PANEL 13 / ELECTIONS UNDER STRAIN: POPULISM, REPRESENTATION, POWER, AND DEMOCRATIC LIMITS
CONVENORS: SONIA JAN BÍBA, KRISTINA BROUCKOVA
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected] and [email protected].
While elections have long been considered a paradigmatic mechanism of popular sovereignty, political equality, and collective self-rule, this understanding has been increasingly challenged in recent decades. Multiple strands of democratic theory now emphasise the limitations of elections in relation to oligarchic power, populism, representation, social and political complexity, epistemic uncertainty, and doubt their overall contribution in times of long-term crises, such as the climate crisis. At the same time, empirical research on democratic backsliding indicates that democratic decay is often driven not only by anti-democratic actors but also by the internal dynamics of traditional democratic institutions, including elections themselves. This panel brings together diverse theoretical perspectives to shed light on elections from different angles and interrogate their status as a cornerstone of democratic legitimacy.
All papers in the panel examine the conceptual relationship between elections and democracy’s foundational ideals, albeit from distinct theoretical and methodological accounts. The papers' themes loosely divide into two clusters. The first cluster covers the representative, spatial, and temporal dimensions of elections. It ponders questions such as: Should we still attribute a representative function to elections in a heterogeneous and complex society, which seems increasingly difficult to encompass within the electoral-representative framework? What can a phenomenological reading of polling stations and voting interfaces tell us about how electoral spaces feature into democratic indeterminacy? How can we counteract the structural mismatch between short electoral cycles and long-term ecological processes with institutional innovations that would “decelerate” democratic time while preserving electoral democracy?
The second cluster explores the themes of power (mainly in relation to populism and oligarchy), epistemic constraints, and the meaning of democratic freedom in elections. It poses questions such as: What do different analyses of populism as an ideology, an identity construction, and a regime type reveal about conceptual misalignment between elections and populism’s claim to embody the unified will of “the people”? In times of post-democracy, should elections be viewed as a symbol of political equality or do they rather reproduce elite and oligarchic dominance, thereby weakening democracy’s normative credibility? Might the realist re-reading of Walter Lippmann offer anything beyond a technocratic defence of elections under conditions of epistemic uncertainty? What does revisiting the Lippmann–Dewey debate hold for defending the notion of voting as an institutional core of democratic freedom, even against participatory or deliberative aspirations?
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected] and [email protected].
While elections have long been considered a paradigmatic mechanism of popular sovereignty, political equality, and collective self-rule, this understanding has been increasingly challenged in recent decades. Multiple strands of democratic theory now emphasise the limitations of elections in relation to oligarchic power, populism, representation, social and political complexity, epistemic uncertainty, and doubt their overall contribution in times of long-term crises, such as the climate crisis. At the same time, empirical research on democratic backsliding indicates that democratic decay is often driven not only by anti-democratic actors but also by the internal dynamics of traditional democratic institutions, including elections themselves. This panel brings together diverse theoretical perspectives to shed light on elections from different angles and interrogate their status as a cornerstone of democratic legitimacy.
All papers in the panel examine the conceptual relationship between elections and democracy’s foundational ideals, albeit from distinct theoretical and methodological accounts. The papers' themes loosely divide into two clusters. The first cluster covers the representative, spatial, and temporal dimensions of elections. It ponders questions such as: Should we still attribute a representative function to elections in a heterogeneous and complex society, which seems increasingly difficult to encompass within the electoral-representative framework? What can a phenomenological reading of polling stations and voting interfaces tell us about how electoral spaces feature into democratic indeterminacy? How can we counteract the structural mismatch between short electoral cycles and long-term ecological processes with institutional innovations that would “decelerate” democratic time while preserving electoral democracy?
The second cluster explores the themes of power (mainly in relation to populism and oligarchy), epistemic constraints, and the meaning of democratic freedom in elections. It poses questions such as: What do different analyses of populism as an ideology, an identity construction, and a regime type reveal about conceptual misalignment between elections and populism’s claim to embody the unified will of “the people”? In times of post-democracy, should elections be viewed as a symbol of political equality or do they rather reproduce elite and oligarchic dominance, thereby weakening democracy’s normative credibility? Might the realist re-reading of Walter Lippmann offer anything beyond a technocratic defence of elections under conditions of epistemic uncertainty? What does revisiting the Lippmann–Dewey debate hold for defending the notion of voting as an institutional core of democratic freedom, even against participatory or deliberative aspirations?
