Jenni Brichzin

My text for the special issue of the Austrian Journal of Sociology on “Crises in Acion and Interaction” is now in press. For a small preview:

“Politics seems to be in a permanent state of crisis, at least according to public discourse. But why? Based on an ethnographic study on four parliamentary levels, this article evaluates two assumptions: Are contemporary politicians simply not up to the task, are they incapable and incompetent? Or is, quite to the contrary, this task so difficult, does it suffer from overload with respect to content, time and idealistic norms to an extent that it induces crisis? The empiric data presented here suggest that neither explanation is appropriate. Instead, the potential for crisis seems to lay in the relation of politics and public itself: structures of everyday and parliamentarian lifeworld are drastically discordant. This especially applies to the structuring of time, content relevance and interaction. As a consequence, a major degree of discordance is discernable where there is supposed to be congruence between the public and its representatives. Alienation is the result and may hold the potential for a true democratic crisis.”