The Monitorial Citizen in the "Democratic Recession"

The success of populist candidates and rhetoric, coupled with a perceived degradation in political discourse, have raised concerns over fraying democratic institutions even in stable wealthy democracies. These developments make particularly relevant the modest, grounded liberalism developed in Michael Schudson's work, with its focus on the possibilities of actually existing democracy. They also offer a moment to ask what are the conditions and limits of the optimism that characterizes much of that work. This essay reviews the analytical and normative framework for understanding contemporary democracy that Schudson develops, centered on the notion of monitorial citizenship elaborated in The Good Citizen and The Rise of the Right to Know. I read this work against the grain to suggest that it represents a fusion of classically liberal and "critical cultural" perspectives. I draw attention to the messy but more or less reasonable public sphere that emerges in the episodes Schudson visits, underwritten by a quality of institutional coherence grounded in strong democratic norms governing elite behavior. Finally, I suggest that those conditions have depended on a tenuous historical balance between political consensus, on one hand, and the opening up of politics and public life Schudson chronicles so well, on the other.

The Monitorial Citizen in the "Democratic Recession" Articles