Poll-driven politics is undemocratic because it bypasses public opinion formation

Evidence

Merely giving the appearance of a democratically steered leadership is not enough. The opinion poll-driven politics characteristic of the currently dominant political style of maintaining power by opportunistically adapting policy to systemic constraints is undemocratic, because it both calls into question the state’s capacity for political action and circumvents political opinion and will formation in civil society and in the political public sphere. When the political elites become paralysed by the defeatism nurtured by systems theory, the population cannot fail to lose faith in governments that only pretend to be able and willing to act. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Opposes the common defense of polling as responsiveness; parallels critique of technocracy and managed democracy. — connects to: Democratic elections legitimize only as outcomes of prior public deliberation, not preference aggregation — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 94; Aggregate polling models cannot reveal how individual citizens change their views — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1566; Deliberative politics is constitutive of democracy, not a regulative ideal — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 54

Related

• Aggregate polling models cannot reveal how individual citizens change their views (similarity 0.83)
• Deliberative politics is constitutive of democracy, not a regulative ideal (similarity 0.82)
• Democratic elections legitimize only as outcomes of prior public deliberation, not preference aggregation (similarity 0.82)
• Deliberative polling reveals the public would hold different views if it thought harder (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Deliberative politics is constitutive of democracy, not a regulative ideal #expands (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 54
• Aggregate polling models cannot reveal how individual citizens change their views #corroborates (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1566