Post-democracy in Europe and Latin America

Abstract

The author argues in the first four sections that there are two main reasons for using "post-democracy" as the adequate term for describing contemporary western societies. On the one hand there is a class biased decline in political participation which hurts the democratic promise of equality. On the other hand we observe a weakening of the democratic state due to the globalization of politics. In effect politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century is becoming more and more a game played by international elites almost without democratic control. In the last section the author asked whether the concept of post-democracy could be transformed to Latin-America. However, there is no clear answer to this question due to the fact that all political concepts are essentially contested.