Pernicious Polarization and Democratic Decline: Identity, Agonism, and Deliberation

Political polarization has become one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often thought to be a key contributor to democratic decline. According to political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, polarization tends to become pernicious when it transforms a society's political divisions into a unitary cleavage, and people come to understand politics in terms of an "us vs them" conflict. By encouraging a perception of politics as zero-sum and increasing the perceived costs of compromise, this factionalism is said to legitimize and incentivise a vicious cycle of authoritarian behaviour which erodes democratic norms. While inspiring much work in political science, pernicious polarization also raises many important questions for normative democratic theory. In this paper, I ask what forms of democratic debate might be desirable in the context of pernicious polarisation and which might help to resist the vicious cycle of democratic decline. The paper first considers two promising candidates from the existing literature: Chantel Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and John Dryzek's approach to deliberative democracy in divided societies. While agonistic pluralism is explicitly developed to avoid often violent forms of political antagonism – and therefore as a form of conflict management – I argue that it sits uneasily with our empirical understanding of pernicious polarisation. In both her earlier and later works, Mouffe defends a binary and affectively charged form of democratic debate between strongly held identity groups, and therefore risks producing the vicious cycles which can lead to democratic decline. Dryzek, alternatively, argues that under conditions of deeply divided politics, democratic debate should aim to transcend identity conflicts by focusing on more universal human needs. While this approach has much value, I argue that it fails to recognise the necessary and productive role of identity in democratic politics, including those group identities central to polarized conflicts. Given these limitations, the paper then aims to offer a third alternative. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Yong and James Bohman, this approach advocates for a problem-focused approach to democratic deliberation, which aims to foster a range of differing social perspectives. Like Dryzek, this view hopes to encourage a focus on common needs but argues that productive deliberation over collective problems requires that actors view problem situations from alternative social positions and experiences. Like Mouffe then, this view continues to recognize a necessary and productive role for social identity. Unlike agonistic pluralism, however, it argues that the benefits of identity depend on the presence of a diversity of social perspectives, and it therefore aims to construct cross-cutting rather than binary social cleavages. In sum, I claim that this approach allows for the positive contribution of identity to democratic debate while also constructing social identities in such a way that it can avoid the dynamics of pernicious polarization and the vicious cycles which risk democratic decline.