Abstract
This chapter discusses how different conceptions of democracy relate to populism. The aim is to reveal how background theoretical commitments regarding both democracy and populism reveal the normative standing of populism and its potential contradictions with democracy. Populism is often described either as a corrective to democracy or its pathology. On the one hand, populism can be seen as politics par excellence, reviving democracies in crisis. On the other hand, its exclusionary and authoritarian tendencies can be considered dangerous to democracy. Despite the apparent contradictory nature of these descriptions, the accounts often agree about the core features of populism itself. This chapter analyses how these core ideas relate to various accounts of democracy, from less to more normative. The claim is that the more normatively demanding the account of democracy is, the more likely it becomes that populism cannot be accommodated within it. In short, the theory of democracy has a key role in the differing normative conclusions that various authors draw from their accounts of populism. The central contribution of this chapter is to make explicit the breadth of the theoretical commitments that are built into the normative evaluation of the role of populism.
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Notes
- 1.
https://diem25.org/about/. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
- 2.
This approach is partly inspired by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat and Corrective for Democracy (2012). Whereas Kaltwasser is mostly interested in different conceptions of populism, this chapter takes a slightly different approach, focusing mainly on the differences between democratic theories.
- 3.
This goes interestingly against Rousseau’s influential formulation of general will, which can be seen working in the background of contemporary democratic institutions. Similar to populists, and following the later ideals of democracy, Rousseau (2012) understands the general will as the source of legitimacy of the governing institutions, the state. However, he does not grant ‘the people’ a privileged representative access to general will. Indeed, the ‘will of the all’ might be mistaken for the ‘general will’ (Rousseau, 2012, p. 182).
- 4.
For an alternative but largely overlapping list of features of democracy, see Robert Dahl (1998, pp. 37–38). In his list, Dahl goes beyond the minimalistic features that characterize democracy as a decision-making mechanism.
- 5.
In the English language alone, there are over 2,000 different descriptions of democracy (Gagnon, 2018), a testament to the ontological pluralism of democracy as well as its varying normative standing in the eyes of theorists.
- 6.
For example, Jürgen Habermas (1994) has argued for citizens’ ‘constitutional patriotism’, which would enable people from different backgrounds to identify with larger political projects. Charles Taylor (1998, 1999) also emphasizes civic virtues such as solidarity, patriotism, and pre-political identification with the democratic project.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Barber (2003, p. 232) also outlines a third option of unitary (or communitarian) democracy, in which the system overrides individual desires and autonomy is subsumed and destroyed under the democratic system. This option is left outside of the analysis here.
- 10.
However, as Pettit (2003, p. 177) argues, there are good reasons to uphold a modicum of collective rationality as otherwise democracy as a decision-making mechanism could lose its traction as a useful practical mechanism of making decisions that direct action.
- 11.
The ideal of deliberative democracy comes in this sense close to Rainer Forst’s (2011) Kantian idea of the right to justification. No one should be excluded (without a good reason) from deliberation, and the results of deliberation should be justifiable to all the affected parties.
- 12.
See List and Pettit (2004) on the discursive dilemma and its effects on collective decision-making.
- 13.
This assumes a very reciprocity-based view of the constitution of agents. Such accounts often draw from the Hegelian idea of mutual recognition.
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Hirvonen, O. (2023). Whose Populism? What Democracy? On the Conceptual and Normative Connections of Populism and Democracy. In: Lagerspetz, E., Pulkkinen, O. (eds) Between Theory and Practice: Essays on Criticism and Crises of Democracy. Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41397-1_5
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