Institutionalized discursive practices can lose credibility and collapse
Evidence
There are many practices that can function only as long as the participants make certain idealizing assumptions. In a constitutional democracy, for example, citizens will conduct their disputes through the courts only as long as they can assume that more or less fair rulings are to be expected (and do not let themselves be perturbed by the evidence unearthed by ārealistsā or the advocates of Critical Legal Studies that judgesā motives are guided by interests). Similarly, citizens will participate in political elections only as long as they are able to assume implicitly that their voice can make itself heard and that their vote ācountsā ā it should even have the same weight as every other vote. These are also idealizing presuppositions. Unlike informal discourses, however, these discursive practices, which are embedded in institutions of the state, can lose their credibility. Voters who feel ādisconnectedā stop going to the polls. ā JĆ¼rgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of theā¦, 53
Categorization
- XREF: The institutionalized vs. informal distinction maps onto the 1962 classicās contrast between the decaying bourgeois public sphere and its institutional shells ā second-generation revision. ā connects to: Institutional credibility depends on not openly repudiating citizensā counterfactual idealizations ā JĆ¼rgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of theā¦, 13; Heterogeneous language games yield only patchy, local institutional determinism. ā David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: Anā¦, 331; Creative destruction grew from an academic term into an empty truism after 1996 ā Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 433 (+5 more)
- SEED: Angle: legitimation, not coercion, as the real load-bearing āinfrastructureā of democracy ā what happens when a population stops presupposing the ideals, drawing on voter withdrawal research.