Stealth Democracy: A V？ew on the Relationship Between the Crisis of Representative Democracy and Demand for Direct Democracy

This study provides a brief examination of the concept of “stealth democracy” developed by John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Stealth democracy is a view on the prevalent and dominant perspective in the scholarly literature on democracy that (i) representative democracy is in a crisis, and thus (ii) there is a growing demand for direct democracy. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse acknowledge that representative democracy is in a crisis. However, contrary to the prevalent view in academia, they maintain that the crisis of representative democracy is overcome by allowing less direct citizen involvement for political decision making processes, but more expert opinion in the policy formation process. They therefore build their understanding of stealth democracy on the basis of a less participatory but a more elitist perspective. In this sense, the aim of this study is to examine the concept of stealth democracy, to the best of our knowledge, on which there has been no comprehensive study in the Turkish-written scholarly literature by focusing on the perspectives to which it provided itself as an alternative and to provide a brief critique of the concept with the aim of building a foundation for further research