When the political scientist Peter Mair died suddenly in 2011, he left his final book unfinished: Ruling the Void, an account of the “hollowing out” of European democracies after years of capitalist offensive.

The volume, published posthumously in 2013, documents a dramatic rise in voter abstention and election volatility in nearly every democracy in Europe. Mair gloomily diagnosed the problem: “the age of party democracy has passed.” Over the course of decades, an elite turn towards expert knowledge over voter preference — what Mair called “easing away from the demos” — quietly undermined political agency in Europe.

Nearly a decade since Mair’s death, the trends he identified continue. Almost invariably, Western democracies have seen former establishment parties, many of them center-left, lose legitimacy after their embrace of neoliberal policies. In many cases, right-wing populists have rushed in to fill the political void, channeling frustration with austerity into vicious anti-migrant politics.