Neo-Liberalism and the Decline of Democratic Governance in Australia: A Problem of Institutional Design?

This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar (‘thick’ and ‘thin’) forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the ‘thick’ pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the ‘thin’ (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades.