Relating and Responding to the Politics of Resentment

The politics that delivers democracy is an imperfect but very human process. Citizens engage as much or as little as they see fit and politicians use every tool available to win support. There are structural flaws in the process that have been widely identified. Our democracy since universal suffrage has been blighted by the negative impact of social and gender inequality, respectively, in terms of the extent of citizen participation and representation in national and local elected assemblies. Democracy may be under increasing threat from big data manipulation or developments in artificial intelligence. But in this chapter, I will focus on the strengths and weaknesses associated with the dominant political vehicles that have emerged to deliver democracy. My concern is less with individual institutions—such as parliament or parties—and more with the frameworks of politics in which they have operated. How politics is done matters hugely to the delivery of democratic ideals, and we have entered the most troubling period since near universal suffrage arrived on the scene a century ago, with the emergent dominance of a politics of resentment.