3 - “Democratic Dissonance”

Summary

In chapter 3, I present the concept of “democratic dissonance,” which plays a significant role in the book. By this concept, I refer to the rupture between political practices and our expectations of them, a gap produced by institutions erected on the basis of assumptions about democracy and society that can no longer be sustained. In the chapter I maintain that the conception of democracy upon which the constitutional institutions were built was “restricted” (i.e., distrust towards majority rule and citizens’ participation in politics) and that the societies of those times were politically “contained” (i.e., in terms of restrictions on political rights). In this chapter, I suggest that such institutional legacy tends to create serious political problems when same institutions are directed to govern, in our time, a completely different social base, one marked by the conviction that public policies must be in line with our fundamental political claims and that our public life must be guided by our collective decisions.