Abstract
Flinders provides a thought-provoking piece on possible pathologies of democratic accountability. This note, however, points out some weaknesses in this line of thinking. The assumptions about the etiology of democratic pathologies are not always robust, the symptoms are dramatized, and there is an inferential jump from anecdotal evidence to a general diagnosis about the health of democracy. This article mainly discusses two partly inaccurate descriptions and qualifies the conclusions based thereon: one on the deleterious role of the media and one on the penetration of “monitory democracy” in contemporary governance.
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