Tired of Politics? On Political Experience and Oligarchic Fatigue

Recent evidence suggests that oligarchs hold disproportionate influence over electoral representative institutions and limit people’s participation in both formal and informal spaces of democratic politics. Drawing on phenomenology, I develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue to describe the political exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchic domination. Oligarchic fatigue materializes through two analytically distinct mechanisms: people experience fatigue either (1) when they actively participate within formal political spaces, but their options for participation are constrained due to oligarchic control over political institutions; or (2) when their political participation is deemed illegitimate and functionally denied by oligarchy. The corrective to oligarchic fatigue, I contend, is a renewed focus on political freedom as a constitutive element of democratic innovations and anti-oligarchic institutional design.