Populist Democracy and the Concept of Self-Rule

The recent advance of populist politics in democratic countries is often interpreted as the result of citizens’ desire to “take back control” from elites, and exercise genuine popular self-rule. Contemporary liberal democracy is often seen relegated to the role of legitimizing constitutional rule and ensuring Schumpeterian stability; against this backdrop populism promises to realize the core ideal of democracy, i.e. the self-government of the people. In this paper I examine whether a distinctly populist understanding of democracy is more compatible with the democratic ideal of self-rule than rival conceptions of democracy. I argue that the answer is ‘no’. This argument provides a novel way to challenge populism. It takes seriously citizens’ demands for self-government but shows that populist democracy is unable to deliver on its promise of popular self-rule. Populist democracy takes the people to be a single collective agent (partially constituted by political action) whose will and interest democratic politics ought to articulate and enact. I compare populist democracy with two rival conceptions of democracy which explicitly emphasize the ideal of self-rule. The first is Philip Pettit’s republican view which justifies democracy as a means to realize non-domination in society by subjecting political institutions to the control of the people. The second is Ronald Dworkin’s liberal egalitarian theory, the so-called partnership conception of democracy. On this view, democratic institutions make citizens equal partners in a shared social enterprise for justice. While populist democracy conceives of self-rule as collective control over political matters, republican theory emphasizes individual control as the source of self-rule. The liberal egalitarian theory abandons the idea of control altogether and takes self-rule to derive from the egalitarian partnership relations among citizens. I show that both the republican and the liberal view are more plausible conceptions of self-rule than the populist one. Collective control is neither necessary nor sufficient for self-rule, while individual control and partnership relations are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Citizens cannot be reasonably viewed as ruling themselves, either individually or severally, simply because they are members of a collective agent – ‘the people’ – that rules itself. In the absence of individual control and egalitarian partnership relations, citizens have no reason to regard the collective agent’s rule over them as self-rule rather than alien rule. Collective control is not only insufficient, it is also unnecessary. It is possible, I argue, to conceive of self-rule without positing a single collective ‘self’ whose coherent intentions and interests democratic politics should track. The populist conception of democracy is based on a faulty understanding of self-rule, and therefore has nothing to offer to citizens desperate to take back charge over their shared political existence. In contrast, both the republican and the liberal egalitarian model of self-rule – if taken seriously – imply radical demands for a more thorough democratization of society through which citizens would become able to exercise greater control and view one another as partners in a quest for building a just political world they have in common.