Mark Leonard in The Ideas Letter:
The political scientist Peter Mair’s brilliant 2006 essay in New Left Review, “Ruling the Void” (posthumously turned into a book in 2013), provided a powerful insight into political dynamics and was a useful predictor of future trends. Mair’s core claim was that a double “withdrawal” was underway at the time. Looking below, he saw citizens abandoning the arena of mass electoral politics, as evidenced by falling turnout during elections, collapsing party membership, partisan dealignment, and declining trust in institutions. Above, the political class was also withdrawing, he claimed. Parties had migrated out of civil society and had become a shadowy continuation of the state. Instead of acting as a bridge between the community and the state, politicians were becoming a homogeneous professional caste. Mair argued that elites were inclined to manage the void by depoliticizing governance—handing contested decisions to non-majoritarian bodies (central banks, courts, regulators) and, supremely, to the European Union.
Mair claimed that these forces were “mutually reinforcing.” He argued, “Citizens turn from being participants into spectators, while the elites gain more space in which to pursue their own shared interests.” His analysis drew on the logic of “cartel parties” that he had developed with the political scientist Richard Katz in 1995. Mair’s “void” was the dramatic name he gave to the empty space that opened up between a disengaged electorate and a self-referential governing class after political parties had stopped bridging the two.
For Mair, the European Union was the archetype of this development: a sphere deliberately constructed by national leaders to be insulated from popular contestation, a zone of policy without politics. His shorthand for the resulting model of democracy—“NGOs + judges” in place of mass participation—captured the beginning of technocratic drift. And when the euro crisis erupted in 2009 he went from being seen as a shrewd political scientist to a prophet.
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