Contemporary Democratic Theory Research Articles

Democratic Theorists and Party Scholars: Why They Don't Talk to Each Other, and Why They Should

Despite their importance to one another, the current literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory continue to develop largely in mutual isolation. Empirical studies of contemporary political parties and party systems tend to have little to say about the meanings and possibilities of democracy, and therefore also about the varied potential roles of political parties within it. Meanwhile, contemporary democratic theorists quietly sidestep the issue of whether political parties perform a legitimate function in democracies. This lack of mutual engagement is regrettable, in particular given the pervasive erosion of popular support and legitimacy of political parties as representative institutions. In this article we explore the key reasons for democratic theorists and scholars of political parties so rarely taking on each others' core concerns, and we outline the key ways in which this mutual disengagement is mutually impoverishing. We will also suggest ways forward, by pinpointing and illustrating potentially productive areas of engagement which might serve to deepen our understanding of democracy's present and its possible futures.Ingrid van Biezen is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK (i.c.vanbiezen@bham.ac.uk). Michael Saward is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK (m.j.saward@open.ac.uk). The authors are grateful to Richard S. Katz and Jeremy Jennings and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In developing our arguments, we also benefited from conversations with Robert Dahl, Russell Dalton, Ian Shapiro, workshop participants at the ECPR Joint Sessions, and graduate students at Yale University. Part of this research was supported by the British Academy (research grant SG 38612).

Democratic legitimacy and proceduralist social epistemology

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy.

Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People

This essay argues for Walt Whitman's significance to contemporary democratic theory, neither as a theorist of moral or aesthetic individualism nor as a theorist of communitarian nationalism, but as a theorist of the democratic sublime. Whitman's account of “aesthetic democracy” emphasizes the affective and autopoetic dimensions of political life. For Whitman, popular attachment to democracy requires an aesthetic component, and he aimed to enact the required reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, world-making power. Through his poetic translation of the vox populi, Whitman hoped to engender a robustly transformative democratic politics. He found the resources for political regeneration in the poetics of everyday citizenship, in the democratic potentials of ordinary life.

Democratic Faith

Democratic Faith. By Patrick J. Deneen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 440p. $45.00.Contemporary democratic theory has been flourishing. Recent liberal, communitarian, republican, deliberative, agonistic, pluralist, postmodern, cosmopolitan, cyberspace, and realist models and theories abound. Patrick Deneen's book is a significant contribution to this genre and original in its critical focus on those democratic theories that “insist upon the possibility of democratic transformation” and advance “a conception of human beings as both infinitely malleable and ameliorable” (p. 4).

Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000

Contention & Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000, Charles Tilly, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. xiv, 305.A leading historical sociologist, Charles Tilly brings skills from both disciplines to this exercise in democratic analysis. The result provocatively illuminates democracy as it developed in Europe and advances challenging hypotheses for contemporary democratic theory and practice. Tilly applies carefully formulated categories and explanatory hypotheses to his subject in a way atypical of most historians while tempering the often inflexible approaches of sociological theory with an historian's sensitivity to nuance and complexity.

Freedom of Speech and Philosophical Citizenship in Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise

In this essay, I challenge genealogies that anoint Baruch Spinoza the founder of liberal democracy and liberal individualism. Spinoza's departure from mainstream liberal individualism manifests most starkly in his argument for freedom of thought and expression–the argument invariably cited to prove Spinoza's liberal credentials. When Spinoza defends freedom of speech, in The Theologico Political Treatise, he endorses a mode of democratic citizenship, and an ethos of public discourse, devoid of the heroic self-display endorsed by theorists like John Stuart Mill. According to Spinoza, philosophy and democracy are mutually reinforcing: philosophers can pursue challenging lines of inquiry in a democracy that grants freedom of speech, and the democracy that welcomes philosophy proves more resilient than a tyranny that polices opinion. Philosophy enhances democracy because philosophers comport themselves in ways that expand egalitarian community: specifically, philosophers observe anonymous protocol. According to Spinoza, democratic philosophers should aspire to the role of courteous friend–not the role of celebrity, martyr, or disciple. Spinoza's argument for anonymity remains relevant for contemporary democratic theorists: Spinoza offers a compelling alternative to dominant modes of philosophical citizenship.

States Are Not People: Harold Laski on Unsettling Sovereignty, Rediscovering Democracy

This essay examines the relationship between democratic theory and historical critiques of state sovereignty by analyzing Harold Laski’s geneological approach to the history of political thought. This approach led Laski to conclude that the apparently “unified” character of soveriegn statehood made differences within states invisible, rendered similarities across states meaningless, obscured the liberal state’s connections to capitalism, and supported order and authority over the less predictable qualities of democratic freedom. Laski’s critique of sovereignty ultimately suggested that true democracy was impossible within the context of sovereingty and that real “international cooperation” could only happen under conditions in which individual states were prevented from speaking in the unified voice of their people. The esssay suggests that contemporary democratic theorists and international ethicists could have much to learn from Laski’s refusal to relegate democracy to the internal boundaries of states.

Political Disagreement and Socratic Civic Competence

Contemporary democratic theories that draw on Socrates for inspiration have addressed his method of investigation too narrowly because there has been insufficient attention to the need for authority, which Socrates also identifies. Because his appeals to authority initially appear antidemocratic, we cannot overlook this aspect of his thought. I describe a virtue, civic competence, which is the excellence of citizens who critically engage with the norms of the community, but who also recognise that authority is politically necessary. Deliberation requires elenctic-like scrutiny, but also a willingness to accept some arguments as authoritative. My overarching claim is that failure to exhibit such character traits can appear in more than one form, a point neglected in recent literature, and that not all such forms are antidemocratic. Civic competence is susceptible to corruptions that may never result in citizenship that is simply undemocratic. I define two corruptions of civic competence: ‘disagonism’ and ‘eristicism’. The former treats disagreement as signalling either confusion or wickedness and deliberation as a process of clarifying and tidying discourse. The latter treats disagreement as ineliminable and deliberation as gaming with words in order to defeat an opponent in argument.

Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies

For contemporary democratic theorists, democracy is largely a matter of deliberation. But the recent rise of deliberative democracy (in practice as well as theory) coincided with ever more prominent identity politics, sometimes in murderous form in deeply divided societies. This essay considers how deliberative democracy can process the toughest issues concerning mutually contradictory assertions of identity. After considering the alternative answers provided by agonists and consociational democrats, the author makes the case for a power-sharing state with attenuated sovereignty and a more engaged deliberative politics in a public sphere that is semidetached from the state and situated transnationally.

Democracia y deliberación pública desde la perspectiva rawlsiana

In this paper we shall center in one of the questions that takes up the first plan of the nowadays theoretical reflexion: the problem of democracy as the political form of the public use of reason. We shall take it from the paradigm that presents J. Rawls in his last works with a view specially to the function and limits that Rawls asigns to «public Reason» and «public Deliberation». The analysis of these concepts seems to me hugely illuminating for the contemporary democratic theory. In the first place I have analysed the relation between democracy and political conception of justice, and afterwards between public reason and the limits of public deliberation. I conclude that the displayed conception of public reason mainly aspires to mark the boundaries of a space that cannot be subjected to interests, either strategical or even deliberative, because it is secured by a political conception of justice which is acepted by everyone. A conception that tries to overcome the conflict between different forms of life through the ideal of justice and human rights.

Framing the nation: three rival versions of contemporary nationalist ideology

The author proposes an analysis of the common and differentiating elements of contemporary nationalist ideologies based on the starting assumption that the character of nationalist discourses in the building of nations is not merely exogenous and expressive, but rather endogenous and productive. The study, which is centred on the internal structure of the concept of nation and the political nature and the relationships between its principal elements, employs a frame analysis approach. Three main types of framing strategies present in contemporary nationalist ideologies are highlighted: 1) an organicistic strategy, which is articulated around a concept of nation as an homogenous ethnic group shaped by the presence of thickly ethnic objective elements (race, spirit, mission, physical space, etc.); 2) the culturalist strategy, which is the result of a purging of the determinism found in the organicistic model and which is based on other objective but thinly ethnic elements (culture, language, tradition); and 3) a strategy based on the emergent model of pluralistic nationalism, which competes with the two previous models by considering the nation as an always-in-the-making political-cultural community, integrated by majorities and minorities, and as an open environment for democratic deliberation and accommodation. The analysis demonstrates how, as a last resort, only the third model, which significantly moves away from the classical formulation of nationalist ideologies, turns out to be compatible with the normative demands of contemporary democratic theory, but at the cost of losing the mobilizing efficiency of the two traditional models (organic and cultural) and the heuristic efficiency of the binary opposites: we/they, insider/outsider, friend/enemy.

Rethinking civil society: radical politics and the legitimization of unpaid activities

This article examines recent debates on the concept of civil society as a source of renewal for political economy and a contributing factor to the establishment of social inclusion. In terms of political economy it contends that the relationship between markets and civil society has been under-theorized and that the potentially deleterious impact of the hegemony of market discourses on civil society has been neglected. Thus there is a need to engage with more radical theories which suggest that, if we want to support and legitimize socially useful activities such as unpaid work, spaces within civil society should be protected from the penetration of economic rationality. To this end the article argues that, following contemporary radical democratic theory, it is important to think of civil society as a differentiated space in which a wide range of actors engage in a multiplicity of activities. However, where radical democrats have tended to focus on a differentiated space for political engagement, this article concludes that we should do the same for economic and non-economic activities and, in so doing, construct an alternative political economy to the hegemony of market discourses.

Nationalism, Liberalism, and Democracy

Liberal nationalism is an important recent development in political theory that challenges liberals to acknowledge the significance of nationality in people's lives, and its role in the justification and implementation of liberal policies. If liberal nationalists are correct, national identity serves basic human needs and is not only compatible with liberal ideals of equality and individuality, but must be fostered for these ideals to flourish and for the liberal-democratic state to function. In this article I analyze the doctrine of liberal nationalism and argue that it actually points to the significance of democratic action, not national sentiment, for liberal states. Civic ties between citizens engaged in the public domain, such as those articulated by contemporary democratic theorists, have more relevance for addressing the functional requirements of liberal states than the bonds of national identity.

Thucydides and Plato on Democracy and Trust

For a variety of reasons, the problem of political trust has become an important issue within contemporary democratic theory, especially within theories of deliberative democracy. This article argues that contributions from classical political philosophy-specifically Thucydides' representation of the Mytilenean debate and the Platonic dialogue, Protagoras-can enrich that discussion. The paper suggests that deliberative democratic theory's treatment of political trust raises a series of questions that the perspective does not fully acknowledge or engage. It then offers intersecting readings of these two classical works that, I suggest, make constructive contributions on three fronts. First, they clarify the goodness of political trust in democratic regimes. Second, they under-score the need to focus on the substantive outcomes as well as on the procedural arrangements of deliberative democracy. Third, they clarify the dependence of warranted trust on certain forms of virtue. The conclusion is not that deli...

Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism

This essay demonstrates that Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought addresses the deficiencies of two opposite poles of contemporary democratic theory: As do formal or minimalist approaches, he specifies electoral mechanisms for elite control; and similar to substantive or civic culture approaches, he encourages more direct and robust modes of popular participation. On these grounds, I cull from Machiavelli’s Discourses a theory of democracy in which the populace selects the elites who will hold office but also constantly patrols them through extraelectoral institutions and practices, such as the tribunes of the people, public accusations, and popular appeals. Machiavelli adds to these institutional features of popular government an important cultural dimension: The people should despise and mistrust elites, and they should actively confront the injustice that elite governing inevitably entails. Finally, I explore the ramifications of this theory for debates over elite accountability in contemporary democratic theory.

Can Less Be More? Leftist Deliberative Democrats' Critique of Participatory Democracy

Many contemporary democratic theorists now base their conceptions of democracy not on the value of citizen participation but on deliberation instead. This apparently slight shift in emphasis marks an important change in the critical project of democratic theory. Although participatory and deliberative democratic theory are in some ways similar, close readings of the recent work of a number of leftist deliberative democrats reveal not only fundamental criticisms of their participatory predecessors but a strikingly different assessment of the political world as well. Deliberative democrats strive to avoid the charge of utopianism so often leveled against participatory theorists; in doing so, however, they lose the power to distinguish critically between the potential for democracy and its realization. Deliberative democratic theory, therefore, should not be understood as a revision of the participatory project, but rather as an independent and, for now, underdeveloped theory of democracy.

Voluntarist democratic theory and the origins of the Irish civil war

This article examines elite behaviour and the origins of the Irish Civil War by looking at the efforts of the Irish political elite to avert civil war in the period between the signing of the Anglo‐Irish Treaty in December 1921 and the outbreak of civil war the following June. It tests a central assumption of contemporary democratic theory: that political elites can always have a decisive impact of the fate of transitional regimes. More particularly it focuses on the making and unmaking of the Collins‐de Valera electoral pact and explains why tactics that have been shown to be effective ways of preventing conflict and stabilising democratic regimes, elsewhere, failed to prevent the outbreak of civil war in the Irish case.

Civil Society and Democracy: The Gap between Theory and Possibility

In this essay, I first provide reasons for the reemergence of the idea of civil society and for its subsequent importance in contemporary democratic theory, particularly on the left. I then show how this new approach to civil society is premised upon the separation of spheres between state and society. Thus the place of civil society in such accounts of democracy and democratisation, although normative and therefore putatively universal, is actually based on western liberalism. This feature of civil society theory obscures democratisation as a contextualised process and therefore distorts descriptions of a normative core to democracy that it truly universal in scope.

Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I devefop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and rechims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

Democracy and the Problem of Statesmanship

Is statesmanship still compatible with democracy? Democratic theorists once viewed democracy as a partnership between citizens and statesmen, to which each brought complementary virtues. Statesmanship has come to be condemned by many contemporary democratic theorists, however, as inimical to democracy. By turning statesmen into “facilitators,” they seek to displace statesmanship with an expanded concept of citizenship. In response, and stung by charges of elitism, embattled liberal defenders of statesmanship have begun to recast it in light of this line of attack. Most notably, the liberal Bruce Ackerman has sought to advance a new concept of nonelitist, “neutral” liberal statesmanship that is compatible with democracy. This study examines both the criticisms that led to this rethinking of statesmanship—especially in the thought of Benjamin R. Barber, liberal statesmanship's leading critic—and Ackerman's success in meeting them. Our study tries to demonstrate that Ackerman actually reconstructs liberal statesmanship on the basis of Barber's arguments and thereby further undermines the statesmanship he purports to defend. I conclude with an effort to rehabilitatean older understanding of liberal statesmanship.