Jonathan White

Periodicity is central to the well-functioning modern democracy. Electoral cycles express the capacity of citizens to cast judgement at regular intervals and revise their political priorities. Parliamentary timetables enable ordered debates and the recurrent interrogation of ministers. Often the pulse of these events extends over months or years, as though meaningful deliberation requires both regularity and an unhurried pace. Yet while modern democracy has been closely tied to a certain temporality, the link has seldom been analysed in democratic theory. My project develops a systematic appreciation of the role of institutional time structures in making representative democracy possible. I look at how periodicity has functioned as a facilitator of organised and legitimate dissent, contributing thereby to modern democracy's characteristic dynamic of government/opposition.

Why study democracy's time structures now? Because arguably they are under threat: one sees tendencies towards a destructuring of the temporality of modern politics. This finds expression in the rise of irregular forms of decision-making in which executives are weakly constrained, leading to the marginalisation of the institutional rhythms of debate and scrutiny. Though arguably a global trend, nothing displays the tendencies towards executive discretion more clearly than contemporary responses to the Euro crisis. Discretionary politics arguably tends towards a politics without rhythm: weakly bound by rules and norms, it typically features snap decisions, arbitrary ultimatums, indefinite mandates and policy regimes of unknown duration.

The forward-looking task is therefore to imagine ways of maintaining democracy's core temporal prerequisites while adapting to changed conditions. In my project I shall be looking at two lines of response: moves to strengthen the familiar time structures of parliamentary politics, and efforts to imagine forms of democracy less reliant on the rhythms that discretion subverts.