Across electoral representative democracies, people continue to be politically active yet increasingly feel that their participation remains unproductive and unheard. Cross-national surveys show that trust in political institutions is at a historic low (Edelman Trust Institute 2025; OECD 2024) and many report feeling exhausted and disillusioned with politics (European Movement International 2025; Pew Research Center 2023; Wuttke, Gavras, and Schoen Reference Wuttke, Gavras and Schoen2022). This is a well-documented phenomenon described as a “democratic paradox” (Dahl Reference Dahl2000): enduring faith in democracy as the best form of governance is accompanied by political exhaustion. In this article, I argue that the disproportionate influence of concentrated private wealth in democratic politics is the underlying cause of this exhaustion.
A growing body of theoretical and empirical work shows that rampant material inequality leads to policy outcomes that systematically favor the interests of wealthy elites,Footnote 1 gradually hollowing out the democratic process (Bartels Reference Bartels2008; Gilens and Page Reference Gilens and Page2014; Milanovic Reference Milanovic2019). Some have argued that the rise of oligarchy may be systemic to representative democracy (Vergara Reference Vergara2020). While this literature has convincingly raised the problem of oligarchization, its effect on the political experience of the demos—understood as the whole citizen body—remains underdeveloped. This article serves as a corrective by focusing on the experience of oligarchic domination. An analysis of political experience reveals how oligarchic domination undermines the sense that one can meaningfully participate in shaping their communal life.
I develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue to capture the experience of exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchs. Democracy is a contested concept and can be defined in a variety of ways, but for the purposes of this article I define it as the capacity of the demos to do things together and to shape their communal life (Ober Reference Ober2008).Footnote 2 People are fatigued within contemporary democratic politics because they are prevented from shaping their communal life; its governing logic instead benefits the wealthy few while majority interests are unrepresented. Contemporary democracy can thus be described as an oligarchic democracy: “[A] nonrepresentative liberal government in which individual rights and separation of powers are upheld but the interests of the majority are consistently not represented” (Vergara Reference Vergara2020, 38–39).Footnote 3 Oligarchic democracy enables concentrated private wealth to constrain the political agency of the demos, leading to a situation in which individual rights are upheld but political influence is unequal. What this means for democracy is that as material inequality increases, doing things together becomes more strenuous. I show that, as a result, oligarchic domination alters the way in which people experience political participation, leaving them exhausted, impotent, and politically unfree.
I show that oligarchic fatigue materializes through two analytically distinct mechanisms: people experience fatigue either (1) when they actively participate within formal political spaces, but their options for participation are constrained due to oligarchic control over political institutions; or (2) when their political participation is deemed illegitimate and functionally denied by oligarchy. In both cases, fatigue is caused by domination. While this may lead to discontent and distrust, these are symptoms rather than the cause. By developing the concept of oligarchic fatigue, I make three contributions: my conceptualization identifies oligarchic domination, rather than democratic disappointment or social complexity, as the source of fatigue; it explains how domination is experienced as a constraint to political agency; and given that fatigue is caused by a constraint to agency, it identifies a key feature of democratic politics—freedom—as a constitutive principle to guide future anti-oligarchic institutional design and democratic innovations.
To develop the concept of oligarchic fatigue, I draw on phenomenology. Rather than attempting to quantify political attitudes or behavior, a phenomenological approach analyzes political life as it is experienced in the context of an active, social, and historical world. I utilize the phenomenological approach to analyze how structural barriers created by oligarchic domination constrain political agency, and how people encounter these barriers. By centering lived experience, phenomenology helps to diagnose how oligarchy is sustained and contested in practice. The resulting analysis highlights the status difference between the many and the few, despite contemporary democracy’s commitment to formal equality.
The observation that domination is the cause of oligarchic fatigue also yields a normative conclusion: political freedom emerges as the central corrective. Political freedom refers to both nondomination (Pettit Reference Pettit1997) and the ability to deliberate, participate, and make decisions in a shared communal space (Arendt [Reference Arendt1961] 2006; Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty, Edie and Cobb1964; Ober Reference Ober2008). In other words, it refers to the ability of the demos to act together without fear of domination. In this context, domination is both structural (i.e., the systemic disempowerment enabled by a particular social structure) and interpersonal (i.e., the ability of an oligarch to arbitrarily interfere) (Gädeke Reference Gädeke2020; Leipold Reference Leipold, Dawson and de Dijn2020). The appropriate corrective to oligarchic fatigue, I contend, is a focus on political freedom because it addresses the root cause of fatigue: domination.
My approach complements empirical findings on elite influence (Gilens and Page Reference Gilens and Page2014; Hobson Reference Hobson2017; Winters and Page Reference Winters and Page2009) by explicating the ontological and structural patterns that underlie these interactions. Relatedly, I contribute to a growing anti-oligarchic literature by attending to the experience of democratic participation under oligarchy. Whereas much attention has been on institutional innovations (Leipold Reference Leipold2025; McCormick Reference McCormick2011; Prinz and Westphal Reference Prinz and Westphal2024; Vergara Reference Vergara2020), I suggest that anti-oligarchic politics must attend to the lived experience of ordinary people to better understand how institutions enable or obstruct democratic agency. Otherwise, institutional reforms may inadvertently reproduce the very conditions of domination and fatigue they seek to address.
In the following section, I discuss the literature on political disengagement, alienation, and democratic fatigue, and highlight the missing interpretive component in the current accounts of democratic fatigue. Next, I discuss how the oligarchic presence within electoral representative democracy is a form of domination that undermines the political participation of ordinary people. I then turn to phenomenology to analyze how oligarchy constrains political agency and the two forms of oligarchic fatigue to which it gives rise. Subsequently, I provide two case studies to explicate how oligarchic fatigue materializes in practice. In the concluding section, I show how the problem of oligarchic fatigue makes clear why those concerned about oligarchy should complement democratic innovations with a renewed focus on political freedom.
The Limits of Democratic Fatigue
In recent years, popular media and academia alike have sounded the alarm: people are politically exhausted (e.g., Rubin Reference Rubin2023; Tavernise Reference Tavernise2018). The burdens of the climate crisis, systemic injustices, corrupt politicians, the internalization of a neoliberal ethic, and the increasing complexity of the social world have turned political life into an exhausting endeavor. People not only feel tired but powerless to change anything about their sociopolitical reality (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot, Laval and Elliott2019). An existing literature on democratic fatigue has identified this general trend of political exhaustion among the populace in contemporary democracies (Appadurai Reference Appadurai and Geiselberger2017; Blühdorn Reference Blühdorn2020; Van Reybrouck Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016; Reference Van Reybrouck and Geiselberger2017). These accounts question the health of these regimes while continuing to call them democratic. I contend that this misses the essential character of contemporary democracies, which is better described as oligarchic democracy (Manin Reference Manin1997; Vergara Reference Vergara2020; Winters and Page Reference Winters and Page2009). As such, democracy does not cause fatigue; rather, the obstruction of democratic participation does. The source of fatigue, in other words, is oligarchic domination.
Democratic fatigue refers to the persistent experience of exhaustion and impotence caused by a host of contemporary issues, including distrust, media stress, governmental impotence, and political paralysis (Appadurai Reference Appadurai and Geiselberger2017; Van Reybrouck Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016). Combined, these contemporary issues have paved the way to a crisis of democracy (Przeworski Reference Przeworski2019). Democracy in this context is generally defined as a form of representative parliamentary governance, wherein fatigue is caused by a particular strand of governance—namely electoral representative democracy. David Van Reybrouck (Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016) argues that this is due to the belief that democracy cannot exist without elections. The belief in “electoral fundamentalism” refers to the idea that elections are not so much a part of the democratic process but have become synonymous with democracy itself (Van Reybrouck Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016; see also Piano Reference Piano2025). In other words, to describe contemporary democracy is to describe an institutionalized electoral process. Yet this faith in elections has become a source of disappointment and has led to a corrosion and breakdown of democracy due to the failure of existing democratic institutions and processes to represent the complexity of a political community. In other words, the ideal of democracy stands in direct conflict with the realities of electoral politics (Blühdorn Reference Blühdorn2020).
Electoral fundamentalism functions with what some have labeled “consumer politics” (Crouch Reference Crouch2004). As Colin Crouch (Reference Crouch2004) argues, elections have become a carefully controlled and institutionalized spectacle in which the public only gets to choose from a range of consumer choices. A supposedly “democratic instrument” that aggregates and expresses the will of the people, it turns out, is nothing but an elite mechanism that turns citizens into passive consumers (Van Reybrouck Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016). The paternalistic approach of consumer politics causes fatigue by denying the free and equal status of people. This critique of electoral fundamentalism accurately diagnoses how procedural democracy can become disconnected from the substantive elements of democratic participation. Elections alone do not and cannot guarantee meaningful citizen involvement.
The analysis of democratic fatigue identifies that elections make possible what Van Reybrouck (Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016, 60, 67) describes as the “oligarchising of democracy.” For Van Reybrouck, however, oligarchy is not a material classification that is inextricably connected to representative governance but refers strictly to the distinction between ruler and ruled. Thus, democratic fatigue hints at the question of corruption by critiquing the empty formalism of electoral democracy while remaining largely a formal critique neglecting the material causes of this corruption. Instead, Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai and Geiselberger2017) and Van Reybrouck (Reference Van Reybrouck and Waters2016) turn to a critique of a particular formalized procedure—elections—as the source of people’s exhaustion with politics. Similarly, Ingolfur Blühdorn (Reference Blühdorn2020) argues that democratic fatigue is caused by a dialectic of democracy in which democratization causes its own decay.Footnote 4 Both approaches fail to appreciate the connection between the material power of some to dismiss the interests of the majority and the experience of political powerlessness, which together engender political exhaustion.
To understand political fatigue in contemporary democracy, I argue we must look beyond and behind elections for the exercise of oligarchic power as a distinct form of political power rooted in material wealth.Footnote 5 Contemporary democracy permits some powerful actors to advance their interests regardless of majority preferences, thereby enabling them to dominate others for personal benefit. Fatigue thus arises not because of disappointment in democracy itself, but rather because of the economic power of some to dispose of the interests of the many despite the latter’s continued efforts to participate. For this reason, the democratic fatigue literature misses the cause of people’s disconnection from and frustration with democratic politics. And while electoral structures enable corruption, they divert attention from the source of corruption—namely the oligarchs, a class of individuals whose concentrated private wealth structurally enables them to shape political outcomes without occupying formal office.
The focus on oligarchy differs in important ways from the focus on democratic disappointment. Disappointment implies that expectations remain unmet and that, at least in theory, better democratic performance—electoral or otherwise—would alleviate democratic fatigue. The framing implies that if only the favored candidate would win the election or if elected representatives would be more responsive, then disappointment—and thus democratic fatigue—would dissipate. By contrast, oligarchic domination comprises the structural constraints that persist regardless of electoral outcome. I contend that declining trust and political disillusionment are better understood as symptoms of domination, not as the origins of fatigue. Fatigue, in other words, does not arise because democracy underperforms relative to the people’s expectations; rather, disappointment is caused by the experience of domination. I now turn to oligarchic democracy as the source of fatigue.
Oligarchic Democracy
The problems I identify in this section are twofold: (1) democratic institutions contain an oligarchic element, and at the same time (2) democratic practice is relegated to institutional practices. While my argument presupposes that oligarchy is a structural feature of contemporary democracy, pace Vergara (Reference Vergara2020), I contend that it becomes salient when socioeconomic inequality exponentially increases. When oligarchy becomes salient, the range of practices people can engage in are limited to certain formalized forms of political behavior, spontaneous practices are not deemed legitimate democratic action, and formalized participation is limited by oligarchic influence. In this section, I move beyond the critique of electoral politics by arguing that democracy is exhausting because oligarchs constrain and limit popular democratic participation.
Democratic institutions promise equal political power through universal notions of free and fair elections, freedom of speech, and broad suffrage. However, as discussed in the previous section, the practice of existing democratic institutions promoting consumer choices does not reflect this promise. Samuel Bagg (Reference Bagg2024) makes the case that this is because concentrated private wealth has power over the agenda, the construction of interests and identities, and how political coalitions are organized. The influence of concentrated private wealth in politics limits the realm of democratic possibilities and benefits a group of wealthy actors. In contemporary democracies, this happens in several ways, from lobbying and opinion shaping (Winters and Page Reference Winters and Page2009) to dark-money politics investing in electoral processes (Mayer Reference Mayer2016). And while my focus here is on the United States, the influence of wealth in politics is not exclusive to American politics. The influence of wealth may not be experienced equally in every regime, but this difference is in degree, not in kind (Green Reference Green2016b). In fact, the presence and rise of oligarchy within liberal democracies has not gone unnoticed elsewhere, including the European Union (Gerbaudo Reference Gerbaudo2017; Regilme Reference Regilme2025) and Latin America (Cameron Reference Cameron2021).Footnote 6
To guarantee that their benefits persist, oligarchs influence and coerce political actors, or join political institutions themselves to defend and expand their wealth.Footnote 7 Oligarchs exert political influence in a variety of ways, including by persuading elected officials to change election plans according to their wishes (as in the case of donors to independent expenditure-only political action committees [super PACs]; Arlen and Rossi Reference Arlen and Rossi2021), or by eliminating worker protections and cutting pensions (as in the case of Donald Trump; Arlen Reference Arlen2019). Furthermore, oligarchs can exert influence outside formal politics—for example, through private philanthropy (as demonstrated by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; Saunders-Hastings Reference Saunders-Hastings2018), or by pursuing ownership over media (as the likes of Jeff Bezos, John Henry, and the Murdoch family have done; Kennedy Reference Kennedy2018).
While these examples are often observed in the form of individual actors, it is the political structure that enables them to secure their interests. In other words, I adopt a structural understanding of oligarchy while recognizing that interpersonal domination exists within and reproduces these structures. In this light, consumer politics and electoral fundamentalism are expressions of oligarchic power (Rancière Reference Rancière and Corcoran2014). Some have described this as a “crisis of political accountability” (McCormick Reference McCormick2011, vii) that is perhaps “fundamentally due to the nature of the regime itself” (Landemore Reference Landemore2020, 43), given that free and fair elections are a design of oligarchic interests (Rancière Reference Rancière and Corcoran2014). This link between elections and oligarchy has been noted by political thinkers since antiquity, and in the last two decades there has been a resurgence of academic work on the relationship between contemporary democracy and oligarchy (Breaugh Reference Breaugh and Lederhendler2013; Leipold Reference Leipold2025; McCormick Reference McCormick2011; Piano Reference Piano2019; Reference Piano2025; Prinz and Westphal Reference Prinz and Westphal2024; Vergara Reference Vergara2021). Empirical findings confirm this view, shedding light on the prevalence of oligarchic interests being represented within government (Gilens and Page Reference Gilens and Page2014; Piketty Reference Piketty and Goldhammer2014; Winters and Page Reference Winters and Page2009).
Oligarchy is an operating feature—even if latent—of contemporary democracy, and thus rather than treating democracy and oligarchy as separate phenomena, their simultaneous presence suggests an “oligarchic democracy” (Vergara Reference Vergara2020). It is precisely because democratic practices continue to use the language of individual rights and separation of powers that the presence of oligarchy is obscured, which is why democratic practices can legitimate the corruption of democratic mechanisms, leading to the dispossession and oppression of people through these very procedural mechanisms.
Beyond influencing formal procedures, oligarchy also narrows the range of democratic practices deemed legitimate. Political scientists find that oligarchs exert influence not only over who or what makes it onto the ballot, but also over the range of political action deemed legitimate (Landemore Reference Landemore2020). Oligarchy clearly demarcates what is considered public and private. Interventions by nonstate actors that are labeled as “private” include attempts of democratic action that exceed the controlled spectacle of electoral politics, such as protests, civil disobedience, and boycotts. In turn, democratic participation becomes a narrowly defined set of institutional practices. The narrowing of legitimate political action not only limits formal politics, but additionally “undermine[s] emancipatory counter-narratives and counter-discourses in the public sphere” (Regilme Reference Regilme2023, 128). Alternative political action—that is, narratives and discourses that are not institutionalized—are undermined because their emancipatory claim challenges the oligarchic logic. Limiting democracy to a tightly institutionalized spectacle undermines the central democratic notions of collective agency and a share in political power. It limits the ability of the demos to do things together.
Having established that democracy today is better described as oligarchic democracy, many accounts move toward institutional design. How can we rethink the relationship between the few and the many? What anti-oligarchic institutions may ostracize the wealthy? And which procedures can empower the people as democratic agents? Such accounts do not adequately address how the presence of oligarchy is experienced.
I contend that understanding the democratic crisis requires an examination of the political experience of everyday life. The presence of oligarchy, with the accompanying crisis of democracy, means that daily political life for many includes elements of frustration, exhaustion, disappointment, and a sense of impotence. By turning toward a phenomenological analysis of democratic life, I add explanatory power to empirical work on political exhaustion. By adding phenomenology to recent empirical insights on political behavior and attitudes, I make two main contributions. First, analyzing how procedural constraints, agenda control, and institutionalized boundaries shape political experience offers a multidimensional picture of oligarchic domination and its outcomes. Such an account of people’s disposition toward democratic institutions illuminates the entanglement between systemic forces and the sociopolitical world in which they operate. Second, echoing Green (Reference Green2016a, 91), “we do a disservice to the phenomenology of everyday political life” if we do not begin our analysis with the quality of civic life and how politics is perceived and lived. Attending to lived experience ensures that explanations of fatigue remain connected to (the lack of) political agency and freedom.
Phenomenology and Oligarchic Fatigue
By turning to phenomenology, I analyze how oligarchic domination, by limiting political agency, causes oligarchic fatigue. Phenomenology is an approach that examines how people experience and interpret the political world in their everyday lives, with an emphasis on how they assign meaning to their experience. In particular, phenomenology places political understanding and action within an active, social, and historical world. In what follows, I examine how procedural constraints, agenda control, and institutionalized boundaries operate as forms of oligarchic control over the capacity of the demos to act together. I then turn to show how these restrictions materialize in two distinct forms of oligarchic fatigue. In doing so, my approach complements previous work on fatigue by showing how domination is experienced as a structural limitation to political agency.
The Phenomenology of Political Action
Phenomenology offers a distinct lens for analyzing fatigue by centering the lived experience of oligarchic domination as the root cause of political exhaustion. While approaches such as deliberative and participatory democracy also attend to political experience, they often emphasize procedural inclusion or normative ideals of participation. In contrast, phenomenology uncovers how individual actions are shaped by and presuppose the structures that make up communal life. Put differently, one’s actions and their intentionality are rooted and occur within the context of an active, social, and historical world.Footnote 8 In this light, fatigue is not only attitudinal or sensory but ontological. One understands oneself (ontologically) within the world one inhabits, including by reference to the presence of political structures that enable or obstruct participation. This methodological approach, therefore, provides a deeper engagement with the connection between democratic institutions and the exhaustion experienced by those who attempt to take part in them.
A phenomenological approach complements and goes beyond prior work on political alienation and democratic fatigue. Existing work on alienation and democratic fatigue often takes a behavioralist approach that measures and quantifies human behavior. For example, Ada Finifter (Reference Finifter1970, 390) suggests that alienation refers to a set of “attitudes toward aspects of the political system.” For Finifter, experiences of powerlessness and meaninglessness are equated with attitudes accessible for empirical measure. While such an approach may provide initial empirical insights into the costs and limitations of democracy, it misses how these attitudes come about. In other words, attempts to quantify lived experiences can succeed in tracing the descriptive patterns of fatigue but fail to capture how fatigue is experienced and what it means for people’s political agency. Far from rejecting empirical observations, phenomenology incorporates these behavioral observations into the everyday life-world. The fundamental distinction is that empirical analyses of fatigue only look at “surface-level facts of political life,” whereas phenomenology also incorporates the “underlying structures determining the shape of political experience” (Green Reference Green2016b, 34).
Political phenomenology analyzes how institutional arrangements and power relations structure the context-dependent and intersubjective first-person experience (Magrì and McQueen Reference Magrì and McQueen2023). To refer to this as political suggests that these relations shape the orientation of what people consider legitimate political action. Political action, following Hannah Arendt ([Reference Arendt1958] 2018, 7), refers to the activity “that goes on directly between [people] without the intermediary of things or matter, [and] corresponds to the human condition of plurality.” Oligarchs, in an attempt to control what is considered legitimate political action, aim to control the political realm and to functionally deny the plurality of the human condition (which allows the demos to act together). Controlling, and thereby limiting, political action is a form of domination as it disempowers the people from participation. It is only through a phenomenological orientation that oligarchic domination can be adequately analyzed and critiqued. Conversely, the analysis also highlights the antithesis of domination: freedom, which refers to both nondomination and human plurality.Footnote 9
Political action can be understood as functioning within a fourfold matrix (Crowell Reference Crowell, Thompson and Embree2000). A political actor within this matrix is someone who makes “a choice of a certain kind, within a certain institutional framework, at a certain time, on certain matters” (Reference Crowell, Thompson and Embree2000, 12; emphasis in original). Put differently, a political actor is someone who makes a choice and does so thinking about the temporal ramifications of such a decision. To choose is a judgment about something and thus concerns a certain matter about which people could reasonably disagree. The political decision on a matter is contestable, and the aim of the political community is to reconcile its differences to shape communal life. Reconciliation occurs within an institutional framework of citizenship distinguishing political action from social action (Reference Crowell, Thompson and Embree2000).
Consider the procedure of voting for a political candidate during an election. As Bernard Manin (Reference Manin1997) convincingly shows, representative government has both democratic and oligarchic elements. It is oligarchic because elections do not provide everyone with an equal chance of seeking office, reserving office for “eminent individuals whom their fellow citizens deem superior,” which benefits those with wealth (Reference Manin1997, 238). However, voting for a representative is, as Manin emphasizes, also democratic, because everyone has “equal power to designate and dismiss their rulers” (238). From the latter point of view, voting is a form of political action insofar as the electorate chooses who to vote for, given what matters to individual voters as determined by what has happened in the past and what they want for the future. As discussed in the previous section, the oligarchic component becomes more salient when material inequality increases, providing oligarchs a platform from which to limit certain elements of the matrix. The key point is that voting for a representative is a deliberate engagement that aims to address communal concerns and therefore can be characterized as political action. As I show below, oligarchic domination restricts the aspects of both choice and matter, constraining political action.
While Crowell (Reference Crowell, Thompson and Embree2000) describes the matrix from a first-person perspective, it must be understood within a given political structure: What conditions must be met for a person or a group to act politically? The question seeks to determine in what ways people are free to act in the matrix. Political action does not happen in isolation but rather takes place between people who live together in a shared world. Thus, when people act within the matrix, the choices they make concern the community as a whole. In a sense, they are deliberating about and articulating the political goods of their community (Drummond Reference Drummond, Thompson and Embree2000). The existence of the community presupposes that decisions are influenced by others; such influence does not, in itself, negate freedom. However, if any of the four parts of the matrix are circumscribed by arbitrary authority or systemic disempowerment, the political actor becomes subject to arbitrary power and is thereby not free; they are dominated (Gädeke Reference Gädeke2020; Leipold Reference Leipold, Dawson and de Dijn2020).
I contend that the root cause of fatigue is a restriction in the matrix. Fatigue is structurally induced because people continue to engage in politics, while facing arbitrary impediments that constrain their ability to act. Since contemporary democracy can best be described as an oligarchic democracy, the type of political fatigue that emerges therein is oligarchic fatigue since it is the oligarchs who restrict one or more parts of the matrix. Domination within the fourfold matrix confines the ways in which people can make political decisions, thereby reducing political agency. In practice, this becomes apparent when oligarchs restrict the range of legitimate political actions and narrow the scope of possible collective—political—decisions.
When institutions confine and objectify meaning and thereby limit its expression, they undermine political action and reduce political life to consumption. Within oligarchic democracy, political action is relegated to the passive act of consumption rather than an expression of shared meaning. In other words, the oligarchs determine what counts as legitimate political action and, in doing so, restrict new possibilities. A phenomenological analysis of oligarchic democracy thus reveals why such constraints produce the exhaustion and impotence that constitute oligarchic fatigue.
Two Forms of Fatigue
The phenomenological reading of political exhaustion, combined with the above assessment of oligarchic democracy, provides an understanding of fatigue as stemming from oligarchic domination. People are exhausted with democracy because it is often not democratic but claims to be nevertheless. Democracy claims to uphold the fourfold matrix and to provide people with political agency, but within oligarchic democracy one or more parts of the matrix are obstructed. Oligarchs control aspects of the matrix because, as Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière and Corcoran2014) argues, they hold popular government in contempt, using formal democratic procedures to maintain control while delegitimizing noninstitutional forms of political expression. I argue that the oligarchic use of democratic procedures to control popular government causes oligarchic fatigue, which I illustrate through two cases in the next section to show how fatigue is experienced in practice.
Fatigue obtains through two analytically distinct mechanisms, but they converge in the restriction of the matrix. First, oligarchic fatigue arises when citizens participate in politics as usual—which is generally limited to voting every few years. Democratic participation follows a market logic in which individuals have autonomy insofar as they can choose from a range of choices. The marketization of democracy leads to inequality between elected officials who set the agenda and constituents who get to choose from the options given to them. Oligarchs influence these options in a variety of ways. They could run for public office in the hopes of influencing law and policy directly, but the more likely option is that they donate money to a particular campaign or candidate through a super PAC or a 501(c)(4) (a tax-exempt social welfare organization) to influence electoral outcomes. As a result, people’s options of engagement within formal spaces of politics are limited. Their inability to set the terms of their communal life is a restriction on both choice and matter.
Second, oligarchic fatigue arises when there is a structural burden to participation, thus limiting the framework deemed legitimate for political action. Contemporary democracy is concerned with maintaining order, and forms of political expression outside tightly defined institutional boundaries threaten this (Wolin Reference Wolin, Euben, Wallach and Ober1994). Worse still, when order is threatened, so too is the oligarchic stranglehold. Hence, within oligarchic democracy, people’s expression outside institutional politics is suppressed, deemed illegitimate, and even criminalized (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot, Laval and Elliott2019). Beyond the mere consumerism that exists within formalized spaces of politics, the economic elite problematize political action outside the purview of institutional politics, because such actions pose a potential threat to their interests. In other words, the underlying cause of fatigue is that politics is confined to certain formalized institutions, beyond which political action ceases to be recognized as legitimate. Furthermore, oligarchs employ antidemocratic measures to prevent or discourage people from participating in such informal spaces.
While these two forms of fatigue are analytically distinguishable, they often overlap in significant ways. For example, a person may vote during elections and participate in protests. This person may experience fatigue both because their electoral needs are marketized and because their participation in protests is deemed illegitimate. The experience of fatigue does not necessarily suggest that citizens can accurately diagnose that the problem is due to oligarchic domination, but that ontologically their participation within traditional forms of decision making is constrained. There is something preventing them from changing the political reality in which they find themselves.Footnote 10
Experiencing Oligarchic Fatigue
In the following two subsections, I illustrate how the two forms of fatigue arise within oligarchic democracy using two case studies. These are not meant to be exhaustive but illustrative of the experience of fatigue obtained under oligarchic domination. The discussion complements empirical work on political exhaustion by revealing how political agency is shaped by the experiences of oligarchic domination.
Fatigue through Limited Participation
In the first instance, people participate within the established boundaries of democratic politics, which includes voting, calling an assembly member, and even running for office. This type of participation is widely regarded by the public as legitimate democratic action and rests on the assumption that all citizens have equal opportunity to participate. Democratic institutions remain democratic insofar as people can and do participate. In addition, when people do not challenge the dominant oligarchic logic, there appears to be little interference in ordinary political activity. Yet fatigue with democratic participation may still ensue due to oligarchic control.
The most common and familiar form of political participation is voting during elections. What makes the act of voting a political act is that someone makes a deliberate choice, on the meaning of a particular matter, within the formal institutional framework of citizenship, which occurs in a concrete historical time. A political actor is free to the extent that all these elements, in the abstract, are not interfered with. Thus, voting for a representative, as I showed in the previous section, is a democratic act insofar as it is a “popular judgment” about what the electorate “would like for a future and what they think of the past” (Manin Reference Manin1997, 237).Footnote 11 Yet oligarchic interests systematically constrain the elements of choice and matter, undermining the formal freedom granted by democratic institutions.
Take the real-world example of the 2012 recall election of Scott Walker for governor of Wisconsin. Shortly after taking office on January 3, 2011, Walker introduced Wisconsin Act 10 (Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill), which would end collective bargaining rights for public employees and make it more difficult for unions to organize. The bill would benefit the wealthy at the expense of working-class Wisconsinites. Act 10 led to mass protests, and a recall election was called after close to one million people signed a recall petition. The reelection on June 5, 2012, set the record for the highest voter turnout in a nonpresidential election in Wisconsin (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2012). Such a turnout does not point to apathy, since people were actively participating in democratic politics through formal avenues. Democratic institutions were functioning as they are supposed to and people were participating within them.
However, extensive outside spending entered the election campaign to shape public messaging, the agenda, and public opinion (Hirschkorn and Cordes Reference Hirschkorn and Cordes2012). Walker was the first governor in US history to survive a recall election, raising more than $60 million in the process (Page and Gilens Reference Page and Gilens2020). This included public donations from 14 billionaires (O’Connor Reference O’Connor2012), and additional millions in anonymous dark money, including from billionaire John Menard Jr. (Isikoff Reference Isikoff2015). In other words, the demos participated, but the various antidemocratic financial loopholes in place meant that oligarchs controlled the terms of the political contest, effectively narrowing both the choice and matter of political action. Lawmakers expressed concern to reporters that voters were losing “meaningful representation” (Golden Reference Golden2012). And voters in Wisconsin, Republican and Democrat alike, stated that they were “exhausted by politics” (Guarino Reference Guarino2011).
This example shows that one’s choice—exemplified by signing the recall petition and voting in the subsequent election—matters little because the matter the public cares about is suppressed by oligarchic interests, generating widespread exhaustion. The case study highlights a broader phenomenon of the hollowing out of political processes, where participation feels more like a duty than an actual attempt to influence political outcomes. And yet, the hope that meaningful change is possible keeps drawing people back to the process—in this case, by demanding a recall election. Sally Nuamah (Reference Nuamah2021, 1115), writing about the experience of poor and Black citizens in the US, emphasizes this point and observes that “each effort to participate in an unfair political process is remembered by those who had engaged and believed in it.” Over time, Nuamah (Reference Nuamah2021) observes, the experience of engaging in an unfair political process leads to distrust and disillusionment with government.
Thus, we find an answer to why polls consistently show that people are exhausted with the political process and why this is due to oligarchic domination. The market logic of distribution that contemporary democratic politics follows is one that permits an oligarchic stranglehold over political mechanisms (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot, Laval and Elliott2019; Urbinati Reference Urbinati2019). Popular polls in the US show that people feel exhausted with politics because they do not believe either major political party represents their interests (Pew Research Center 2023). Policy preferences of the demos are systematically ignored when lobbyists, large corporations, and private donors do not want these policies (Page and Gilens Reference Page and Gilens2020).
As a result, the lived experience of participating in politics for the average political actor is limited through relations of hierarchy, consumerism, and rarity of participation (Green Reference Green2016b). Oligarchic fatigue arises because democratic institutions generally limit their options to a “binary set of possible [consumer] choices,” thereby legitimizing the political power of extraordinary members who define those choices and limiting popular participation (Green Reference Green2016b, 34–35). Binary choices typically describe elections between two candidates, but voters may also be restricted to an opt-in or opt-out choice in elections featuring only one candidate, as happened in the reelection of former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder. Householder faced federal charges for taking $60 million in dark money from First Energy, but despite these charges he ran unopposed and won reelection in his district.
Oligarchic democracy remains democratic to the extent that it has a formal commitment to institutions and principles of free and equal citizenship, and these institutions do not formally discriminate between participants. And yet, fatigue may arise precisely when people are active in politics due to their continued failure to have an impact on political decision making. In these cases, participation fails because democracy is shaped by and limited to the truth claims of oligarchs (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot, Laval and Elliott2019). Elites set the agenda, lobby candidates, and define viable policy options (Arlen and Rossi Reference Arlen and Rossi2021). Rather than forming a political community in which people contest and develop law and policy, elite influence leaves only a limited scope for meaningful participation. Put differently, democracy is reduced to a controlled performance—a spectacle of consumer politics (Crouch Reference Crouch2004). While fatigue can arise from constrained engagement within formal political spaces, it can also emerge from the functional denial of participation, to which I turn now.
Fatigue through Denied Participation
The dominant logic of oligarchic democracy is to limit potential contestation that may pose a threat to the material interests of oligarchs. To protect their material interests, oligarchs legitimize acts of repression by appealing to democratic ideals, thereby suppressing alternative forms of popular expression such as protests, boycotts, noncooperation, and civil disobedience. In this section, I show that people experience fatigue when attempts to move beyond the confines of what oligarchs consider permissible democratic participation are functionally denied. Alternative forms of contestation threaten oligarchic control by undermining its grip on democratic institutions, and thus oligarchic domination limits such forms of contestation.
Returning to the fourfold matrix, political action is not confined to a single institutional framework. Voting is one way to act politically, but this does not in principle foreclose other forms of political action. Here, too, oligarchic power limits the political action of the demos. Whereas in the previous section it was closures of choice and matter, here it is closure of framework. The closure of the institutional framework takes place when certain places of contestation are deemed illegitimate. These closures are often enforced by state violence and intensified by precarity that is meant to limit the ways in which people act politically.
Consider Occupy Wall Street (henceforth Occupy), which began its occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17, 2011. Occupy was a noninstitutional response to the problems of increasing economic inequality, precarity, and corporate greed. The occupation of Zuccotti Park offered a vision of an alternative form of democratic participation. Occupy received broad media attention, and the movement was adopted by many others in the US and beyond in their fight against oligarchic domination. With public opinion showing support for the movement (Anderson Reference Anderson2021), some commentators wondered if this was a moment that would address the problem of oligarchy (Gitlin Reference Gitlin2012). As an activist put it, Occupy created “a kind of space nobody knew existed” to counter institutionalized politics (Yotam Marom, as cited in Gitlin Reference Gitlin2012, 4). Thus, here again, one observes active political participation from the demos to shape their communal life together.
As the Occupy movement spread throughout the US, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation surveilled participants (Moynihan Reference Moynihan2014) and approximately eight thousand faced arrest (Fairchild Reference Fairchild2013). Further evidence suggests that both federal and local law enforcement agencies worked in coordination with US banks (Partnership for Civil Justice Fund 2013). These repressive actions were executed under the pretext that Occupy posed a potential terrorist threat and could even attempt to interfere in legitimate democratic action, despite there being no concrete evidence for either claim (Schmidt and Moynihan Reference Schmidt and Moynihan2012). In addition, New York City’s mayor at the time, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, argued that the occupation of Zuccotti Park was contradictory to free speech (Barron and Moynihan Reference Barron and Moynihan2011). The language used by Bloomberg illustrates the claim that legitimate participation can only occur within a defined institutional framework, and “[w]hat was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that” (as cited in Barron and Moynihan Reference Barron and Moynihan2011).
These repressions contributed to a sense of exhaustion (Anthony Reference Anthony2021) and burnout (Williams Reference Williams2017) among the participants, which stemmed not only from the length and exigencies of the occupation but also from constant surveillance, fear of arrest, and delegitimization. The case of Occupy shows how oligarchic democracy narrows the framework of political action. People participated in an effort to act politically but faced systemic barriers that led them to experience fatigue.
This is an example of repressive action used to suppress popular expressions that threaten oligarchic power. Occupy directly challenged the corporate bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis, which increased precarity for most Americans while corporations and wealthy individuals received financial assistance. This example shows how the state employs formalized means to violently limit the forms of contestation people engage with. Put differently, it is a case of oligarchs making use of state policing to effectively protect their private interests. Occupy is a telling illustration for a broader pattern observed across contemporary democracies.
Beyond direct repression of political action, the example of Occupy also hints at the role of precarity in reinforcing the second form of oligarchic fatigue. Precarity functions as a closure of the political framework, because economic insecurity narrows the range of actions a person can realistically take, rendering noninstitutional participation costly, risky, or even impossible. Moreover, precarity reduces the capacity for participation within formalized avenues as it becomes a luxury for which people do not have time. Occupy made visible how economic insecurity makes political action more burdensome and allows for powerful agents to control democratic institutions. As Eleanor Wilkinson and Iliana Ortega-Alcázar (Reference Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar2019, 155) convincingly argue, precarity can “lead to a state of fatigue, a gradual slow wearing-out that comes with having to endure everyday hardships.” The scenes of closure exemplified by precarity are a mode of oligarchic domination, given that they are a slow, long-term consequence of elite-driven austerity policies. For example, the experiences of working-class people in Argentina have been described as dominated by “deleterious webs of the informal and gig economy” (Baca Reference Baca2024, 447).
All in all, the two case studies highlight that oligarchs, with the help of law and state authority, dominate people to protect their material interests. The case studies exemplify the structural experience of second-class status that defines oligarchic fatigue. Repression, precarity, and passive consumption shape how people experience political action and how political possibilities cease to appear as feasible, safe, or effective. Democracy is then relegated to abstract principles and institutions that reject the perpetuity of democratic contestation by delegitimizing other forms of political action. While people may continue to participate within democratic institutions, such a mode of politics will subject them to fatigue as long as their calls for contestation remain unobserved.
These forms of closure and the denial of contestation are attached to the oligarchic project, as the “straitjacket” of material interests that ostracizes and criminalizes political behavior outside the confines of institutional politics (Dardot and Laval Reference Dardot, Laval and Elliott2019). More to the point, oligarchic fatigue arises because people express their desire for political participation, which is ignored or taken as a threat. Both reflect how oligarchic domination fundamentally shapes political experience and explains why fatigue must be theorized as having an oligarchic component. Under oligarchic domination, one feels impotent because of systemic injustice and violence put in place to protect and expand elite interests.
The relation people have to political participation moves beyond mere formality. Yet the boundaries placed upon people through formalized participation limits their ability to develop their own political agency. As Bonnie Honig (Reference Honig1993, 209–10) writes, “[t]he closures represented by law, responsibility, authority, [and] the state … enable a democratic politics, but their sedimentations also have disempowering effects that are not easily overcome or challenged.” In other words, what constitutes a site of action is determined by what the administrators of law and order decide threatens or does not threaten their security. Under oligarchic domination, certain political actions are deemed as illegitimate sites of democratic participation because they attempt to move beyond what is considered acceptable democratic behavior as determined by the state.
While this reading of fatigue has thus far focused on the closures associated with oligarchic democracy, oligarchic fatigue also points to a “scene of possibility” (Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar Reference Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar2019, 157; emphasis in original) by heeding ordinary actions of people in everyday life. In this context, the scene of possibility refers to the continued political participation within and beyond existing political structures, despite the presence of oligarchic democracy. The phenomenological reading of oligarchic fatigue makes clear that democratic participation is centrally about political freedom, and that people continue to participate in an effort to engage in collective decision making despite the structural limitations placed upon participation. In the conclusion, I explore how continued participation by people may reorient democratic theory and institutional design around political freedom.
Conclusion: Recentering Political Freedom
Recent years have seen a surge in institutional proposals to minimize the presence of oligarchy, including constituency juries (Leipold Reference Leipold2025), a tribune of the plebs (McCormick Reference McCormick2011; Prinz and Westphal Reference Prinz and Westphal2024), and a plebeian constitutional branch (Vergara Reference Vergara2020). But perhaps the best-known democratic innovation is the citizens’ assembly (Bulmer and White Reference Bulmer, White, Bennett, Brouwer and Claassen2022; Guerrero Reference Guerrero2014; Landemore Reference Landemore2020).Footnote 12 Citizens’ assemblies aim to place agency back with the demos and provide a way for people to have a more direct say over law and policy. Based on the understanding of fatigue as an outcome of oligarchic domination—and thus unfreedom—I now provide a reflection on its implications for citizens’ assemblies in particular, and democratic innovations more broadly.
Previous sections have shown that oligarchy erodes the norms, expectations, and communal character of democracy and that this leaves the demos unfree. As a result, political exhaustion and impotence can best be understood as outcomes of oligarchic domination rather than democratic disappointment. The emphasis on domination reframes fatigue as a political experience of unfreedom. Within this framework, oligarchic fatigue raises a particular challenge to anti-oligarchic institutional remedies, which, I argue, can only be resolved in tandem with a substantive understanding of political freedom. The central problem of oligarchic democracy is that it represents a closure to political action. What this means for anti-oligarchic approaches is that they, likewise, must not paternalistically impose other procedures and practices but must center their efforts in promoting political action. The analysis of oligarchic fatigue also points to a scene of possibility.
Challenging oligarchic power, I contend, means that institutional remedies and democratic innovations must focus on the substantive elements of collective self-rule, without which they too risk being co-opted (Böker Reference Böker2017). This calls for rethinking democracy not only as an institution, but as a social relationship between people that arises through active civic life, public discourse, and contestation—that is, through political freedom. An institutional response that ignores the people’s experience with democracy risks reinforcing the very exhaustion it seeks to resolve.
A response to oligarchic fatigue should look beyond the institutional and affirm this struggle for freedom as central to democratic politics. And although institutions are necessary and complementary to such an emancipatory project, institutional remedies alone function as another way to confine politics (Wolin Reference Wolin, Euben, Wallach and Ober1994). A purely institutional approach would fail to empower people who experience oligarchic domination while running the risk of confirming far-right talking points—with the support of oligarchic funding—regarding the so-called failures of democracy. At best such remedies would constitute successes of governmental public relations (Villa Reference Villa2008).
Some worry that more direct involvement in politics may adversely result in democratic fatigue because politics would become more demanding (e.g., Kern and Hooghe Reference Kern and Hooghe2018), but such worries treat democracy as a set of instruments for political decision making. Their worry is correct only if one sees direct democratic participation as possible solely through a plethora of new institutions in which people need to be active. In other words, if the demand for participation becomes more burdensome by adding deliberative and participatory bodies to every level of government, from the local to the transnational, without resolving people’s daily economic burdens, then it would not be surprising that this would increase political fatigue. Democracy in such cases is made even more complex than the contemporary bureaucratic bulwark. These worries anticipate the risk of institutional remedies. More formal avenues for participation may add extra complexity, making it easier for oligarchs to operate unnoticed. At the same time, expanding the roles and expectations of participation may increase people’s exhaustion as they attempt to navigate these demands.
Instead, I have made the case that democratic politics is centrally about doing things together. Thus, solutions meant to mitigate oligarchic domination, such as citizens’ assemblies, may provide a way to address oligarchic fatigue. The aim of combating oligarchic fatigue is to orient democratic practices toward the daily experiences of people within the polity that are too easily overlooked. Concretely, this means that anti-oligarchic politics must (1) reduce material barriers to political participation and limit the role of private wealth, (2) create and protect spaces for spontaneous political action, and finally (3) enable popular decision making on matters that concern the community. Citizens’ assemblies constitute one institutional remedy that may be able to accomplish all three of these principles, but importantly they cannot, and should not, be the sole venues for legitimate political action.
There have been moments—even if fleeting (Breaugh Reference Breaugh and Lederhendler2013)—that can serve as inspiration for anti-oligarchic institutions that may be conducive to the actualization of political freedom. In part, freedom refers to nondomination, both at the individual and structural level. This is something that current anti-oligarchic proposals address well. However, freedom also comprises the ability to do things together, and this is a phenomenological experience that design alone cannot quite address. Historical examples may provide principles for anti-oligarchic politics that would center around freedom in both senses to help address oligarchic fatigue. For example, Niklas Plaetzer (Reference Plaetzer2024) has recently pleaded for a reconsideration of nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist Luiz Gama and the resistance of the enslaved in Brazil as a way of thinking about institutional prefiguration opposing oligarchic domination. For Gama, the resistance of the enslaved and the organization of maroon communities constituted a democratic politics, which was not opposed to institutions but rather challenged the oligarchic status quo within (Plaetzer Reference Plaetzer2024). In a similar vein, Sheldon Wolin (Reference Wolin, Euben, Wallach and Ober1994) highlights the use of sortition and the frequent rotation of political office in democratic Athens to subvert institutionalization that would benefit the wealthy—and benefit those who oppose the political instability and uncertainty that comes with democracy. Others have turned to socialist republicanism (e.g., Muldoon Reference Muldoon2022; O’Shea Reference O’Shea2020) and the Black radical tradition (e.g., Kelley Reference Kelley2002; Robinson [Reference Robinson1983] 2021) to show that historically successful democratic projects against oligarchy depend upon a demand for political freedom.
These historical and contemporary scenes of resistance offer interpretive models of engagement that embed a concern for political freedom within institutional design. This concern demands that democratic reforms and innovations attend to how ordinary people experience domination when they engage in politics. This article has recentered democracy as an experience of ordinary people. The problem orientation, in this light, moves from the ability to make good policy toward a central concern for freedom in the political sphere. What this means is that oligarchy is wrong, not merely because it makes poor policy decisions, but because these policies are not produced through popular participation and therefore are not democratic. The struggle for political freedom, then, is a demand to confront the political experience of oligarchic domination.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Dawn Herrera, Benjamin McKean, Christy Hyunso Oh, Emma Saunders-Hastings, and Inés Valdez for their advice, critical engagement, and support, as well as to Joseph Bell, Bear Brown, Gabriel Gorre, Derek Kennedy, Eric MacGilvray, John McCormick, Michael Neblo, Karis Neufeld, Dominic Pfister, Janosch Prinz, Brandon Ritter, Kaveri Sarkar, and Orane Steffann for comments on earlier drafts. Thank you also to the editors and three anonymous reviewers at Perspectives on Politics, and to audiences at the 2023 Political Theory Workshop at Ohio State University, the 2024 Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, the 2024 Mancept workshops, and the 2025 Stanford Graduate Political Theory Workshop. I am thankful to the Department of Political Science and the Institute for Democratic Engagement & Accountability (IDEA) at Ohio State University for their continued support.
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