Političke Perspektive (Jan 2015)
Prospects of Pluralist Democracy in an Age of Economic Globalization and World-Wide Migration
Abstract
The author inquires how are societies to cope with economic globalization, migration and ethnic and religious diversity without sacrificing electoral responsiveness and governmental accountability. His also asks how to deal with grossly unequal distribution of political resources, skewed power structures, structurally embedded participatory barriers that resurface in a more dangerous forms in the new context. For answers he turns to a classic of democratic theory Robert Dahl and his ideas that are in sharp contrast to the present trend of introducing corporate management as a best way to run political affairs. Dahl, instead, proposes introducing democracy into the economic sphere and especially in large corporations. For the growing diversity of present societies, the author only partly advocates for the consociational recipes of Lijphart and the multiculturalism of Kymlicka pointing out that without resourceful political individuals and their political participation pluralist democracy cannot flourish. The author concludes that political science should again develop visions about how a “good society” might be designed – and how it might be politically brought even remotely closer to being attained. Such a discipline might then work as a science of democracy.
