Vinnykova N. Political decisions in the context of post-democratic transformations

The dissertation is the first comprehensive study of political decision-making in the context of post-democratic trends in the development of socio-political processes. The new conceptual and methodological approach сomprised a combination of the basic principles of network analysis and chaos theory is developed and tested that revealed the dynamics of transformations occurring inside the political decision-making components, namely the practices of political participation, political representation and political legitimation and the causes of delegitimation tendencies. The methodological input includes author's definitions of “participation” and “representation of interests” in political decision-making, as well as distinguishing between their “legitimation” and “legitimization” based on the conceptual and categorical matrix of network analysis have been proposed. The types of plebiscite traps have been classified (“society-split trap”, “Russian roulette trap”, “populism trap”, “trap of over-facilitating the issue”, “autocracy trap”) in order to substantiate the ambivalence of forms of citizens’ direct participation in political decision-making in post-democratic politics. The author’s definition of the effect of “participatory placebo”, meaning the indifference of conventional forms of political participation in relation to the influence on political decision-making, has been formulated. It has been proposed to interpret the goal-setting and representation of interests in political decision-making via the concept of particularism, considering the possibility of its constructive or destructive effects on the political governance. The key factors influencing political decision-making in the context of post-democratical policy-making were determined: the de-etatization and de-verticalization of political governance due to fragmentation of state’ functions among participants of multi-stakeholder formats of decision-making; the increase of delegated powers from the level of the sovereign governing to international structures, where a narrow circle of participants with the largest quotas of votes dominates in the decision-making procedures; the unregulated functioning of the digital economy, in which the production of goods and services is deinstitutionalized and individualized; emerging precariat, which does not have a clearly defined political affiliation to delegate its interests to political decision-making processes and becomes a source of social frustration; increasing intensity of unconventional practices of participation in policy-making caused by the ineffectiveness of conventional forms of citizens engagement into political decision-making; the availability of online forms of communication, which provides opportunities for manipulating of public opinion by instant and large-scale dissemination of misinformation. It was proved that the encapsulation of decision-making within global power networks leads to the increase of the entropy and carries the risks of destabilisation for modern political governance systems and world order.