Democratic Contestation Research Articles

When Dissident Citizens Are Militant Mamas: Intersectional Gender and Agonistic Struggle in Welfare Rights Activism

In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of agonistic democracy offer provocative insights into democratic activism and protest but require a more robust account of intersectional gender to adequately theorize the challenges of disruptive dissent. To this end, I propose an agonistic and feminist account of “dissident citizenship,” the democratic practices of disruption used to problematize and disturb the status quo when formal channels of democratic change are inadequate. My account foregrounds how intersectional gender formations pervade dissident practices, including activists’ ongoing struggles with their critics over their democratic standing and performances of disruption. I illustrate these theoretical claims through a case study of dissident citizenship drawn from U.S. politics, the welfare rights movement of 1966–75. Intersectional gender formations assisted welfare activists in claiming democratic standing as loving, hardworking mothers and in becoming bold dissidents. It was nonetheless exceedingly difficult for the poor, usually minority “militant mamas” to remain intelligible as full citizens when critics rejected their claims as the greediness of “breeders” and “cheaters” and dismissed their democratic disruptions as offensive, violence-causing disorders. Attending to intersectional gender dynamics highlights critical dimensions of democratic contestation that agonistic theories must address more carefully.

Democratic Contestation on the Margins: Regimes in Small African Countries edited by Claire Metelits and Stephanie Matti Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. 173. $80 (hbk)

Democratic Contestation on the Margins: Regimes in Small African Countries edited by Claire Metelits and Stephanie Matti Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. 173. $80 (hbk)

Are Europeans ready for a more democratic European Union? New evidence on preference heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness

AbstractSome scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European‐wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of ‘problematic’ diversity by examining how three variables – the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring.

Making democratic contestation possible: public deliberation and mass media regulation

While recent democratic theory has insisted upon the contestability of public policies as a key source of democratic legitimacy, the role mass media should play in fostering public contestation has yet to be specified. The role of deliberative theory in particular should be to try to identify which standards mass communication needs to meet in order to provide a general forum for democratic contestation. This article focuses on the theoretical foundations of such a project. It puts forward three claims. First, the contestability of public policy can only be a source of democratic legitimacy if citizens have the opportunity to participate in public contestation through – among other forums – a general public forum that is endowed with a deliberative dimension. Second, media pluralism alone is insufficient in providing such a public forum: both external standards (related to the independence of mass media) and internal standards (related to the norms guiding media practices) need to be satisfied. Third, and as a consequence of the preceding two, the democratic contestability of public policies presupposes effective mass media regulation that goes beyond the promotion of media pluralism. Democratic contestation requires more than a ‘marketplace of ideas’.

National Security's Broken Windows

This Article examines the federal government’s community engagement efforts with American Muslim communities as part of a larger infrastructure for policing radicalization and countering violent extremism (CVE). While the federal government presents community engagement as a softer alternative to policing, community engagement is integrated into a larger policing apparatus, making the reality far more coercive. Community engagement efforts are staged within the greater context of radicalization discourse, counterradicalization and CVE programs. Radicalization theory posits that increased religiosity and politicization in Muslims provokes an increased threat of terrorism. Government counterradicalization programs aim, therefore, to monitor and influence the political and religious cultures of Muslim communities so as to prevent radicalization, bringing tremendous scrutiny to bear on these communities. The federal government situates its national security community engagement efforts within the history of community policing in the ordinary criminal context. Community engagement and community policing are celebrated as forms of policing that emphasize communication and collaboration with marginalized communities and serve ideals of inclusion and democratic participation. In both contexts, however, efforts at police-community communication and collaboration are warped by law enforcement’s commitments to preventive theories of crime control, narrowing the space for the inclusion of and democratic contestation by the subject communities. Broken windows theory and radicalization theory invest local social and cultural norms an outsized role in the origination of criminal activity, creating a rationale for the policing of everyday life. In linking noncriminal activity to the potential for crime, both theories reinforce a punitive lens through which police interact with communities, further marginalizing communities on the grounds of their racial and religious difference. In putting community engagement in conversation with community policing, this Article’s central insight is as straightforward as it might be surprising: Community engagement in the national security context shares some of the problems of community policing in the ordinary criminal context. Community engagement efforts increase the presence of law enforcement in already overpoliced communities, and exacerbate intracommunity inequalities. Rather than enhance participation, community engagement may simply provide opportunities for select members of Muslim communities to approve preexisting law enforcement commitments — and create an additional source of pressure on Muslim communities to perform their Americanness — without meaningful openings for Muslim communities to communicate, collaborate, and contest the relationship, its modalities, and its outputs.

Making Democratic Contestation Possible: Public Deliberation and Mass Media Regulation

While recent democratic theory has insisted upon the contestability of public policies as a key source of democratic legitimacy, the role mass media should play in fostering public contestation has yet to be specified. The role of deliberative theory in particular should be to try to identify which standards mass communication needs to meet in order to provide a general forum for democratic contestation. This article focuses on the theoretical foundations of such a project. It puts forward three claims. First, the contestability of public policy can only be a source of democratic legitimacy if citizens have the opportunity to participate in public contestation through – among other forums – a general public forum that is endowed with a deliberative dimension. Second, media pluralism alone is insufficient in providing such a public forum: both external standards (related to the independence of mass media) and internal standards (related to the norms guiding media practices) need to be satisfied. Third, and as a consequence of the preceding two, the democratic contestability of public policies presupposes effective mass media regulation that goes beyond the promotion of media pluralism. Democratic contestation requires more than a “marketplace of ideas”.

Austerity, the European Council, and the Institutional Future of the European Union: A Proposal to Strengthen the Presidency of the European Council

This article contextualizes the resilience of austerity in Europe, explaining it in light of the transformations in the EU system of governance. As the article maintains, since the eruption of the Euro-crisis, the European Council—the body congressing the heads of state and government of the EU member states together with its President and the President of the European Commission—has risen to the center of EU governance. In an intergovernmental institution such as the European Council, however, larger and wealthier states have been able to impose their preferences on other states—a development that is at odds with the anti-hegemonic nature of the EU integration project. To address this problematic state of affairs, this article proposes a targeted institutional reform: strengthening the President of the European Council. As this article claims, a President of the European Council endowed with its own executive powers and legitimated by a popular election could restore a balance between the member states and, at the same time, create a forum for democratic contestation of the policies of the European Union. The proposal to strengthen the presidency of the European Council builds on recent calls to redefine this institution as the presidency of the European Union as a whole. However, it faces several challenges. This article considers the following questions: 1) What are the advantages associated with the proposal to strengthen the European Council presidency and what powers should be attributed to the office?; 2) What electoral mechanism could be conceived to select the President in an asymmetrical Union of states and citizens?; and 3) What are the incentives—and is there a window of opportunity—to implement this reform? This article proposes ways to address these issues, opening a debate on a potentially fruitful constitutional reform of the EU system of governance.

From the Politics of Antagonistic Recognition to Agonistic Peace Building: An Exploration of Symbols and Rituals in Divided Societies

The inclusion of symbols and rituals in peace agreements is often based on the politics of recognition, in which the cultural identities of oppositional groups are awarded equal status in society. Moreover, it is often assumed that the successful regulation of conflicts over symbols and rituals is dependent on the resolution of seemingly more important issues that divide warring groups, like demilitarization and the reform of the justice system and the government. Yet, symbols and rituals generate specific problems that merit the design of innovative mechanisms to ensure peaceful stability in divided societies. This article explores how the politics of recognition often fails to successfully regulate violent conflict and instead creates a context for destructive intergroup clashes. It further assesses the potential of creating shared symbols and rituals, as well as reframing their meaning, before finally proposing Chantal Mouffe's concept of agonism, the process in which violent group‐based antagonism is channeled into peaceful and democratic contestation.

The Politics of Getting It Right

ABSTRACTHélène Landemore's Democratic Reason marks a crucial achievement in democratic theory, as it successfully shows that democracy is about more than procedural legitimacy—and that it should be. Nonetheless, the procedural argument remains at the heart of the case for democracy. For many democratic decisions, getting the right answer is not what we ask of political institutions. Politics is often about defining what counts as a problem, and no single definition counts as the right one. Furthermore, the epistemic claim that democracy is likely to get moral questions right can obscure the difficulty of getting moral questions exactly “right.” The best political approach to controversial questions is often to strike a balance of competing claims, and every actual democracy does this in ways that leave many citizens dissatisfied. This is why many citizens participate in democratic politics as partisans: they put more trust in their party than in the democratic regime to get it right. Partisanship fuels the never-ending democratic contest over what it means to get it right in politics, but it is also appropriately epistemic, in that it is prompted by the never-ending possibility that even democracy will get things wrong.

Iceland on the Rocks: The Mass Political Economy of Sovereign Debt Resettlement

AbstractWe undertake an individual-level analysis of mass political behavior toward sovereign debt resettlement by leveraging the unique circumstances of a 2011 referendum on debt repayment in Iceland. This allows us to engage broader questions about mass international political economy. Against the recent thrust of a growing literature, we find evidence of material economic “pocketbook” effects—self-interest—on voting behavior, operating alongside symbolic/sociotropic and partisan/political logics. Contrary to expectations, these self-interest effects are not conditional on voter sophistication. We conclude that conventional sampling frames may be inappropriate for understanding contemporary democratic contestation over international economic policy.

PLURALISMO E DESLOCAMENTO IDEOLÓGICO: os limites democráticos dos processos de transformação na América Latina

O artigo analisa a qualidade da democracia por meio das restrições ideológicas que forçaram o deslocamento do conteúdo dos programas eleitorais de Luis Inácio Lula (Brasil) e Tabaré Vázquez (Uruguai). Conclui que, apesar da ampliação da participação, o jogo democrático contribui para a redução do espectro ideológico que caracteriza a contestação democrática, o que implica limites ao pluralismo e a inviabilização de transformações econômicas profundas.---Pluralism And ideological shift: the limits of democratic processes of change in Latin AmericaThe article analyzes the quality of democracy through the ideological constraints that forced the ideological shift of the electoral programs of Luis Inácio Lula (Brazil) and Tabaré Vázquez (Uruguay). Concludes that, despite the increased participation, the democratic game contributes to the reduction of the spectrum of content that characterize democratic contestation, which implies the unfeasibility of profound economic transformations.Keywords: quality of democracy, pluralism, ideological contents.

Reforming the city: Neoliberal school reform and democratic contestation in New Orleans

Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a testing ground for a series of neoliberal school reforms, including the eradication of neighbourhood attendance boundaries and the extensive charterization of public schools in the parish. Ostensibly designed to improve schooling options, these efforts are not directed solely at securing positive educational outcomes. Instead, neoliberal school reforms utilize spatial strategies to reshape the city itself in ways that often benefit white elites while displacing and disempowering many of the city's poor people of colour. These reform strategies tend to undermine democratic life but, as illustrated by the work of the non‐profit group OPEN (Orleans Public Education Network), they do not foreclose the possibility of it. Rather than taking a particular stand toward the current reforms, OPEN attempts to build civic capacity around educational issues. The deliberative process they use creates a time and a place for a type of educative experience that is actively discouraged by neoliberal reform and yet vitally important to democratic struggles.

A life of one’s own: republican freedom and disability

This article outlines a republican perspective on disability. We argue that a commitment to ensuring the republican freedom of disabled citizens offers a promising account of what disabled citizens are owed as a matter of justice. A republican perspective offers a particular diagnosis of the injustice of disability disadvantage, both in relation to individuals (dominium) and the state (imperium), that is congenial to prominent concerns voiced by the disability rights movement. This article also offers a brief outline of three republican remedies: the right of social participation, the right of opportunities for civic contribution, and the right of democratic contestation. These remedies constitute key guidelines for the robust institutional protection of disabled citizens’ republican freedom.

Reifying and reconciling class conflict

This article examines the role of class divisions in critical social theory through Habermas’ theory of law and democracy. It begins with Hegel’s view that social freedom involves reconciliation with the modern division of labor, which in turn requires membership in ‘estates’, and his thoughts on their role in the state. While subsequent Left Hegelian thinkers reject these institutions as authoritarian, the melancholic tenor of much Frankfurt School social theory stems partly from their view that class divisions are not only entrenched, but also ‘latent’ and therefore not amenable to reconciliation through the political process that Hegel envisions. Habermas’ conception of ‘interchange roles’ between the system and the lifeworld as sites of reification, but potentially of democratic contestation, synthesizes these lines of thought, by conceptualizing how the political mediation of class-based interests can be an ongoing possibility amidst a condition of latent class conflict.

Hidden substance: mental disorder as a challenge to normatively neutral accounts of autonomy

AbstractMental capacity and autonomy are often understood to be normatively neutral – the only values or other norms they may presuppose are those the assessed person does or would accept. We show how mental disorder threatens normatively neutral accounts of autonomy. These accounts produce false positives, particularly in the case of disorders (such as depression, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia) that affect evaluative abilities. Two normatively neutral strategies for handling autonomy-undermining disorder are explored and rejected: a blanket exclusion of mental disorder, and functional tests requiring consistency, expression of identity, reflective non-alienation or lack of compulsion. Finally, we suggest ways in which substantivist alternatives to neutrality can be made more promising through increased transparency, democratic contestability of conditions for capacity and autonomy, and a historically sensitive caution concerning restrictions of liberty.

Wireless smart meters and public acceptance: the environment, limited choices, and precautionary politics.

Wireless smart meters (WSMs) promise numerous environmental benefits, but they have been installed without full consideration of public acceptance issues. Although societal-implications research and regulatory policy have focused on privacy, security, and accuracy issues, our research indicates that health concerns have played an important role in the public policy debates that have emerged in California. Regulatory bodies do not recognize non-thermal health effects for non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, but both homeowners and counter-experts have contested the official assurances that WSMs pose no health risks. Similarities and differences with the existing social science literature on mobile phone masts are discussed, as are the broader political implications of framing an alternative policy based on an opt-out choice. The research suggests conditions under which health-oriented precautionary politics can be particularly effective, namely, if there is a mandatory technology, a network of counter-experts, and a broader context of democratic contestation.

Play and Democracy

In this essay I argue that the work of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga is an important resource for contemporary democratic theory because his employment of the concept of play illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of agonistic thought. I employ a reading of Huizinga to explore three central problems of contemporary agonism: the distinction between antagonism and agonism; the representative or expressive character of the agon; and the shaping and limiting of the space of the agon by the materials with which we play democratic games. Reading Huizinga reveals the importance of a consideration of the social relations and material conditions that shape the playful features of democratic contestation. But it also warns against the idealization of democratic contestation and the contesting subject that occurs in contemporary agonistic thought as a result of privileging the autonomy and priority of play and extruding it from the wider economy of agonism.

Beyond Establishment and Separation: Political Liberalism, Religion and Democracy

Does John Rawls’s political liberalism require the institutional separation between state and religion or does it allow space for moderate forms of religious establishment? In this paper I address this question by presenting and critically evaluating Cecile Laborde’s recent claim that political liberalism is ‘inconclusive about the public place of religion’ and ‘indeterminate about the symbolic dimensions of the public place of religion’. In response to Cecile Laborde, I argue that neither moderate separation nor moderate establishment, intended as regimes of religious governance that fix specific interpretations of principles of social and economic justice, are compatible with Rawls’s political liberalism. Furthermore, I claim that a state can ensure that both its religious and non-religious citizens enjoy a sense of self-respect and identification with their polity by leaving issues of symbolic establishment and separation open to democratic debate. I conclude that Rawls’s political liberalism transcends the standard distinction between moderate establishment and moderate separation and leaves the public place of religion open to the democratic contestation of ordinary legislative politics.

Domestic Antecedents of Afghan Policy

Realism tells us that states are unitary actors and foreign policy ends at the water’s edge. This essay questions this view in the context of recent US policy on Afghanistan. In early 2008, Senator Barack Obama won several early primary victories and gained a substantial lead in the Democratic presidential nomination contest. Both Democratic senator Hillary Clinton and to a lesser extent the apparent Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, questioned Obama’s leadership ability. The future president responded in part by announcing his intent to expand the US military presence in Afghanistan. The policy of increased militarization crystallized publically in response to domestic campaign pressure rather than because of events on the ground in South Asia.

I Save for Icesave: Self-Interest and Sovereign Debt Resettlement

We undertake an individual-level analysis of mass political behavior toward sovereign debt resettlement by leveraging the unique circumstances of a 2011 referendum on debt repayment in Iceland. This allows us to engage broader questions about mass international political economy. Against the recent thrust of a growing literature, we find evidence of material economic “pocketbook” effects — self-interest — on voting behavior, operating alongside symbolic/sociotropic and partisan/political logics. Contrary to expectations, these self-interest effects are not conditional on voter sophistication. We conclude that conventional sampling frames may be inappropriate for understanding contemporary democratic contestation over international economic policy.