Session 2: Forms of Democracy

1st Global Conference

Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic

Populist Representation and Agonistic Politics
Tim Houwen
Centre for Ethics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The paper attempts to explain populism in terms of democratic representation. On behalf of conceptual clarity about the notion of representation, a difference should be made between political and symbolic representation. Building on Spinoza’s distinction between potentia and potestas, I view political representation as the transformation of societal forces (potentia) into real political power (potestas). Symbolic representation, on the other hand, refers to guiding principles of a social order which legitimizes and gives meaning to that order. What are the guiding principles of a liberal democratic order? I disagree with, among others, Habermas and Lefort, who identify democracy with liberal democracy and argue that the principles of popular sovereignty and rule of law are co-original. Instead, I argue that a liberal democracy is a contingent articulation between two principles and is still characterized by an tension between these two principles. The inner tension of liberal democracy could explain why the symbolic framework of liberal democracy stimulates different political subjects. In the paper I discuss two different political subjects which hold different views on political representation. A first political subject explains political representation in terms of political deliberation and agonistic politics. A second political subject views political representation in terms of a relation of identity between the leader and a homogeneous people. This latter view on political representation is what I will call ‘populist representation’. How are these two political subjects related?

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Let the Dice Decide: A Qualified Argument for Sortitionist Democracy
Paul Lucardie
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

If democracy is based on the principle of equality, political power should be shared by all citizens (e.g. in a popular assembly) or distributed by lot – so that at least every citizen has an equal chance of acquiring it. The ancient Greeks were well aware of this simple logic. However, modern democrats seem to ignore this. Only in recent decades, modest experiments have been made with citizen assemblies or citizen juries selected by lot; yet so far these assemblies or juries have been only temporary advisory bodies with very little power. We still associate democracy with elections, even if elections inevitably produce aristocracies (in one form or another) and offer the voting citizen usually a very limited choice.

In this paper I would like to discuss the pros and cons of a sortitionist democracy, where most important decisions are made by randomly selected citizens. The latter are said to be more representative of the people, more open-minded and more modest, hence possibly more adapted to post-modern conditions of diffused and fragmented power. Yet they may be also less competent, more dependent on civil servants and more inclined to voting in cycles. And in the end, they might become as alienated from the people as elected politicians are now. Nevertheless, in my opinion, sortitionism should be tried – preferably first at the local level – provided it is combined with two other institutions: a referendum (with a fairly low threshold) and a strong constitutional court.

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Apart from the widely discussed problems with the development and consolidation of democracy after the military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan there is also growing concern on the lack of success in promoting democracy through development aid in other parts of the developing world. Twenty years after “good governance” moved to the centre-stage in international declarations, official aid policies and non-governmental activities alike, elections are constantly being fraught, institutions of accountability are still hollow and the political rights and freedoms of citizens globally have even declined over the last four years. For every significant achievement such as Ghana’s confirmation of its multiparty political system, one can cite a number of democratic setbacks, Kenya, Madagascar and Thailand providing some of the most obvious recent examples.

This article will first present the current state of democracy in developing countries and will then go on to discussing three main theories dealing with the question of democracy promotion as part of development policy. These are modernisation theory, institutional capacity theory and the theory of rational choice institutionalism. Finally, we will conclude that Western institutions cannot easily be transferred to other contexts and explain why the dynamics in developing countries often resist the development and consolidation of democratic institutions.

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