In a column a journal editor or an author expresses his or her opinion on a particular subject.

In their book Diploma Democracy Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille state that positions in the field of politics are dominantly held by people with higher levels of education. Because of diverging political preferences between citizens with a higher level of education and those with a lower one this results in a lack of representation of the latter, they argue. In this section five authors critically replied to this position from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In this contribution Bovens en Wille answer their critics.

Contemporary western democracies, such the United States, Great Britain, and The Netherlands have become diploma democracies. They are ruled by the well educated, whereas the least educated, even though they still comprise about half of the population, have virtually vanished from most political arenas. Of course, the well educated have always been more politically active than the less educated, but in the past decades this gap has widened substantially. Well-educated citizens are more inclined to vote, to write letters to the editor, or to visit consultative or deliberative meetings than citizens with a low level of education; and most, if not all, members of parliament, all the political officials, and almost all of the political advocates and lobbyists, have college or graduate degrees. The paper substantiates the rise of diploma democracy in The Netherlands, discusses what is problematic about such an educational meritocracy in the context of democracy, and looks at what could be done to mitigate or remedy some of its negative effects.

The displacement of political decision making from the classic bodies of representative democracy to non democratically legitimised arenas is a major threat to contemporary representative democracy. In this essay, three displacements are discussed: from parliamentary to deliberative processes, from political to professional decision making, and from national to international arenas. Several of the safeguards that have been developed in parliamentary democracy over the past centuries, such as representation, transparency, majority voting, and public accountability, are missing or are underdeveloped in these new arenas. The essay explores how these safeguards could be introduced into these new arenas and concludes that the displacement of politics should be attended by a dissemination of democracy.