The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy

The book challenges the notion that media- and ratings-driven politics leads to a popularity contest, arguing that political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify, leading to a complex representation of popular electorates that cannot be secured by rigid bureaucratic parties.

Format: Hardback
Length: 426 pages
Publication date: 17 January 2025
Publisher: Central European University Press

Media- and ratings-driven politics often face criticism for reducing democracy to a popularity contest. However, this book presents a different perspective by viewing politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that distances itself from the public it aims to engage. Political actors, unaware of their own biases, rely on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to fulfill, leading to a disconnect from the actual public opinion. This book explores how collective discourses on "the popular" have become intermediaries between political elites and electorates. The shift towards "liquid control" has been driven by the idea of reaching postindustrial electorates through flexible media campaigns that understand their media-immersed lives. This complex representation of popular electorates is believed to be beyond the capabilities of rigid bureaucratic parties and requires the distilled wisdom of a diverse group of consultants, pollsters, journalists, and pundits commenting on the political process. The mediatization of political representation has followed a similar trajectory to the marketization of capital allocation in finance, starting from a rejection of bureaucratic control, promising a more "liquid" alternative, attempting to detect a collective wisdom (of/about "the markets" and "the people"), and ending up in self-driven spirals of collective speculation.

Weight: 700g
Dimension: 234 x 159 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789633861677