Rebuilding Popular Democracy in the 21st Century

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In an era marked by democratic breakdown and economic pessimism, this short provocation explores the decline of democratic membership organisations as a rarely recognised cause of this crisis, and sets out a strategy for their revival. 

With civil society now dominated by memberless NGOs, it argues that we must confront how the absence of collective institutions is undermining our ability to build and maintain a functioning democracy – particularly at a moment when the political consequences are increasingly visible.

The co-director of the Centre for Democratic Business – Jonny Gordon-Farleigh – writes about the upcoming launch of Membership Nation, a new research programme and a series of conferences in Britain and the United States, which proposes that a civic revival rooted in mass participation and institutional renewal is the only viable way out of the current ‘crisis of democracy’.

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There seems to be no end to the interest in the “death of democracy” nor a lack of attempts to renew or reformulate it. Yet, while we may no longer live in a period of apathy and disengagement, the politics that followed the financial crisis appear to be markedly different from – and far less effective than – the popular politics of the past.

What explains these changes in the nature of our democratic institutions and participation across Britain over the last 50 years? And despite the inexorable rise of civic entrepreneurship, policy experimentation, and progressive movements, why does our society remain so unequal, divided, and powerless?

From Membership to Management: The ‘Hollowing Out’ of Civil Society

British civil society has always been plural, spanning public charities, family trusts, trade unions, and mutual societies, but it is democratic membership bodies – those controlled by their members – that once formed the backbone of social change. From leagues and federations to unions and associations, these organisations offered active participation and representation, enabling millions of individuals of modest means to join the same institutions as the most privileged citizens. Through these structures, they built social ties, economic solidarity, and political power.

From the 1960s onwards, however, these membership organisations – with their subnational roots and democratic accountability – were steadily replaced by professionalised, staff-driven NGOs and consultancies offering advocacy services to passive beneficiaries. This “advocacy explosion”, as Theda Skocpol describes in Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management, redirected civic energy into “professional advocacy, private foundation grant-making, and institutional trusteeship”. The result was a “diminished democracy” – even, as she provocatively calls it, an “oligarchic” one – where hired experts replaced citizens as the agents of civic life.

These transformations hollowed out the institutional foundations of democratic power and initiated a “great disengagement”. Without membership bodies connecting politics, civil society, and business, our public sphere became dominated by a relatively small number of think tanks securing policy achievements “away from democratic contestation.” Individuals were reimagined as ‘disaggregated’ consumers of policy preferences rather than members of a political community who would fund, participate in, and ultimately lead collective institutions.

The Failure of Technocratic Renewal

Faced with widespread public disaffection, calls for “democratic renewal” have risen over the last couple of decades. Yet, as Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han note in their essay ‘AI and Democratic Publics’ (2025), initiatives such as open government, digital consultation, and citizens’ assemblies tend to be procedural rather than structural – concerned with moments of engagement rather than rebuilding the democratic institutions that make participation meaningful. And most remain technocratic and apolitical in nature, framing social and political questions as neutral “problems” to be solved by "disinterested" experts or “mini-publics,” who can apparently reach “collectively superior outcomes” than the wider electorate.

But these examples of disintermediation – which bypasses representative institutions in favour of direct and individualised participation – have only deepened alienation. They invite individuals to contribute as citizen-experts rather than as members of a collective with its own interests and values. As Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti argue in Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics, such approaches do not solve the crisis of democratic discontent; they only exacerbate it.

These same logics underpin what political historian Anton Jaeger calls the “movement model” that has dominated contemporary democratic practice: a ‘gaseous’ form of participation that thrives on ease of entry and exit but struggles to generate durable organisation or loyalty. The result, Jaeger warns, is a democracy that appears energetic on the surface yet remains structurally frail beneath it.

Reclaiming Collective Power: Towards a Membership Nation

If the private NGO ‘order’ has edged citizens out of meaningful involvement, how can we close the widening gap between people and power? We argue that democratic renewal requires rebuilding the institutional infrastructure of participation through mass membership organisations capable of shaping interests and values, and encouraging long-term collective action.

To revive democracy, we must recover the membership ethos: the conviction that political agency arises from belonging, not merely voice; from shared institutions, not from the “non-politics” of platforms. By strengthening membership bodies, we can reclaim politics and government from the narrow confines of “policy” and “governance”, re-embedding civic, economic, and political institutions in the fabric of democratic life.

Given the fragility of modern politics, perhaps it is time to rebuild our membership nation: to reinvent the popular democracy of the last century for a different age, and to make the growth of democratic membership associations a priority for the public and policymakers alike.

You could quite easily walk past a cage and not even notice it. For many people in inner-city London, though, the cage – or "their" cage – is a place drenched in meaning and significance.

Sometimes referred to as ball courts, pens, or Multi-Use Games Areas (MUGAs), cages often consist of nothing more than a concrete surface, fencing, and a couple of goals and basketball hoops. They are among the most rudimentary structures to be found in any city, and yet the social life of a cage is a complex thing. For different people, the cage may evoke memories of fun, friendship, and laughter, or of fear, danger, and intimidation. 

I've sought to become an expert on the cages in my home borough, Hackney, in north-east London, where I've been a youth worker for the past ten years. Through a series of projects, I’ve spoken with children and young adults, parents, youth workers, and sports coaches about the role cages play in the social life of the local neighbourhood. 

Thinking about social infrastructure ‘from the cage’ can help illuminate important considerations about why, how, and for whom particular parts of the city become significant sites for sociality. In a recent academic publication co-authored with Fraser Curry and Stephen Crossley, I make two main points about cages which I think have relevance for all forms of social infrastructure.

In the early twentieth century, R. H. Tawney argued that questions of ideology go against the grain of our national psyche. As a country we are “incurious to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on a map”, he wrote in The Acquisitive Society (1920).

There’s much about our present political moment that further strengthens these practical instincts. The pace of Labour’s political turnaround in recent years means there has not been much space for reflective conversations about the nature of social democracy. But as Tawney went on to say, “it is not enough to follow the road. It is necessary to know where it leads.” 

This maxim is particularly important when in government. At the end of Labour’s last period in office, James Purnell and Graeme Cooke, writing in a 2010 paper for Demos, reflected that New Labour’s “ideological flexibility” brought the party “three major disadvantages in government”. It didn’t help prioritise when faced with difficult choices. It created “blind spots” that left important issues on the back burner. And, with no clear thread to connect policies together, it made it hard to create an enduring electoral coalition.

Keir Starmer himself is dispositionally disinclined towards the ideological – he has repeatedly said there is no such thing as “Starmerism”. What’s more, his government is now under huge and urgent pressure to “deliver change” in the most challenging of circumstances. As such, the bandwidth for big ideas feels even more constrained. 

However, it’s not that the wider party doesn’t have them. The Fabian Society – where I used to work – has always been a key source, home to a rich intellectual tradition that has been central to Labour thinking over the course of its 140-year history. The Fabians are most associated with the big state, ‘democratic collectivism’ of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. However, in a recent Fabian pamphlet, I argued that there are two other strands of the Fabian tradition that are more relevant for the Left today. 

The first is revisionism, whereby each generation of social democrats has sought to consider the appropriate ‘means’ by which their ultimate ‘ends’ can be achieved in modern conditions.

The second strand is the Fabian communitarians – most notably G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney – whose theory of change was rooted in the power of local people and the relationships they form with each other. While communitarianism has long been part of the Fabian story, it has tended to be a subplot. But the big state has been struggling for some time to get to grips with the complex nature of contemporary problems. So the time has come to reverse the balance of history and make the communitarians the mainstream of social democratic ideas today.   

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Historian Tehila Sasson challenges the traditional view that neoliberalism originated on the political right, arguing instead that its roots run through the British Left and the growth of international nonprofits that unintentionally helped legitimise the neoliberal project. Our editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh interviewed the author to find out more.

JGF: The central provocation of your book, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism, is its challenge to the prevailing narrative that neoliberalism originated primarily from the political right.

Instead, you offer an alternative account – one that traces the roots of neoliberalism through the British Left from the 1950s and, in particular, through the growth of the nonprofit sector. By doing so, you illuminate a more complex relationship between the Left and the neoliberal project.

Rather than continuing with a commitment to state-managed economies and the welfare state, parts of the Left shifted toward an approach described as being “in and against the market” – a form of market-based socialism that would advocate for a “distinctively nongovernmental project.“

Could you retrace this historical process that links capitalist development, decolonisation, and the rise of INGOs?

TS: The Solidarity Economy explores how nonprofits – particularly large international aid organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children, War on Want, and Christian Aid – emerged as key actors in the British, and to some extent global, economy through their development and aid programmes.

Traditionally, these organisations have been studied through the lenses of politics and international governance. Historians, international relations scholars, and anthropologists have often framed NGOs within the broader narrative of "non-governmental governance" that gained prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Their activities have also been situated within what historian Charles S. Maier describes as the emergence of alternatives to the "project-state".

My book builds on this scholarship – an essential foundation for the narrative I trace – but seeks to broaden the scope. Rather than viewing these NGOs solely as instruments of governance, I argue that they played a formative role in shaping the British and the global economies. These organisations were not only influenced by economic theories and policies; they also developed economic ideas of their own, like fair trade, and actively shaped economic life through their development and aid initiatives. In doing so, they became integral to the third sector of the British economy.

Historians often refer to organisations like Oxfam and Save the Children as ‘NGOs’ or as ‘charities’. Instead, I use the term ‘nonprofits’ to highlight the unusual positionality these organisations occupy, particularly in how they relate to the world of profit.

On one hand, they hold charitable status and benefit from associated tax exemptions. On the other hand, they actively engage in profit-generating activities, most notably through trading companies they establish and operate. These organisations were key players in shaping the fair trade movement, campaigning for corporate social responsibility, and, at times, calling for consumer boycotts against multinational corporations while simultaneously partnering with other businesses. Some were deeply involved in the distribution of microfinance, while others experimented with models that blurred the line between commerce and ethics. Across these initiatives, they developed a range of practices aimed at being not just economically sustainable but morally justifiable.

A central concern of the book is to explore how these organisations navigated – and often embodied – the tensions at the heart of what is sometimes called "ethical capitalism”.