Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

of history and rewarded by an appreciation of the political verities to be
found in the good or great books (Riemer 1962: 69).
Thus more than twenty years on, Ricci’s observation holds true:
he argues that the ‘critical, normatively charged questions about
the foundations of politics and democracy’ have been relegated to
political philosophy, replaced, ‘in the brave new world of mass data
and policy analysis, by bloodless technical concepts like “attitude”,
“cognition”, “socialisation” and “system”’ (Ricci 1984: 297). This
means that those scholars concerned with the concept of democracy
and its relation to other concepts such as liberty, truth, justice
and equality, tend not to be the same people who have expertise in
political institutions.
The result of this ‘sitting at separate tables, like Rattigan’s actors’
(Almond 1988: 828) has meant that ‘democracy’ is treated either as
a strangely scientific matter on the one hand or as an abstract and
idealised notion on the other. Empirical positivists are moving from
an assumption of democracy as the hegemonic model of (acceptable)
political systems while normative idealists construct democracy in
relation to certain key values so this separation is somewhat understandable.
That said, its consequences for current conceptions of
‘democracy’ are significant. Many contemporary contributions of
‘political scientists’ seem to be offering a ‘blueprint’ for achieving
accountable and legitimate government, whether it is more democracy
or less. Alternatively, ‘political philosophers’ seem to be caught up
in naïve abstraction, detached from the reality of actual politics. For
example, Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett suggest that much of
the literature (specifically on deliberative democracy) exists ‘at such
a high level of abstraction’ that it seems ‘quite unaware’ of the many
empirical issues that actually characterise contemporary democracies
(Thompson and Hoggett 2001: 354). As such, the importance of
treating the study of democracy in an engaged and concrete manner
has been all but lost.
The implications of the separation of political philosophy and
political science are not simply a matter of methodology: what is at
stake is what democracy means in substantive terms as the second
part of this paper aims to show. So just how should we treat the study
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DEMOCRATIC COMPROMISE
OR COMPROMISING
DEMOCRACY: RETHINKING
PARTICIPATION
Heidi Matisonn