Introduction: beyond the royal science of politics

Anxieties over democracy in the post-war era, reinvigorated by

philosophical nostalgia for the modern icons of civic engagement –

including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and James

Madison – resulted in a flourishing industry of academic writing on

political participation, especially in the English-speaking world and

particularly in the field of political science. Almond and Verba’s

legendary The Civic Culture (1963) and Carole Pateman’s Participation

and Democratic Theory (1970), together with Robert Dahl’s and Seymor

Martin Lipset’s works on democratic theory, are just a few of the most

prominent names and different works that have become the pillars of

a very influential clergy, which has helped circumscribe contemporary

understandings of politics. The paradigm introduced by such thinkers

(and supported more effervescently by republicans than by liberals) did

not seek to replace or challenge the privileged political form that is

‘representative democracy’; rather, it assumed that ‘mass participation

is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ (Norris 2002: 5), and

identified elitism as that which impedes the reinvigoration of democratic

regimes (see Schumpeter 1950).