Liberal democracies are not direct-access societies but elite-mediated ones

Evidence

In today’s liberal democracies a strong case can be made for the thesis that there is less and less of a direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives—that the latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a culturally differentiated and economically polarized electorate. And the absence of a direct reflection of the citizen in his political representation is not compensated for through the various extra-parliamentary institutions connected to governance. On the contrary. The influence of pressure groups on government decisions is more often than not far greater than is warranted by the proportion of the electorate whose interests they directly promote (for example, the Farmers Union in Britain; AIPAC and the oil lobby in the United States). Opinion polls, continuously monitoring the fragile collective views of citizens, keep the government informed about public sentiment between elections, and enable it to anticipate or influence opinion independently of the electoral mandate. Finally, the mass media, increasingly owned by conglomerates and often cooperating with the state, mediate the political reactions of the public and its sense of guarantee and threat. Thus in crucial ways this is not at all a direct-access society. There is no space in which all citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another. The existence of negotiation in public life is confined to such elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary legislators, and business leaders. The ordinary citizen does not participate in the process of formulating policy options as these elites do—his or her participation in periodic elections does not even guarantee that the policies voted for will be adhered to. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 26

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on communication/media and public sphere theory (Communication as Culture), and to contemporary critique of representative democracy as elite capture. — connects to: Early liberal parliamentarism presupposed an elite excluding universal suffrage — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 450; Liberal constitutional democracy historically reserved political reality to economically privileged minorities. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2336; Both liberal and socialist public-sphere models wrongly assumed the public can control the state — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2375 (+2 more)
• SEED: Could become an essay on how opinion polling and lobby influence structurally decouple citizens from representation, independent of any electoral mandate.