Powerlessness to the People: The Struggle between Democracy and Its Institutions.

There is an inherent tension between democracy, as the self-rule of everyday people, and the institutions that serve it. The balancing act between the need for non-democratic administrative institutions that form who we are and the need to let ordinary people decide for themselves how to live their own lives is a daunting one. At the same time, democracy would be meaningless as a form of government if it only allowed people to choose who would rule over them. We need the institutions of representative democracy - they limit us, but without them our lives would be infinitely more difficult - but at the very moment the well-being of the institutions becomes more important than the ordinary person’s right to author her own life, we no longer live in a democracy. An administered life is not free. In this paper, I explore the tension between democracy and its institutions, arguing that if democratic institutions become too strong, they might very well smother democracy itself. (Institutions that are too weak can also threaten democracy, but that is not the focus of this paper.) They do this by eliminating disturbances, by ensuring that democratic procedures run smoothly and efficiently. But it is difficult to have a meaningful democracy when the picture of reality one is asked to accept does not contain any disturbing elements, and it is even more difficult when one is deprived of the possibility of being disturbing. One cannot be disturbing in a shopping mall or a theme park - the only public spaces to which an increasing number of us now have access. If the local, spontaneously created public spaces in which everyday citizens can come together as citizens, rather than as consumers or private individuals, are discouraged (or even taken away) because they interfere with the smooth functioning of the democratic institutions, then those institutions have defeated democracy itself. What is the value of a democracy that is so strong that it can ignore the people? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]