The Populist Challenge Kriesi, Hanspeter
West European politics,
03/2014, Volume:
37, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Populism has been on the rise for some time in Europe now, and its rise has been one of the key concerns of Peter Mair. He has linked it to the increasing erosion of the representative function of ...European party systems. The spectre that haunted him was 'partyless democracy', a democratic regime where parties had lost their representative function, which opened the door for unmediated populist protest. While largely sharing his interpretation of the overall structural trends giving rise to the populist challenges in Western Europe, the article is critical of the static character of his assessment. It suggests that there are three forms of 'protest populism', all of which may eventually end up transforming the West European party systems in the name of the new structuring conflicts that characterise contemporary European societies. In addition, it proposes to extend the scope of Peter's argument to the less established democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.
This article analogises political representation to legal interpretation. It then applies the analogy to the hitherto neglected question of what political representation means for deliberative ...constitutionalism. The upshot is a conception of deliberative constitutionalism that, while uncompromisingly grounded in the reasoned expression of the preferences of a polity's constituents through deliberative democratic institutional innovations, mandates representatives to translate those preferences into general and constitutional law. It thus enhances the deliberative contribution of citizens in the determination of constitutional meaning, while preserving the value of representative institutions.
Facing Authority Fossen, Thomas
2024, 2023-11-15, 2023, 2023-10-10
eBook
Open access
When your friends call on you to take to the streets and demand the fall of the regime, this presses a practical predicament that we all address, often implicitly, in our everyday lives: Is this ...regime legitimate? Facing Authority investigates the ways in which this question of legitimacy can be addressed in theory and practice, in the face of disagreement and uncertainty. Instead of asking, “What makes authorities legitimate?” in the abstract, it examines how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so? And what does it mean to do this well? Facing Authority proposes that judging legitimacy is not a matter of applying moral knowledge, provided by political philosophy, but of engaging in various forms of political contestation—contestation over the representation of power (what is the nature of the regime?), collective selfhood (who am I, and who are we?), and the meaning of events (what happened here—a coup, or a revolution?). These questions constitute the heart of the question of legitimacy, but thus far they have been neglected by theorists of legitimacy. This book offers a new way of thinking about political legitimacy and practical judgment, interweaving philosophical analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with concrete examples of struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. The result is a pragmatist alternative to predominant moralist and realist approaches to legitimacy in political philosophy.
Abstract Systemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many‐to‐many’, or sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system . Yet, most ...studies link shifts in democratic preferences to individual‐level representation (‘many‐to‐one’, or egocentric incongruence), since individual‐level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic (in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment tests whether offering expertise‐based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives. We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against representative democracy: they exacerbate it.
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was one of the first international bodies devoted to gender issues and has played a foundational role in the promotion of gender equality ...globally. In this article, I explore representational patterns at the CSW and question when and why states choose to send men representatives. Novel data shows that while the commission was composed entirely of women representatives in its early decades, men’s representation has steadily increased—reaching parity in 2000. This paper argues that appointment choice can be explained by domestic levels of women’s political empowerment. The empirical results demonstrate a non-linear relationship between women’s political empowerment and appointment. States with higher levels of women’s political empowerment are more likely to appoint women representatives, until a threshold. At the highest levels of empowerment, states become again more likely to appoint men. I argue that this reflects a positive trend, in which men are taking a more active role in deconstructing pervasive gender inequalities. This paper has relevant implications for understandings of women’s representation in international institutions.
A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited ...since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th-113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' "follow-through" with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.
Cet article étudie la façon dont certains membres de l’ethnie matsigenka, une population arawak du sud-est de l’Amazonie péruvienne, s’approprient et font vivre l’unité administrative au sein de ...laquelle ils se trouvent aujourd’hui regroupés, c’est-à-dire celle de la « communauté autochtone » (comunidad nativa). C’est le processus de formation de Palotoa-Teparo, petite communauté administrative matsigenka du département du Madre de Dios, qui sera en particulier étudié. On verra comment les Matsigenka ainsi regroupés en « communauté » reprennent à leur compte le répertoire administratif imposé par l’État, combien ils s’approprient son lexique et ses outils de manière à construire une représentativité politique qui leur est propre. De la sorte, ce sont des ramifications de l’État qu’ils ne cessent de reproduire, tout en exerçant, mutatis mutandis, une forme d’autonomie politique sur le territoire qui leur a été reconnu – aussi exigu soit-il.
It is widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high. Given that individuals are persuaded to follow party lines while having the opportunity and incentives to ...collaborate with members of the opposite party, our goal is to measure the extent to which legislators tend to form ideological relationships with members of the opposite party. We quantify the level of cooperation, or lack thereof, between Democrat and Republican Party members in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949-2012. We define a network of over 5 million pairs of representatives, and compare the mutual agreement rates on legislative decisions between two distinct types of pairs: those from the same party and those formed of members from different parties. We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing. Yet, a group of representatives continue to cooperate across party lines despite growing partisanship.
Despite vast research on women's descriptive representation, little is known about its influence on women's political engagement in East and Southeast Asia where gender norms are different from those ...in other parts of the world. I theorize that the discrepancy between women's political and social rights in the region makes it difficult for women to envision themselves as equal to their male counterparts. Thus, women are less reluctant to play a "man's game" even when they see female political leaders. Using a multilevel model with data from the Asian Barometer Survey and various additional sources, I examine the impact of female parliamentarians in the region and find that they significantly reduce women's political participation. My results suggest that the female legislators' role model effect found in existing literature on Western democracies does not apply to East and Southeast Asia. Instead, female political leaders generate a backlash effect on women's political engagement. This research raises implications for the role of context in the effectiveness of women's symbolic representation and calls for further exploration on the connection between women's symbolic and descriptive representation.
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