Volume 2: Political Regulation, Governance, and Societal Transformations
This chapter is structured along the fundamental challenges democracy is facing in the twenty-first century. The first part explores the challenges of socioeconomic inequality, gender inequality, religious inequality, racial inequality, generational inequality, and racial inequality. It then turns to globalization as an external threat to public equality, populism as an increasingly powerful internal threat within the OECD world, and the challenge science and technology pose to democracy. Though these single sections focus particularly on the challenges to democracy, they also provide some responses to them. The second part of the chapter changes the focus insofar as it deals mainly with responses, such as some proposals for reestablishing the demos and renationalizing democracy, democratic innovations in Europe and Latin America, and the democratic norms that should guide the procedures of supranational governance. We conclude with suggestions for limiting the effects of inequality of wealth on democratic decision making and some different ways of organizing electoral systems for increasing minority participation.