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On 24 June, Nick Pearce delivered a lecture on political leadership and public administration in a post-democratic and populist age, co-hosted by CSaP and CRASSH.
Click on the image below to listen to Nick's talk
Pearce opened the lecture by sketching out the nature of contemporary political context. The latter has been characterised by declining popular participation in representative democracy, not only in the UK but across most industrialised countries. This has also been paralleled by the demise of mass political parties and the increase in the number of populist ones. At the same time, access to political careers has become professionalised, which has resulted in the spaces of political governance to become increasingly inhabited by interlocking networks of elites.
Given this current situation, Pearce outlined the contours of a democratic reform, which would serve to reinvigorate democratic leadership. Firstly, Nick suggested that the process needed to start by paying greater attention to the formation and selection of political leaders. As routes into politics have increasingly been narrowed for people of working class backgrounds, politics now needed to open up again to different entry and selection points.
Secondly, greater attention also needed to be paid to the education of those in office. Rather than receiving education in ‘segregated groups’, Pearce argued that political elites needed to instead be ‘educated for the common good’. Through encouraging ‘education for integration’, such as the Teach First project, elites would be able to empathise and engage with people from different backgrounds.
Lastly, Pearce suggested that political parties ought to find democratic and political energy by creating more and richer mediations between civil society and the state. This could be done by embracing new alliances with civil society, such as contemporary feminist and environmental movements. More broadly, such a move could also help forge new institutional structures that would devolve power downwards to citizens and local state institutions, governed less by transnational imperatives than by democratic negotiation.
Banner image from Mihnea Maftel on Flickr