Democracy and the Mundane: Reflections on John Boswell, How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State

Abstract John Boswell's How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State offers a unique and compelling analysis of democracy and its challenges, and also of the mainstream academic study of citizen disengagement by political scientists and theorists. While the majority of academics focus on big structural reasons for citizens’ increasing disaffection for democracy and the democratic state, Boswell focusses on the negative views of democracy and the democratic state that citizens gain through their many mundane interactions with them. I argue that his focus on citizens’ everyday engagement with the democratic state—and the many ways in which these engagements foster a sense of powerlessness, punitive judgment and sanction, especially among the poorest members of society—has important implications for democratic theory, participatory inequality and our wider understanding of democratic decline. It reveals a gap in the existing democratic theory literature which helps to explain why democracy is so popular among many academics yet so unpopular among many ordinary citizens. It also reveals a new strategy for democratic renewal, although it is one which is not without its own problems.