„Demokratija posmatrača”: analiza paradoksa divergencije između demokratije i kapitalizma na primeru izborne participacije u Srbiji
“Democracy of Spectators”: An Analysis of the Paradox of the Divergence between Democracy and Capitalism in the Case of Electoral Participation in Serbia

Summary/Abstract: Electoral participation is the pilar of democracy. The declining trend of voting on the elections in a large number of countries has prompted a number of authors to search for causality in the paradox which implies the consolidation of institutional (formal) democracy and equal political rights on the one hand, and the disappearance of social equality on the other. As political and economic equality are in mutual interconnection, the question is next: can democracy work without the essential equality of its constituent elements? Does takeover of global power into the hands of economic giants means that democracy will remain a normative basis without its contents? Is our future age of capitalism in a democratic shell, without the factual participation of citizens in politics, even at the minimum level, at the level of voting in elections? A basic indicator that testifi es of a decline in confi dence that national governments will pursue a policy in accordance with willpower is the low level of political and electoral participation in most Western countries, especially in those which are less economically developed. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the consolidation of capitalism and the decline in electoral participation on the example of Serbia. On the trajectory of the theory of the incongruity of the successive development of capitalism and democracy, we analyzed the data on the basic form of political participation, and in this way we have looked at the reflections of global trends on the countries of the world’s semi-periphery. The results of the irradiation indicate that Serbia fits well into the this theoretical-hypothetical framework, however, because the electoral participation is still at a relatively high level, we should be cautious with the final conclusions.

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