The prevailing thesis in democracy research is that democracy is in crisis.
The latest results of the expert surveys of the “Varieties of Democracy” project seem to support this.
The data aggregated for the project from the 27 EU countries and the most important Western democracies show an almost continuous increase in democratization since 1950.
But only until around 2008. Since then, the quality of democracy has been steadily declining on average.
Also in Germany.
Is that why democracy is already in crisis?
The fact that Wolfgang Merkel would rather speak of an erosion of democracy instead of a crisis does not take away any of its drama from his diagnosis.
In his farewell lecture at the Berlin Science Center, which he is leaving after sixteen years of research, Merkel not only complains about the persistent loss of quality in our democratic institutions.
He also relates it to the three new external crises that challenged our democracy.
The migration crisis, the pandemic and the climate crisis are crises of a new type because they dangerously distort the relationship between science and politics, according to Merkel.
The crucial question is: Can science (in the plural) (pre) formulate the common good?
A strategic selection of scientific expertise
Not least in Germany there is a longing for political authority on this side of party pluralism, social conflicts and conflicting interests, warned Merkel in a recently published essay. Is this longing now finding its fulfillment in the scientistic guise of the scientific government advisor? Unfortunately, the governments always selected precisely those scientists whose positions best suited their concept. In the end, however, a strategic selection of scientific expertise harms both politicized science and scientifically-based politics. This tries to disguise the obvious selectivity of their justifications by unceremoniously declaring the Expert Council to be the current form of the common good,which one cannot refuse. Merkel did not name any specific addressees of his allegations. The apparently objective "epistemization" of politics can be found in all combatants of the current crises. The consequences are fatal because we don't even know how to get out of the trap that democracy has thus fallen into.