Established accounts of the place of recognition in democratic politics have emphasised the need to remedy recognition deficits experienced by cultural minorities. It will be argued here that this model of the politics of recognition relies on an oversimplified model of recognitive relations and is particularly ill-suited to coping with the recognition demands of populist citizens, demands that have recently come to the fore in the US and UK in particular. We need an alternative model of social recognition if we are to understand how democratic citizens are to respond to these demands. 'Deficit' models of recognition, such as those of Honneth and Taylor, adopt a one-sided understanding of recognitive relations in contrast to interactive models of recognition which stress the mutuality of recognition relations and the recognition of the other's authority to adjudicate recognition demands. The interactive model, in consequence, is more sensitive to inequalities of power than the perfectionist accounts driving the deficit model of recognition. While populist politics may be plausibly interpreted as responding to a perceived recognition deficit, it is not obvious that justice requires that this deficit be remedied. On the contrary, negative recognition plays a key role in regulating social interaction and the norms of responsible democratic citizenship cannot be maintained where they are not enforced through negative judgements of those who appear to have violated them. Agonists, however, have long argued that liberal conceptions of democracy err in moralising the sphere of politics. Others argue that overly moralised responses to populist voters are politically ineffective. It will be argued here that we need to distinguish between moralistic responses, which are inconsistent with civic respect, and moralised responses which are consistent with civic respect even when they entail negative attitudes towards others. It is argued that civic respect rests on shared recognition of mutual accountability (and to this extent, agonists themselves, despite protests to the contrary, rely on a moralised view of democratic citizenship). If democracy is to be defended from Schumpeter's scepticism about the capacity of ordinary citizens for responsible decision-making, then an appropriately moralised understanding of civic respect is essential to democratic citizenship. We need a politics of recognition that moves beyond gestures of inclusion, to encourage us to see ourselves as sharing responsibility for our collective future.
