The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Critical Exploration ◽  
Comprehensive Introduction ◽  
Critical Intervention

This is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive introduction and a critical exploration of the constructivist turn in political representation. Divided into three thematic parts, the 13 newly commissioned essays presented here develop constructivist turn as a central concept advancing the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation because constituencies, or groups, exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented. Complete with an original English translation of ‘Democracy and Representation’ by the French philosopher Claude Lefort, this volume delivers a rich critical intervention in democratic theory.

Political Representation in Leader Democracy

2005 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Körösényi
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Public Office

AbstractThe essay focuses on the neglected problem of democratic politics, i.e. on the role of leadership. Although in democracies public office holders are controlled to a certain extent, leaders still have wide room for political manoeuvre and decide without any ‘instruction’ of the citizens. Re-working Weber's and Schumpeter's theory, the author aims to build the model of leader democracy. He highlights the major traits of it in a comparison with the deliberative and the aggregative–utilitarian concepts of democratic theory. The theory of leader democracy is applied to the problem of representation, which, in contrast to mechanical mirroring, gains a new, dynamic and qualitative meaning.

Political representation: the view from France

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
Raf Geenens
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Self ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
The Way

It is now widely accepted that political representation is not merely a passive, ‘mirroring’ process, but that the process of political representation plays a constitutive role in the construction of citizens’ ideas and preferences. This chapter argues that French political philosophy points to an even more fundamental role for power and representation in the construction (or the ‘constitution’) of society and the self-image of its members. It focuses on a key argument of political theorist, Claude Lefort, who maintained that the specificity of a society is determined by the way power is organized and symbolically represented in that society. On this account, the importance of political representation goes far beyond the formation of opinions and the process of collective decision making. The organization and representation of power is instead seen as a key determinant of society’s self-understanding and of the way citizens within that society understand themselves and their mutual relations.

Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

Other Domains of Democratic Theory: Space, Power, and the Politics of Democratization

10.1068/d255t ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Slater
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
The West ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Guiding Questions

Located in the analysis of spatial power and democratic politics, this paper brings together three guiding questions. First, given the fact that inside the West much theorization of power and social relations has assumed a geohistorical context that is intrinsically Western, to what extent and in what ways does this particularity constrain the conceptual and thematic effectiveness of the perspectives employed and especially in relation to the politics of democratization? Second, as it is most appropriate to argue that power shapes social identities, and that democratic politics cannot dispense with power, a key question becomes how to generate relations of power that are compatible with democratic values and opposed to ethnocentric privilege. Third, how can we open up a discussion of democratic politics so that the geographies of democratization can be explored in a way that might broaden our vision of power and geopolitics? These questions are pursued in the context of the coloniality of power and an exploration of the territoriality of democratization in the Peruvian and Bolivian cases. The overall objective is to go beyond the limits of a Euro—Americanist frame and open up the analysis of the complex and dynamic geographies of democracy.

scholarly journals Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-473
Author(s):  
Marlene Schäfers
Keyword(s):  
Political Representation ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Fine Line ◽  
Kurdish Women ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Modern Turkey ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Music Recordings

AbstractThis article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large collections of Kurdish music recordings in their possession. Framing them as archives, women mobilize these collections as central elements in a larger, ongoing Kurdish project of historical critique, which seeks to resist hegemonic state narratives that have long denied and marginalized Kurdish voices. While recognizing the critical intervention such archives make, the article contends that, to be heard as “history” with a legitimate claim to authority, subaltern voices often have to rely on the very hegemonic forms, genres, and discourses they set out to challenge. This means that subaltern projects of historical critique walk a fine line between critique and complicity, an insight that nuances narratives that would approach subaltern voices predominantly from a perspective of resistance. At the same time, this article argues that a more complete picture of subaltern archives requires us to attend to the voices they contain not just as metaphors for resistance or political representation but also as acoustic objects that have social effects because of the way they sound. By outlining the affective qualities that voice recordings held for the Kurdish women who archived them, the article shows how their collections participated in carving out specific, gendered subject positions as well as forging a broader Kurdish sociality. Paying attention to history's “acoustic register” (Hunt 2008), this suggests, promises to open up perspectives on subaltern historiography that go beyond binary frameworks of resistance and domination, critique and complicity.

Democratic Theory and the Athenian Public Sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Matthew Landauer
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Democratic Practice ◽  
Accountability Practices ◽  
The Relationship

Classical Athens has left to political theorists a dual legacy: a crucial historical case of democratic practice, and a rich tradition of political reflection. A growing number of scholars have placed the relationship between these two legacies at the center of their research. I argue that these scholars collectively offer us a model of a broad, engaged, Athenian public sphere. Yet I also caution that we should avoid overly harmonizing pictures of what that public sphere was like. I focus in particular on two prominent claims in the literature: that Socratic philosophy can be read as an expansion of Athenian accountability practices, and that ancient dramatists, philosophers, and historians were alike engaged in a project to educate citizen judgment. I argue that both claims threaten to obscure arguments over the appropriate role of the judgment of the demos in democratic politics.

Partisan Attachment and Democracy in Mexico: Some Cautionary Observations

2010 ◽  
Vol 52 (01) ◽  
pp. 63-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Xavier Medina Vidal ◽  
Antonio Ugues ◽  
Shaun Bowler ◽  
Jonathan Hiskey
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party Identification ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Positive Sign ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Emerging Democracies ◽  
Democratic Development

AbstractParty identification is a central concept in studies of parties and elections. Drawing from an extensive literature linking the concept of party identification to the understanding of Mexico's electoral politics, this article explores how the Mexican experience informs the understanding of party identification in general, especially in emerging democracies. There, voters' attachments to political parties are usually seen both as essential to and a positive sign of democratic development. This study finds evidence consistent with these arguments in the Mexican case but also identifies aspects of Mexican party identification that are not so clearly supportive of democratic politics; that indeed may delay or even undermine democratization. These findings illustrate the relevance of the Mexican experience to the wider literature on parties and elections, particularly the well-documented relationship between party identifications and democratization.

Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The People ◽  
Poetic Translation

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.

scholarly journals Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Archer ◽  
Amanda Cawston ◽  
Benjamin Matheson ◽  
Machteld Geuskens
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Practice

What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics, none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. We will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems.

Democracy and representation

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Claude Lefort
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
Sciences Sociales

This chapter presents the first English translation of an essay that was originally presented in 1989 by Claude Lefort at the Colloquium on Latin America, sponsored by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), organized by Daniel Pécault. In this essay, Lefort affirms his important thesis regarding the disembodiment of power in representative democracy and begins to elaborate institutional conditions for its modern practice. He emphasizes that representation must be supported by independent political organizing by social movements and dissenting groups within institutions such as labor unions, schools, and hospitals. He also emphasizes the importance of participation, understood distinctively neither as voting nor as taking to the streets but as a feature of political judgment that he terms a “capacity to understand the political game,” a feature that he considers to be lacking where there exist great divides between elite political actors as mass publics.

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