislature. These members would also define the policy issue on which the panel is commissioned to deliberate. The panel would deliberate one year prior to a decision to be taken by the legislature or executive branch on the policy. Such panels would always come in pairs, with both being active in two (according to some “most different” design) selected subterritorial entities (counties or cities). A statute would regulate the size of the panel, the sampling method, the mode of operation (including a budget for expert assistance and compensation payments), the role of facilitators and moderators, and the scheduling of meetings. Their work of (at most) six months would result in policy recommendations (consensual or otherwise) in the form of an executive summary, together with the reasoning from which the recommendations derive. The identity of members would ideally be kept anonymous through the time of deliberations so as to shield the deliberators from outside influence. Neither governments nor citizens would be pressured to follow those policy recommendations. Governments (and, perhaps, political parties) might, however, be formally required to publish an official statement specifying the reasons why they did not follow the advice, in cases in which they decide not to do so. It is impossible to know whether the outcome of the Brexit decision would have been different if it had been processed through an institutional arrangement of will formation such as the one just outlined. Whatever the answer, British voters and elites would at least have been more certain that they made the right decision than they can possibly be after the experience of the Brexit referendum.

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Wille und Unwille des Volkes. Notizen zur politischen „Theorie“ des Populismus (2019)

Menschen können einen Willen haben. Das Volk besteht aus Menschen. Also kann auch das Volk einen Willen haben. Das ist eine klassische fallacy of composition, ein Fehlschluss von Eigenschaften der Elemente auf die Eigenschaften des Ganzen, das aus diesen Elementen zusammengesetzt ist. Zellen haben einen Kern. Der menschliche Körper besteht aus Zellen. Also muss auch dieser Körper einen Kern haben… Nötigt uns die Vergegenwärtigung solchen Unsinns, den Begriff des Volkswillens aus unserem analytischen Vokabular zu entfernen ? Das wäre gewiss voreilig.

I. Bekanntlich unterscheidet Rousseau zwischen (a) der volonté de tous, dem Willen aller, und (b) der volonté générale, dem vernünftigen Gemeinwillen. Jener steht für die Vielfalt empirisch divergierender Willensbekundungen der Bürger, dieser für ihre gemeinsame und übereinstimmende Einsicht über den Gehalt des Gemeinwohls und den zu seiner Realisierung erforderlichen Weg – eine Einsicht, die nur bei ungetrübter Urteilskraft und makelloser republikanischer Tugend aller Beteiligten zustande kommen kann. Der gesamte Gedankengang des Contrat Social ist von der Anstrengung getrieben, einen Weg von (a) nach (b) zu finden. Rous­seaus Problem ist: „Wie soll eine verblendete Menge, die oft nicht weiß, was ihr zum Guten gereicht, […] ein derart schwieriges Unternehmen ausführen, wie ein System der Gesetzgebung es ist ?“ (Kapitel II, 6 des Contrat Social) Rousseaus Lösung ist, grob zusammengefasst, dass jener vernünftige Gemeinwille nur dann gefunden und zur Geltung gebracht werden kann, wenn das Gemeinwesen, in dem das geschieht, sehr klein sowie ökonomisch, politisch und kulturell in hohem Maße homogen ist. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9_15

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Es darf keine „Teilgesellschaften“ geben (II, 3) und keinen faktisch durchsetzungsfähigen fürstlichen „Sonderwillen“. (III, 1) Kein Bürger darf „derart vermögend sein, sich einen anderen kaufen zu können, und keiner so arm, dass er gezwungen wäre, sich zu verkaufen.“ (II, 11) – die perfekte „Ein-Klassen-Gesellschaft“, die nur aus selbständigen Gewerbetreibenden besteht. Alles kommt darauf an, dass „Privatinteressen“ und „Sondermeinungen“ aus der Gesetzgebung ausgefiltert werden. (III, 4) Das Volk muss unmittelbar an der Gesetzgebung beteiligt werden, nicht etwas durch Repräsentanten wie Parteien, Verbände oder auch ständische Parlamente; daher muss das Gemeinwesen „sehr klein“ sein. (III, 15) Wenn es zu einer Mehrheitsentscheidung kommt, beweist das, dass die unterlegene Minderheit sich schlicht über den Inhalt des Gemeinwohls „getäuscht“ hat. (IV, 2) Im Notfall, d. h. „wenn es sich um das Wohl des Vaterlandes handelt“, darf und muss auch eine „Diktatur“ eingreifen, da als „erste Absicht des Volkes“ zwanglos zu unterstellen ist, „dass der Staat nicht untergehen soll.“ (IV, 6) Für die „Bewahrung“ und „Hebung“ der Sitten im Volke sorgt ein „Censor“ (IV, 7) und für die erforderliche „Gesinnung des Miteinander“ die Zivilreligion mit ihrem nicht-kirchlichem, vielmehr „rein bürgerlichen Glaubensbekenntnis“. (IV, 8)

II. Natürlich ist es müßig, Rousseau vorzuhalten, dass seine Theorie einer durchaus illiberalen Homogenisierung des Volkswillens im 20. Jahrhundert für die Rechtfertigung der Herrschaftspraxis beider totalitärer Regimes herhalten musste. Rousseau stellt sich „die gesellschaftsvertragliche Konstituierung der Volkssouveränität als einen gleichsam existentiellen Akt der Vergesellschaftung vor, durch den sich die vereinzelten […] Individuen in die gemeinwohlorientierten Bürger eines ethischen Gemeinwesens verwandeln.“1 Was den heute (nicht nur) in Europa grassierenden Rechtspopulismus angeht, so erspart er sich jede vertragstheoretische Anstrengung, Anweisungen für den politischen Prozess der „Veredelung“ des empirischen zum vernunftgeleiteten Volkswillen vorzuzeichnen. Er umgeht sozusagen das Rousseau-Problem, indem die beiden Typen des Willens gleichgesetzt werden: Der Volkswille ist der empirische Mehrheitswille, und dessen singuläre Substanz leitet sich aus einer immer schon vorausgesetzten ethno-nationalen Identität der politischen Gemeinschaft her. An die Stelle des liberalen Minderheitenschutzes tritt damit das konsequent zu exekutierende Gebot des Mehrheitsschutzes.

1

J. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992, S. 132.

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Populisten sind auf die Anrufung eines singulären und homogenen Volkswillens strategisch angewiesen, weil sie sonst ihren anti-pluralistischen Alleinvertretungsanspruch für „das“ Volk aufgeben müssten.2 Dabei haben sie das Problem, die für ihre politischen Ambitionen ärgerliche Tatsache der faktischen Pluralität von Willensbekundungen der Bevölkerung theoretisch und praktisch bewältigen zu müssen. Der Volkswille tritt nun einmal immer wieder im Plural auf. Populisten sind deshalb in der strukturellen Verlegenheit, nicht explizieren zu können, was eigentlich gemeint ist, wenn vom Volkswillen die Rede ist. In modernen, d. h. hier: komplexen und vielfältig differenzierten Gesellschaften ist der Versuch ersichtlich aussichtslos, einen singulären Willen des Volkes zu substanzialisieren. Selbst die vulgär-rouseauistische Lösung eines Carl Schmitt, Homogenität des Volkswillens durch eine externe Feindschaftserklärung zu erzeugen, hat unter partiell supranational geregelten Bedingungen der Interdependenz und Kooperation von Staaten schlechte Erfolgsaussichten. Angesichts dieses Argumentationsnotstandes populistischer Positionen lassen sich drei Arten von gedanklichen (und in ihren Konsequenzen durchaus sehr praktischen) Notlösungen beobachten. Zum einen die Stimulierung von Furcht und Verlustängsten, einschließlich der wütend-aggressiven Aversion gegen Fremdes und Fremde. Hier erlangt der Volkswille seine Einheitlichkeit negatorisch, als manifester Unwille eines Volkes von „Wutbürgern“, Differenz zu tolerieren und sich mit ihr abzufinden. Der Volkswille besteht dann in Äußerungen der Indigna­ tion über die Kränkung und Verletzung des vermeintlich Eigenen und Vertrauten und der wahrgenommenen Verweigerung geforderter Anerkennung. Daher die Affinität des Populismus zu ethno-nationalen Kategorien. Deren Verwendung hat immer schon dazu gedient, externe Gegensätze hervorzuheben und gleichzeitig interne Konfliktfronten innerhalb einer proklamierten „Volksgemeinschaft“ zu verwischen. Dazu gehört die Klage über einen erlebten oder doch befürchteten Niedergang – das Verfalls-Narrativ, das in suggestiven und politisch so ungemein erfolgreichen Slogans wie „taking back control“ oder „making America great again“ aufscheint. Dabei können identitätsstiftende Diskurse über Bedrohung und Niedergang durchaus (wenn auch oft in demagogischer Verdrehung von Kausalitäten) an Erfahrungen unkompensierter Verluste anknüpfen, die von Globalisierungs- und auch Europäisierungsverlierern und denjenigen gemacht werden, deren Lage auf Arbeits- und Wohnungsmärkten oder deren Schulkarrieren und Versorgungslage durch Migration – sei es Zuwanderung in West- und Südeuropa, sei es Abwanderung in Mittel- und Osteuropa3 – negativ betroffen sind.

2 3

Vgl. J. W. Müller, Was ist Populismus ? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016. Vgl. I. Krastev und S. Holmes, The Light That Failed, im Erscheinen

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Eine zweite populistische Vorgehensweise bei der Verkündung eines fingierten Volkswillens besteht darin, die real existierende Pluralität politischer und gesellschaftlicher Willensbekundungen als Resultat von Verrat, Manipulation und Irreführung zu denunzieren, die von politischen, justiziellen, medialen und professionellen Eliten verübt werden. Ihnen werden die „einfachen“ und „normalen“ Bürger (im Englischen „ordinary“, gern auch „hard working“ citizens) als Leit­ figuren des „wahren“ Volkes gegenübergestellt, das vor der Irreführung durch jene „kosmopilitischen“ Eliten zu bewahren sei. Daher die Affinität des Populismus zu Verschwörungstheorien, wie sie in bizarrer Ausprägung mit zugleich antisemitischen wie antiislamischen Akzenten von Ungarns Ministerpräsidenten gepflegt werden. Aber auch die Beschimpfung von liberalen Massenmedien als „Lügenpresse“ mit ihren „fake news“ gehört in diesen Zusammenhang. Der suggerierte Umkehrschluss ist, dass Wahrheit und authentischer Volkswille vornehmlich in den „sozialen“ Medien zu finden ist; allenfalls noch in den von Populisten stets (und ungeachtet der verheerenden Folgen, wie sie am Beispiel Brexit überdeutlich abzulesen sind4) präferierten plebiszitären Methoden der Ermittlung des Volkswillens. Zu den noch vergleichsweise harmlosen Vorhaltungen gehört, dass die Eliten in ihrer Arroganz (das „Establishment“, Akteure supranationaler Organisationen und andere „foreign stakeholders“, die „Altparteien“) weder willig noch fähig sind, den Vertretern des „wahren“ Volkswillens Gehör zu bieten und auf ihre Anliegen in ihrer politischen Praxis einzugehen. Auch hier ergeben sich Anknüpfungspunkte nicht nur an die empörende Evidenz großflächiger politischer Korruption in einigen postkommunistischen Ländern, sondern über diese hinaus auch an die Erfahrung realer Strukturprobleme und Symptomen von „Unregierbarkeit“ einer staatlichen Politik, die sich auf den verschiedensten Gebieten – von der Reform der Eurozone bis zu Problemen bei der Regulierung von Diesel-Kraftstoff oder dem Management der „digitalen Revolution“ – unfähig zeigt, selbst bescheidenen Ansprüchen an adäquates Krisenmanagement und effektives Regieren gerecht zu werden. Die Wahrnehmung einer dysfunktional gewordenen Staatsgewalt führt kann offensichtlich dem kurzschlüssigen Gedanken Auftrieb verschaffen, Sicherheit, Ordnung und Lebenschancen ersatzweise von der Befestigung von Staatsgrenzen zu erwarten. Ein drittes gedankliches Manöver von Populisten, das dem Phantasma eines konsolidierten Volkswillens Plausibilität zu verleihen bestimmt ist, besteht im weitgehenden Verzicht auf wirtschafts- und sozialpolitische Ordnungsvorstellungen. Viele sozialwissenschaftliche Beobachter stimmen darin überein, dass es sich 4 Vgl. C. Offe, „Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision“, Daedalus, (2017) vol. 146 no. 3, 14 – ​27, http://www. mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00443.

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bei Populismus um eine „dünne“, ordnungspolitisch amorphe Ideologie handelt, die kulturpolitisch überwiegend konservativ und politisch mehr oder weniger autoritär optiert, sich aber im Sinne eines konsequenten Machterwerbs-Opportunismus für linke wie rechte sozialökonomische Positionen als zumindest anschlussfähig ausgibt und chamäleonartig auf Festlegungen verzichtet. Von der vergleichsweise generösen sozialprotektionistischen Familienpolitik der polnischen PiS-Regierung, den ebenso unklaren wie jedenfalls unfinanzierbaren Versprechungen der italienischen Cinque Stelle zum Thema eines „Grundeinkommens“ für Langzeit-Arbeitslose bis zu der drastischen wirtschaftsprotektionistischen Handelspolitik des amerikanischen Präsidenten und den öffentlichen Gedankenspielen der deutschen AfD über einen Austritt der Bundesrepublik aus der Euro­ zone („Dexit“) kommt allerlei vor, das nicht auf einen gemeinsamen ideologischen Nenner zu bringen ist. Populisten sind in ihrer Diskursstrategie bestrebt, den „alten“ politischen Code links vs. rechts (so, als wäre dieser obsolet) durch einen neuen zu ersetzen: den Code GAL (für green-alternative-libertarian) vs. TAN (für traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist).

III. Entgegen populistischen Suggestionen einer mythischen Ursprünglichkeit und Homogenität des Volkswillens ist die Erinnerung an die vermittelte Natur kollektiver Willensäußerungen am Platze.5 Es ist zunächst die Verfassung, die das Volk zum Haben wie zur Bekundung eines Willens allererst befähigt. Kommunikative Grundrechte wie die Meinungs-, Wissenschafts-, Versammlungs- und Koalitionsfreiheit sowie prozedurale Vorschriften bestimmen darüber, wie das, was dann als Wille des Volkes Verbindlichkeit erlangt, gebildet und geäußert wird. So schreibt Art. 20, 2 des deutschen Grundgesetzes vor: „Alle Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus. Sie wird vom Volke in Wahlen und Abstimmungen und durch besondere Organe der Gesetzgebung, der vollziehenden Gewalt und der Rechtsprechung ausgeübt.“ Ganz anders ist in Art. 1 der Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik von der „Führung der Arbeiterklasse und ihrer marxistisch-leninistischen Partei“ sowie in Art. 2 davon die Rede, dass „alle politische Macht in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik […] von den Werktätigen in Stadt und Land ausgeübt“ wird. Es liegt auch ohne die bestätigende historische Erfahrung auf der Hand, dass der Volkswille nichts anderes ist als ein Destillat von spezifischen konstitutionellen Bestimmungen und sich seinem möglichen Inhalt nach so unterscheiden wird 5

Vgl. zu Folgendem auch A. Weale, The Will of The People. A Modern Myth, Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

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wie jene sich unterscheiden. Nur jene Bestimmungen können überhaupt Gegenstand eines Volkswillens sein (etwa eines „verfassungspatriotischen“), während konkrete politische Präferenzen nicht „dem“ Volk, sondern nur sozialen Kategorien der ihm angehörenden Bürger zugeschrieben werden können. Die These von der fiktiven Natur eines materialen, auf bestimmte Politik­ inhalte bezogenen Volkswillens, wie ihn Populisten postulieren, ist keineswegs originell und lässt sich leicht begründen. Zunächst mit der wenig riskanten Verallgemeinerung, dass die meisten Bürger zu den meisten politischen Sach- und Streitfragen und zu den meisten Zeitpunkten ihre Interessen und Präferenzen gar nicht benennen können. Sie bilden Meinungen und Präferenzen und bekunden ihren Willen, wenn sie durch Ereignisse, mediale Berichterstattung, soziale Konflikte oder politische Wahlkämpfe gefragt oder herausgefordert werden: Der Volkswille hat „Antwortcharakter“ (E.-W. Böckenförde). Im zeitlichen Ablauf ist sowohl der Wille von Personen Wandlungen unterworfen wie auch die Zusammensetzung des Volkes als eines kollektiven Willenssubjekts.6 Das „Volk“ wäre demnach nicht als Gemeinschaft von Personen, sondern eher als eine operierende Buslinie zu verstehen, bei der kontinuierlich Personen ein- und aussteigen. Zu jedem gegebenen Zeitpunkt ist zudem der Volkswille kontrovers und nicht im Singular anzutreffen.7 Dieser Umstand führt zu dem dornigen Problem der Aggregation der vielen Willensäußerungen. Hier stellt sich als Scheinlösung der Verweis auf das Mehrheitsprinzip ein. Der gewaltige Berg an philosophischer, mathematischer und sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur, der sich im Anschluss an Condorcet und Arrow aufgetürmt hat, lässt indes den Schluss zu, dass es eine eindeutig rationale und faire, damit vorzugswürdige Methode der Willensaggregation nicht gibt – erst recht dann nicht, wenn man nicht nur der Zahl der Wollenden, sondern zusätzlich auch die Intensität ihres Wollens zu berücksichtigen bereit ist. Sobald es mehr als zwei zur Willensentscheidung anstehende Alternativen gibt, stellen sich zudem Probleme der zyklischen Mehrheiten und der sog. Zweigipfligkeit von Präferenzen. Das Mehrheitsprinzip kann als Aggregationsmethode versagen, weil

6

Daher lässt sich das Brexit-Referendum vom 23. Juni 2016 genau genommen gar nicht „wiederholen“, weil das kollektive Willenssubjekt sich zwischenzeitlich gewandelt hat, nämlich durch das Ableben Hunderttausender von Bürgern und durch den Eintritt einer ähnlichen Anzahl von Personen in den Status der Wahlberechtigung. 7 Das Wort „Wille“ ist in der deutschen Sprache (im Gegensatz zum englischen Äquivalent „will“) offenbar ausschließlich im Singular gebräuchlich. Der Plural würde „Willen“ lauten, aber diese Form ist lt. Duden als seltenere Variante des Singulars im Sprachgebrauch. Als Mehrzahl würde man „Willensäußerungen“ o. ä. verwenden. Insofern suggeriert schon die Grammatik des Wortes Einzigartigkeit und Souveränität des gemeinten Gegenstandes.

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es – ganz abgesehen vom Gegenprinzip des Minderheitenschutzes – keine eindeutige Hierarchie bzw. Transitivität erzeugt.8 Zudem kann man sich bei der Frage aufhalten, was es eigentlich bedeutet, einen „Willen“ zu haben. Zur Beantwortung kommen die beiden Kriterien in Betracht, dass (a) jeder Wille sich auf ein hinreichend konkretisiertes und erwartbares Ergebnis eigenen oder fremden Handelns richtet und dass (b) Gründe expliziert werden können, weshalb man diesen und keinen anderen Willen hat. Nur unter diesen beiden Bedingungen „weiß“ ein Akteur, „was er will“. Die Äußerung und Verfolgung eines Willens ist jedenfalls etwas anderes als ein Würfelspiel. Aber ist sie auch etwas anderes als eine Panikreaktion, eine Stimmungslage oder ein ressentimentgesteuerter Impuls ? Zudem kann der von Teilen des Volkes bekundete Volkswille auf die Verletzung moralischer und rechtlicher Normen (z. B. öffentliche Leugnung des Holocaust) hinauslaufen, was ihn nach rechtsstaatlichen Grundsätzen ohnehin politisch unbeachtlich macht. Weitere denkbare Qualitätsanforderungen an den „Willen“ von Personen sind Konsistenz9 (man kann unter gegebenen Bedingungen nicht gleichzeitig niedrigere Steuern und höhere Staatsausgaben fordern) und individuelle Transitivität (wenn A > B und B > C, dann A > C). Es ist zumindest unklar, ob, wie und ggf. mit welchem Ergebnis der „Volkswille“ diesen Kriterien unterworfen werden kann. Wenn politische Akteure sich affirmativ auf „den“ Volkswillen beziehen, dann suggerieren sie, dass sie von diesem Willen Kenntnis haben oder auch nur haben könnten. Tatsächlich nehmen sie nur Bezug auf einen „hypothetischen Volkswillen“ (Ernst Fraenkel) und äußern die – sich dadurch eventuell selbst-erfüllende – Erwartung, dass ihr Handeln in einer antizipierten Zukunft, z. B. bei den nächsten Wahlen, die Zustimmung ihrer Adressaten finden wird.

IV. Sobald sie Regierungsgewalt ausüben oder an ihr beteiligt sind, sind Populisten typischerweise anstandslos bereit, ihre eigene Theorie von der fraglosen Ursprünglichkeit und existentiellen Gegebenheit „des“ souveränen Volkswillens fallen zu lassen. Sie zeigen sich mit der Tatsache der „vermittelten“, artifiziellen Natur des Volkswillens durchaus vertraut. Sie arbeiten an der Umwandlung der liberalen Demokratie (ohnehin eine Pleonasmus !) in eine illiberale (Orbán) und des „inputs“ demokratischer Willens- und Interessenbekundungen in einen „output“ von 8 9

Die Logik ist die des Kinderspiels Stein-Schere-Papier. Vgl. L. A. Free und H. Cantril, Political Beliefs of Americans, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967

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Regierungshandeln. Die Berufung auf einen authentischen und wahren Volkswillen dient als Vorwand, seine pluralistische Äußerung repressiv einzuschränken und damit Bindungen der Regierungsverantwortlichkeit zu lockern. Die Methoden, mit denen die Gestaltung des Volkswillen praktiziert wird, hat Martin Brusis am Beispiel von Entwicklungstendenzen von populistischen Regimes im nachkommunistischen Mittel- und Osteuropa facettenreich resümiert.10 Dabei geht es zunächst um die Verwischung der Grenze zwischen Regierung und Regierungspartei: öffentliche Mittel werden für Wahlkämpfe verfügbar gemacht sowie für den klientelistischen „Kauf “ von Wählerstimmen oder Dienstleistungen regierungsfreundlicher Medien. Gleichzeitig werden kritische Medien zum Schweigen gebracht oder von vermögenden Freunden der Regierung aufgekauft (Ungarn). Neue Mediengesetze wie das polnische vom Dezember 2015 erklären die Berichterstattung über regierungskritische Aktivitäten für strafbar, typischerweise wegen „Gefährdung der öffentlichen Sicherheit“. Regierungschefs (Berlusconi in Italien, Babis in der Tschechischen Republik) betätigen sich als Eigentümer großer Massenmedien. Oppositionellen Medien wird ihre Lizenz entzogen (Kroatien, Türkei). Ein weiteres Ziel der semi-autoritären Prägung des Volkswillens sind zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen (NGOs) und akademische Einrichtungen wie die Central European University in Budapest. Die im Januar 2019 ins Amt gelangte brasilianische Regierung ermutigt die Denunziation von Lehrern und Professoren durch Schüler und Studenten, und die deutsche AfD geht gegen kulturell missliebige Theaterprogramme mit der Forderung nach Etat-Kürzungen vor. Schließlich steht, wie v. a. der polnische Fall zeigt, die Unabhängigkeit der Justiz und damit die Gewaltenteilung auf dem Spiel. Diese vielfältigen und in der Mehrzahl der EU-Mitgliedstaaten nachweisbaren Symptome einer „illiberal drift“ (Brusis) müssen, so meine These, als Ergebnis strategisch betriebener Kampagnen und institutioneller Deformationen gelesen werden, mit denen populistische Kräfte (regierende, an Regierungen beteiligte und oppositionelle gleichermaßen) den Volkswillen unter Kontrolle zu nehmen suchen – freilich ohne einen offen autoritären Regimewandel im Sinne einer Partei- oder Militärdiktatur zu vollziehen. Der Volkswille, den sie stets als authentische und feststehende Letztinstanz der nationalen politischen Gemeinschaft deklarieren, erweist sich unter ihrem Regime als etwas, das sie wie eine knetbare Masse behandeln.

10 M. Brusis, „The Quality of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe“, P. Guasti and Z. Mansfeldóva (eds.) Democracy Under Stress. Changing Perspectives on Democracy, Governance and Their Measurement, Prague: Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 2018, 31 – ​53.

Nachweise

1 „Strategisches Beschweigen. Institutionelle und strategische Vorentscheidungen über die Vermeidung von Entscheidungsthemen“. Erschienen als „Einleitung“ zu P. Bachrach, M. Baratz. Macht und Armut. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977, 7 – ​34 2 “Political Institutions and Social Power: Conceptual Explorations.” In: Shapiro, Ian, Stephen Skowronek and Daniel Galvin (eds.), Rethinking Political Institutions. The Art of State. New York: New York University Press, 9 – ​31 3 “The Attribution of Public Status to Interest Groups – Observations on the West German Case”. In: S. Berger (ed.). Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, 123 – ​158 4 „Korporatismus als System nicht-staatlicher Makrosteuerung ? Notizen über seine Voraussetzungen und demokratischen Gehalte“. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10, Nr. 2 (1984), 234 – ​256 5 “‘Homogeneity’ and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights”. Journal of Political Philosophy 6, No. 2 (1998), 113 – ​ 141 6 “Democratic Institutions and Moral Resources”. In: D. Held (ed.), Political Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity, 1991, 143 – ​171 7 “Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State: Factors of Stability and Disorganization”. Policy Sciences 15, No. 3 (1983), 225 – ​246 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9

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382 Nachweise

8 „Politische Legitimation durch Mehrheitsentscheidung ?“ In: B. Guggenberger und C. Offe (Hg.), An den Grenzen der Mehrheitsdemokratie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984, 150 – ​183 (überarb. Nachdruck). 9 „Bewährungsproben – Über einige Beweislasten bei der Verteidigung der liberalen Demokratie“. In: W. Weidenfeld (Hg.), Demokratie am Wendepunkt. Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1995, 141 – ​157 10 “Political disaffection as an outcome of institutional practices ? Some postTocquevillean speculations.” In: M. Torcal and J. R. Montero (eds.), Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies. Social Capital, institutions, and politics. London: Routledge, 2006, 23 – ​45 11 “Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State: A Supply-Side Approach”. In: A. Schäfer und W. Streeck (eds.), Politics in the Age of Austerity. Cambridge: Polity, 2013, 196 – ​218. 12 “Microaspects of Democratic Theory: what makes for the deliberative competence of citizens ?”. In: A. Hadenius (ed.), Democracy’s Victory and Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 81 – ​104 13 “Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalised”. Sociologicky časopis/Czech Sociological Review 47, No. 3 (2011), 447–472 14 “Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision”. Daedalus 146, No. 3 (2017), 14 – ​27 15 „ Wille und Unwille des Volkes. Notizen zur politischen ‚Theorie‘ des Populismus“. In: Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Hg.), Wenn Demokratien demokratisch untergehen, Wien: Passagen Verlag, 2019, 95 – 105

Namensregister

A

Abraham, D.  IX, 180, 216 Abromeit, H  72, 221, 225 Ackerman, B.  XV, 263, 343, 345, 348 Adenauer, K.  28, 239 Adler, M.  75 Ágh, A.  241 Alemann, U. v.  81 Anan, K.  254 Anderson, C. W.  53, 58, 186, 194 André-Schulze, I.  IX Anheier, H.  IX Antoni, M.  205 Arendt, H.  147 Aristotle 32 Arrow, K. J.  314, 378 Ayres, I.  343 B

Babis, A.  380 Bacci, C.  347 f. Bachrach, P.  XV, 3 ff., 9 – ​16, 18, 20, 22, 38, 288 Bacon, R.  188 Balbus, I.  13 Baltes, P. B.  25 Baogang, H.  369

Baratz, M.  XV, 3 ff., 9 – ​12, 14 ff., 18, 20, 38, 288 Barber, B.  164 Barry, B.  18, 84 Bartels, L. M.  283 Basaglia, F.  42 Bauböck, R.  118, 130, 132 Bauer, O.  329 Becker, G.  307 Beetham, D.  172 Beierwaltes, A.  IX Benjamin, R.  215 Bentham, J.  305 f. Berelson, B. R.  4 Berg, E.  222 f., 378 Berger, B.  288 Berger, P. L.  43 Bergman, J.  14 Bergmann, J.  73 Berlusconi, S.  380 Birtek, F.  IX Bismarck, O. v.  50 Bobbio, N.  169, 240 Böckenförde, E. W.  51, 70, 72 f., 82, 102, 189, 218, 244, 263, 378 Böhm-Bawerk, E.  13

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 C. Offe, Liberale Demokratie und soziale Macht, Ausgewählte Schriften von Claus Offe 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22265-9

383

384 Namensregister

Boix, C.  39 Borchert, J.  242 Bosch, G.  14 Bowles, S.  181 Brecht, B.  37 Briefs, G.  52 Brusis, M.  380 Buchstein, H.  368 Burke, E.  361, 370 C

Cameron, D.  359 f., 367 Cantril, H.  379 Cawson, A.  102 Cazes, B.  186 Cloward, R. A.  282 Cobb, R. W.  13, 21 Cohen, J.  100, 313, 318, 321 f. Coleman, J. L.  315 Condorcet, N. de  378 Connor, W.  113 Coote, A.  350 Crenson, M. A.  19 Crouch, C.  294, 332, 337 f. Crouch, J.  363 Crozier, M. J.  329, 337 Curtice, J.  361 D

Dahl, R. A.  4 f., 8, 99, 195, 212, 220, 225, 247, 268, 289, 337, 345 Dalton, R. J.  338 Daudt, H.  204, 208 Debnam, G.  11 f., 22 Dettling, W.  53, 56 Dienel, P. C.  350 Dollinger, M.  347 f. Donnelly, B.  364 Dorling, D.  362 Dotzenrath, F. J.  50

Downs, A.  171 Draper, H.  53 Durkheim, E.  29, 88, 93 Dworkin, R.  307 E

Easton, D.  30, 253 Edelman, M.  15 Ehrlich, S.  70 Eijk, v. d. C.  11 f., 15, 17, 19 Eisenstadt, S. N.  30 Elder, C. D.  13, 21 Elster, J.  IX, 118, 126, 133, 195, 207, 361 Elster, P.  262 Eltis, W.  188 Engels, F.  36 Erhard, L.  52 f. Eschenburg, T.  51 Esping-Andersen, G.  76 F

Ferejohn, J.  315 Fishkin, J.  IX, XV, 263, 281, 308, 344 ff., 348 Fraenkel, E.  27, 379 Free, L. A.  379 Frey, F. W.  11, 16, 18 Fung, A.  343, 348 G

Gallego, A.  279, 281 Galtung, J.  18, 21 Gastil, J.  347 f. Gaventa, J.  38 Gehlen, A.  31 Gitlin, T.  113 Glazer, N.  122 Goldthorpe, J.  186 Golsch, L.  242

Namensregister 385

Goodin, R. E.  IX, XV, 27 f., 32, 154, 313, 339, 344, 348 Gorbachev, M.  140 Gordon, R.  367 Guasti, P.  380 Guéhenno, J.-M.  236, 337 Guggenberger, B.  XV, 217 Gunsteren, H. v.  218 H

Habermas, J.  XV, 19, 29, 109, 149, 162, 240, 374 Hall, P. A.  30 Hamm-Brücher, H.  194 Hardin, R.  84 Harris, N.  48, 57 Harsanyi, J. C.  308 Hauff, V.  52 Hayek, F. A. v.  34, 210 Heck, W.  363 Hegel, G. W. F.  88 f. Heinze, R. G.  190 Held, D.  156, 239 Heller, H.  328 Hepp, A.  IX Hilferding, R.  198 Himmelstrand, U.  179 Hindenburg, P. v.  29 Hindess, B.  34, 169 Hinrichs, K.  342 Hirsch, F.  188 Hirschman, A. O.  IX, XIII, 85, 112, 170, 213 Hitler, A.  29 Holmes, S.  375 Honneth, A.  288 Horn, G. H.  226 Howe, I.  100 Hunter, F.  4 Huntington, S.  186, 293, 329, 337

I

Illich, I.  188 Ionescu, G.  58 J

Jessop, B.  61, 76, 178 Joppke, C.  126 K

Kant, I.  237, 328 Karl, T. L.  IX, 106, 238 f. Kevenhörster, P.  51 Kirchheimer, O.  174, 206 Kitschelt, H.  194 Klein, R.  187 Knight, J.  31, 33 Kocka, J.  189 Kohler, U.  279 Kok, W. J. P.  11 f., 15, 17, 19 Kornhauser, W.  4 Krastev, I.  375 Kriele, M.  194 Krippendorff, E.  212 Kukathas, C.  133 Kymlicka, W.  109, 118, 123, 125 f., 128, 311 L

Lefebvre, G.  145 Leggewie, C.  369 Lehmbruch, G.  58, 65, 73, 81, 97, 177, 221, 225 Lenaghan, J.  350 Lenin, V. I.  169, 199 Lerman, P.  43 Levy, J. T.  124 Lijphart, A.  279 ff., 283, 332, 340, 342 Lindblom, C. E.  41, 86, 195, 297 Linz, J. J.  107 f.

386 Namensregister

Lipset, S. M.  4, 169, 236, 244 f., 333 f., 339 Locke, J.  156, 216 Logue, J.  187 Longstreth, F.  25 Luhmann, N.  IX, 21, 87 f., 186, 224 f., 292 Lukes, S.  IX, XV, 5, 12, 14, 17 ff., 22, 38, 342 f. Luscher, K.  43 Lutz, D. S.  103 Luxemburg, R.  171 ff. M

Macedo, S.  27 f. Mackrodt, C.  IX Madsen, D.  286 Maier, C. S.  168, 268 Mair, P.  277 Makszin, K.  283, 290 Maletz, D. J.  260 Manin, B.  149, 162 Mansfeldóva, Z.  380 March, J.  28, 35, 141 Marcuse, H.  32 Marien, S.  281 Marin, B.  94, 97 Markoff, J.  290 Markovits, A.  181 Marshall, T. H.  154 Marx, K.  10, 89, 148, 167, 169, 190 Mayer-Tasch, P. C.  63, 81 May, T.  366 Mayntz, R.  52 McPherson, C. V.  175 Meidner, R.  179 Merelman, R. M.  15, 20 Merkel, W.  284, 286 Merkl, P. H.  142 Mez, L.  223

Michels, R.  158, 171 ff., 199, 201 Miegel, M.  88 Miliband, R.  13 Mill, J. S.  32, 36, 158, 167, 169, 190, 194, 206, 311, 328 Miller, D.  314 Mills, C. W.  4 Milosevic, S.  257 Mody, A.  360 Moffatt, R.  367 Mokken, R. J.  20 Montero, J. R.  253 f., 332, 338 Montesquieu, C.-L.  145 f., 151, 162, 262 Mueller, E.  71 Müller, H. P.  88 f. Müller, J. W.  375 Mussolini, B.  172 Mutz, D. C.  345 N

Nadel, M. V.  218 Nairn, T.  216 Nanz, P.  369 Nassmacher, K. H.  343 Neblo, M. A.  346, 349 Neuhaus, R.  43 Neumann, F.  44 North, D. C.  30, 33 Norton, D. L.  322 Novy, K.  207 Nye, J.  268 O

O’Connor, J.  329 O’Donnell, G.  237 Offe, C.  XIII, XV, 12, 27, 30, 65, 86, 92, 95, 105, 118, 133, 182, 195, 201, 209, 240, 268, 281, 285, 295, 343 f., 346, 367, 376 Olsen, J. P.  27 f., 35, 141

Namensregister 387

Olson Jr., M.  84 f., 90, 171 Opitz, R.  53 Orbán, V.  379 Ostrom, E.  30 P

Pangle, T.  144 Panikkar, R.  142 Panitch, L.  58, 61, 82 Parenti, M.  20 Parsons, T.  21, 292 Pateman, C.  206 Pearse, H.  344, 348 Petring, A.  284, 286 Pharr, S. J.  253, 337 Phillips, A.  343 Piven, F. F.  282 Polsby, N.  4, 20 Poulantzas, N.  13 Preuß, U. K.  IX, 70, 118, 133, 268 Putnam, R. D.  XV, 240, 247, 253, 269, 337 Q

Quintelier, E.  279, 281 R

Rae, D. W.  204, 208 Rawls, J.  162 Reagan, R.  180, 329 Regini, M.  96, 190 Reybrouck, D. v.  368 Riker, W. H.  223, 305 Ritter, H. E.  83 Robertson, M.  186 Rogers, J.  100 Rokkan, S.  220, 222 Römmele, A.  286 Rosanvallon, P.  337 Rose-Ackerman, S.  268

Rousseau, J.-J.  38, 145 – ​149, 151, 153 – ​156, 158, 162, 171, 202, 214, 368, 373 f. Ruin, O.  58 Rustin, M.  200, 220 S

Santos, B. de S.  343 Saunders, B.  288 Schäfer, A.  279 ff., 284 Scharpf, F. W.  52, 74, 83, 256 Schattschneider, E. E.  XV, 22, 286 f., 346 Scheuner, U.  203 f., 220 Schmidt, M.  97 Schmitt, C.  142, 158, 375 Schmitter, P. C.  IX, 58, 61, 81, 97, 103, 106, 177, 238 f., 252, 269, 338, 342 Schneider, C. Q.  283, 290 Schober, H.  286 Schumpeter, J. A.  142, 158, 171, 199, 293, 295 Sen, A.  329 Shapiro, I.  27 f. Shklar, J. N.  270, 273 Shonfield, A.  180 Sieyes, A.  145 Smart, N.  142 Smelser, N. J.  25 Smith, G.  296, 343 f., 348 Solt, F.  279, 288, 290, 346 Soysal, Y.  122 Spinner, J.  114 Steinmo, S.  25 Stepan, A.  107 Stephens, P.  360 Streeck, W.  81, 86, 97, 101, 103, 277, 279, 294 ff., 362 Sunstein, C.  310, 312, 316 – ​320

388 Namensregister

T

W

Tamir, Y.  133 Taubes, J.  142 Tenbruck, F.  18, 21 Teubner, G.  70 f. Thatcher, M.  180, 242, 329, 337 Thelen, K.  25 Therborn, G.  168, 198 Thompson, D. F.  157 Thurow, L.  189, 215 Tocqueville, A. d.  XV, 167, 202, 206, 240, 259 – ​264, 311, 322, 328 Torcal, M.  332, 338 Trechsel, A. H.  343 Tribe, L. H.  154 Truman, D.  4 Tullock, G.  213 Tyrell, H.  43

Wagenbach, K.  227 f. Walser, M.  216 Walter, F.  290, 296 Warren, M. E.  XV, 337, 344, 348, 369 Watanuki, J.  329, 337 Weale, A.  377 Weber, M.  XIV, 6 f., 85, 158, 171 ff., 199, 201, 223, 256, 262, 264, 270, 313, 315, 328 Weber, W.  51 Wehler, H.-U.  50 Weizsäcker, R. v.  272 Wiesenthal, H.  5, 90, 92, 95, 100 Willke, H.  83, 89, 93, 98 Winkler, J. T.  58, 72 f. Wolfinger, R. E.  7, 12, 16 f., 20 Wolter, U.  223 Wren-Lewis, S.  364 Wright, E. O.  343, 348

U

Usher, D.  203 V

Varain, H. J.  195, 204, 214 Verba, S.  281 Vobruba, G.  85 Voegelin, E.  52 Vogt, W.  11 Voigt, R.  87

Y

Young, I. M.  113 Z

Zolo, D.  240 Zürn, M.  IX