Battling Antidemocrats, Regulating Competition, or Enforcing Rules? Three Models of Democratic Self-Protection

Democratic self-protection is mostly discussed in terms of ‘militant democracy’—pre-emptively targeting antidemocrats who threaten to subvert democracy from within. This paper studies the various conceptualizations of democratic dynamics in current debates, thus moving beyond the militant model in democracy protection. By means of conceptual analysis and intellectual history, I identify three dominant models for democratic dynamics in scholarship: battle, competition, and game. Democracy scholars typically mix vocabulary deriving from each to account for different aspects of democracy protection (object, menace, countermeasures), which causes unclarity of analytical vocabulary. This is particularly problematic for transitions: when subtle antidemocrats operate within the system, we first discuss them as legitimate competitors – but when, exactly, should we switch to the militant framing and describe them as enemies to be excluded? Failure in identifying intra-parliamentary antidemocracy causes both false positives that intensify conflicts and false negatives that hide risks from view. To remedy that conundrum, I critically assess the strengths/weaknesses of each of the above conceptualizations and how they guide our thoughts in empirical and theoretical research settings alike. Some of the conceptual commitments are more due to contingent ways in which these models entered the democracy protection debate than their analytical usefulness. My conceptual analysis suggests that, once clarified of misinterpretations, the competition paradigm is the most promising candidate for a single coherent framework to develop analytical terminology in as it allows for depicting both benign and malign forms of democratic contestation with same terminology.